I just had a match on PTR that had both a DPS moira (“I’ll start healing when you take gold elims”) and a self-admitted plat smurf (with gameplay typical of a plat smurf in bronze, lots of spawn camping and aggressive flanks and getting away with it most of the time). I mean, points for honesty, I guess, at least he didn’t claim to be from Master.
Any-way. This is pretty much unsurprising to me, it’s perfectly typical of low Elo, except that the claim was made that they would detect and ban such people. But of course, this is purportedly based on comparing to player records.
Well, if you have been smurfing… then smurfing won’t look like anything different from before. If you have been DPS Moira or Battlemercy… then DPS from support won’t look like anything different from before.
So auto-detecting based on people’s record… detects nothing. Okay, not nothing. It (maybe) detects people who decide to start trolling or throwing now who never did before.
I mean, they also said not to worry about smurfs/derankers because they had a way to detect and handle it (long before the 2/2/2 update). Doesnt seem like thats been happening
No, I don’t think so. I’ve been paying pretty close attention to the smurfing problem. Prior to this update, the only system they said they had was one to detect boosting players (i.e. having a better player play on a worse players account).
Until the system they put in to accompany the 2-2-2 rollout they had never claimed to have systems for detecting throwing players. That’s a brand new claim.
Maybe, but… wouldn’t you also want to test the throwing detection system?
How do you test a throw/smurf detection on the ptr. Given that PTR is not up all the time and people regularly dont play on it I am guessing they dont have a ton of data for the throw system to compare against. As far as plat smurf, on the ptr? You’re kidding right… I am surprised they have a big enough player pool to even attempt to build balanced games. Typically the ptr is just a smash up of what ever players are available…
Bottom line is you can’t test a system like this in an environment with no resources and no collected data…
PTR data was updated from live recently, probably because using year-old data to place people in the new system would be a disaster. So they have exactly the same data they had on live as of a week ago.
It reportedly gets a bit wonky at high Elo, but at low-mid Elo everything is fine.
Separate conversation. It was specifically in answer to the question of what would stop people from just picking moira, ana, etc., and playing pure DPS, to which the answer was that they have lots of historical data and have built a system to detect that kind of thing. There’s a top level topic on it somewhere about ‘the ban hammer is ready’. Hrm.
Edit: Found it, but it uses a clip so you can’t listen to the full context. Unfortunate.
However, he actually says “we have a full group ready to go…”
Having a “system” may have been something I got from people discussing the quote inaccurately. Hmmmmm.
I have no confidence in any enforcement that relies on using a team of people from a company that is in constant layoffs. Maybe if I heard that they were hiring more non-dev staff rather than laying off more non-dev staff I’d feel better about it.
Hmm. He also says “lots of ways to know”.
I don’t know anymore what he said they have other than having a ban hammer.
Dunno how they keep their stats or if thats something they are even currently looking at on ptr. I assume during the live beta version next month it will be happening.
