This wouldn’t fix the issue, it would likely make it worse because it would be like players having their placements for the first time and they could easily manipulate their rank by throwing their 5 initial games to be placed very low. Also, with alt accounts they could do this multiple times throughout the season to further the issue.
There’s not an easy solution for fixing smurfing, but one idea I have is to look at peak performances for certain characters and like Role Queue, assign an MMR for each character that can rapidly climb with very strong performances.
An example of this could be a game where a 2500 SR smurf (who is 4000 SR on their main) plays Genji and frags out hard, getting something like 60 elims, 35 final blows, 15k damage in a 10 minute game (I made these numbers up).
This would change the Genji MMR from 2500 to something like 2700 MMR and put a soft limit at 2500 where it would be very difficult to fall below 2500 SR. After this, that player would have characters with different SR ranks (given their hidden MMR), just some examples:
Genji - 2700 SR
Soldier 76 - 2500 SR
Widowmaker - 2200 SR
This means that the player could queue at 2700 SR and have access to all their characters, or queue at 2500 SR and have Genji locked, or queue at 2200 SR and have both Genji and Soldier 76 locked. This would need to have some limit like the player MUST have 2 or 3 characters of that role (damage, tank, support), so they couldn’t queue as say, Sombra at 1100 SR if Sombra was their lowest.
This idea is probably over simplified but I think it would help the problem by having players who are very skilled at certain characters and perform well with them, rapidly have them climb closer to where they should be ranked.
That’s also like saying bronze and gm are in the same league and should be regularly matched against each other. Ranks that are far apart aren’t allowed to group together and aren’t matched together outside of extreme exceptions for good reason.
Jeff recently acknowledged it’s a problem and said they’re working on a solution but not to expect a fix until at least Overwatch 2 given it’s a complex situation with how account creation works on consoles.
Smurfing is only smurfing if they throw there placements to get into low elo, so we stop that we stop smurfing
Also making the minimum lvl 50 will help, and by the time you reach level 25 your not rly ready for comp and a lot of ppl just jump in and end up ruining some games
You link every account to a phone number (the technology is there as everybody can already use two-step authentication).
Each phone number is not allowed to have more than one competitive account.
Performance is based on averages, not extremes. Rare really good matches you play and rare really bad matches you play are not (entirely) considered for SR. This prevents both throwing and popping. The average is taken from performance during the last 3 months.
You cannot go up more than 500 SR per season.
You cannot go down more than 500 SR per season.
You must play at least 50 matches per season to make your rank valid. No decay, because people could decay on purpose to smurf.
If you crash or DC during the game, you lose 100 SR instantly and get a 1-day ban straight away. If you want to play comp, you need a good internet connection. Else go quick play.
If you combine all the above, smurfing will become a lot harder than it is now.
It’s not just simply a case of having a good Internet connection. Electricity power outages, unannounced internet service interruptions, unexpected hardware failures, and more such events beyond a player’s control can all cause disconnects from a game.
It’s already unfair that people who have such things happen to them get an SR penalty and a temp ban as it is, and you want to make it more severe?
Yeah but key difference with that is that they are not same age and they do not get same training and comparison is wrong then
In Overwatch, Grand Master and Bronze players have completely identical heroes with same spells and same abilities, just like people in the same “rank/league” are of similar skill and performance but not equal at all. Only difference is that there is someone better and usually, there is always someone better.
If it happens to you because of a hardware failure or a power outage, I feel for you, of course. But we all know that in many cases this is used as a poor excuse for a rage-quit.
Before playing comp, I’d test my hardware and connection thoroughly. If that goes well for say 10 matches in quickplay (which you have played as you can’t even enter comp before level 25), you should be alright.
Smurfing is an unfixable problem, anyone can buy a new account (or just make one for free on console). With that said, any MMR reset or rank restarts limit would do the exact opposite of said issue - an equivalent of such is saying “force everyone to smurf”. SR limits just forces players to stagnate in a rank (example of where this would be bad is when my friend placed plat in tank initially and now is high silver/low gold, this would’ve ruined multiple seasons worth of games rather than him just dropping to his actual rank+ people wouldn’t have reason to not throw if they’d lost enough sr that season, other than the off chance that they get a measly 24hr ban). I do
Also, consider the idea that you can’t just make the game completely garbage for a new player and shove them into their first comp match, inexperienced, against the GM Genji player because he didn’t place yet.
Actually though, increasing the ranked level minimum to 50 would help so much on both ends (double the effort for smurfing so less committed players just won’t do it + new players actually learn enough about the game to have some sort of idea on what they’re doing) and the phone number verification + averaged performance stats idea slaps hard.
They’re still things beyond a player’s control, and the player should not be penalised at all for them happening, let alone be penalised more severely.
Keep in mind that many of the ideas being thrown out here may hinder smurfing, but any sort of SR anchor has a flip side. You’ll be locking boosted players into a higher SR where they don’t belong, so people just need to buy a boost once (or once per season) and will sit at their rank ruining games for as long as they want.
The proper solution is a combination of machine learning and bans. By manually identifying enough smurfs and feeding in the data, machine learning can be used to identify players who are alternating between sabotaging and carrying games, by looking for factors unique to this behavior. Hire enough people to monitor smurf reports and feed enough data to a machine learning algorithm, and you can automatically detect this behavior in a short enough time period to make it a relative non-issue.
Nothing will guarantee you never face a smurf, but if someone only gets 20-30 games out of a smurf account they’re going to hesitate to keep buying new games and leveling to 25 to cheat the system. Right now, they’re getting hundreds or even thousands of games before anything happens.
Isn’t that already the case? I see so many boosted players ruining games and it doesn’t seem like they drop really.
I can look past many little mistakes but big ones that cost you multiple team fights make me question their rank.
If I had to say a number I would say there is a 25% chance for one trash player on your team. Sometimes it’s your team often its both but there’s always is that one guy in the lobby.
Not a very competitive system if you ask me.