Constant smurf/bot accounts in bronze

I’m in bronze at the moment, and I constantly see smurf/bot accounts.

There’s no mystery or gray area to it. When the accounts are new they show up as full teams of six, all with the same name, same icon, same level around 26, and they spend the whole match walking out of spawn one at a time and waiting to be killed.

Then later on you see the same accounts, still the same name, slightly higher level, but now it’s gold/plat players who solo-carry and say openly in chat that they’re on a smurf account.

Am I missing something about why these accounts don’t get banned? Whoever is making the accounts (presumable to sell) doesn’t even try to hide it. Is this a “broken windows” thing, where moderation has been turned off until OW2 or something?

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Sadly this is a thing that happens a lot in the lowest ranks, those bots are then sold onto people you see doing “bronze to GM” and smurfing in low ranks on low level accts :frowning:

I’m so angry that Bronze to GM is allowed to go on considering how the accounts are created & obtained.

“Educational Bronze to GM stream” Maybe they should include the educational part of how the account was so low in the first place :sunglasses:

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I should add: it’s way worse on asia-region servers. Before cross-play when I could use NA servers, the bot accounts were a lot less frequent. So if you’re not seeing them as often in NA/EU, that’s probably why.

I know that’s a thing, but it’s not the main issue. Those people make one account and leave bronze fast; I’m talking about people making them at scale and staying there.

no no, they buy the account from these people who bot those accounts to bronze

That’s great, but it doesn’t explain why obvious bot and smurf accounts are sticking around and not getting banned, which this thread is asking about :upside_down_face:

Ok no need to be rude, I was talking about how the people who buy them aren’t getting banned either.

Bye then lol

It really is ridiculous, though the funniest thing was watching ML7 doing an educational stream, and the first game in Gold, he says, ‘ok, there’s a smurf on the other team. In this case, you need to play as well as you can, and hope you have a smurf on your team, too.’ He is the smurf on their team! All the ‘education’ boiled down to rng on who your smurf was.

Not that it happens every game, but listening to a t500 player giving that advice was pretty hilarious.

Ok, but be fair to ML7 - he does unranked to GM streams, at least that I’ve seen. He starts fresh, no rule against that, and if he buys his account (obviously he doesn’t, but if) then that’s a separate issue.

I get that some people don’t like X-to-GM streams, but those are a different ballpark from plat players who openly stay on sub-500 accounts week after week, month after month.

Just take free SR and don’t ask questions which you don’t want to hear answers.

I have a topic already on this. Support/Devs stated that they don’t intend do anything about it. Not only that, the main reason behind it is because “Que times would get longer”

Edit: Also reports work on very poor algorithm. Since there’s no way to contact support/devs directly, it’s a lose lose situation. The chances of someone getting banned without a “Banwave” are super slim. Even a smaller chance on consoles.

There needs to be enough reports to trigger action. Humans don’t read and review every single report that comes in.

Yeah, I faced a throw stack yesterday. It seemed that all 6 accounts were being controlled by one person, kind of eerie.

Yeah that’s how I always see them. They walk out one at a time, on similar but varied paths, as if it was one person rotating through the accounts.

Hrm, any link on that?

“Floyd Mayweather teaches young adults how to box by mercilessly beating 8 year old Karate kids”

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Same reason blizz does nothing to botters in world of warcraft even if they could stop them extremely easily:

People buying accounts to throw and resell is still money into actiblizz pocket.