You do realize how easy it is to look at your phone for fifteen seconds and press yes it’s you. Lol. That won’t deter any casual player from playing on their one account.
And what makes you think that it would stop anyone at all then? Worst case, you add another £5 for a burner phone.
You don’t change anything, you just add an inconvenience for everyone.
But again, blizz likes money. Even it it would work, why would blizz want to do something that reduces the main form of income from the game?
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Only a special few will buy a burner phone but it will stop some people from smurfing.
On the other part you are correct blizzard number one thing is to make money. Which is why the game has no competitive integrity they got greedy and never tried to fix many problems of their game.
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Even without a burner, it takes 30sec to change a sim, assuming you play in the same account throughout the day, it isn’t that big of an inconvenience.
As for competitive Integrity, that just comes from blizz trying to make a an eaport out of a game they have openly admitted they want to balance for both comp and casual players. You can’t have both, a positive casual experience will come at the cost of the competetive experience. Hopefully ow2 will cover the casual aspects, I doubt it, but there’s a chance.
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You bring up an interesting idea.
I think the ranked system is just clearly broken. The fact that I get matchmade with masters, GM, and Top 500 players in quickplay, but then when I play comp the game still puts me in with gold and plat players because I never took the time to grind comp since I placed that account dozens of seasons ago is just absolutely preposterous.
If I get matchmade with very high SR players in quickplay, you would think that indicates that my MMR is high. That doesn’t translate to competitive though, so when the teams are otherwise evenly matched, I just stomp the enemy team in competitive because I’m playing with gold and plat players.
It’s so stupid. I get called a smurf sometimes, and my response is just like, “I’m not a smurf, just blame Blizzards garbage rank system that has me playing in this SR”
One idea I had was to have a kind of like a report option for players that says “Recommend this player for an SR review/reset.”
So if someone is way way way better than the rank they are playing in you recommend them for an SR review / reset and then hopefully their SR climbs. If someone is clearly a boosted animal, then you recommend them for an SR reset and they drop. So this would keep people from camping ranks they don’t belong in and it would try to combat smurfs / players screwed by the SR system.
Note: I don’t mean an MMR reset, I mean an SR reset, since apparently the competitive system cares more about your previous seasons’ SRs than your current MMR.
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Sorry. I guess someone got offended at something I said so I had a brief suspension. And apologies but I think you misunderstood what my post said that sounded as if said smurfs throw…so first off allow me to answer your question of what do I define as a Smurf. A Smurf is a low level account that does not belong in whatever rank they are in. This does not mean that every low level account is a Smurf because some people just don’t play that much. But it is clear from the game play of said player that they belong in a higher elo, it’s not to say that the can’t throw, but the act of throwing is separate from the act of “Smurfing”. So for example this account. If you view my profile I’m level 26 (however I’m not a Smurf, I play on multiple platforms just not predominantly PC so this account gets very little game time). But what my post said (I’m just gonna reword it to be shorter) was that if the solution of phone verification went through then it would make people with multiple accounts tie their phone number to one account and thus if they choose their “Smurf account” then they give up their (insert some high rank) account but if they choose to keep their high rank account than the only way for them to play at a lower elo they would have to throw their account all the way down to what ever elo they wanted to be at, but then they would be identified as a thrower (which is a reportable offense and with enough reports can get action taken against that player further detering them from doing it). And while yes technically speaking they are playing at an elo they don’t belong in (assuming they haven’t been banned for throwing after multiple reports) everyone will easily be able to tell that someone who threw down from whatever rank they were at, vice starting a new account.
Jeff acknowledged that infinite free console accounts contribution to smurfing is a problem and that they are thinking about ideas for a solution they might work on after OW2 launches would be a more accurate summary of that exchange.
They also said that they would be stricter about throwers with the release of role queue (because there were a number of threats to throw lots of matches if role queue was implemented), but as far as I can tell they have not made any changes to the way the enforce rules against gameplay sabotage.
I have no expectation that any actual change will follow from Jeff’s vague response there, and if a change did come about I would expect, given the context of the concern, that it would be specific to limiting free console accounts from locations (IP address or hardware ID) that had a bad history.
While I sympathize with the plight of console players, such a fix would do nothing for smurfing on PC.
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about this… This will never happen. Smurfs add money directly into Blizz’s bank account. Preventing smurfs from getting alt accounts will directly impact the revenue stream. Jeff spoke about smurfs but in the context of console. Console can have multiple smurfs without actually buying the same multiple times (unlike pc).
It grinds me when i hear people say smurfs aren’t the issue. It IS!
The devs have set up the MM with the hidden MMR/SR adjustments to force people to grind. With the variation of soloq/multiq and changes every month, the constant tweaks to the comp, the variation of PBSR, etc, it all plays on on our psyche. The the MM was supposed to give you a 50/50 chance of winning, why do we have winning streaks and (mostly) losing streaks. It’s because of the element of accomplishment. Think about flappy bird. It was so easy, yet it hade people rage. Same with how the devs set up OW. You win 20, you lose 50. Its allabout making you come back. Think about it, if you win EXACTLY 1 game, lose 1 game, win 1 game, You’ll get bored and leave. Give the number of variations (heros, ranks, pvp) it all makes you want to come back. Also, with the number of variations, it encourages the players to buy alt accounts to see if “luck” is on their side.
For example, the variation of comp modes (role 1) had forved player into long ! times. to avioud that, players would BUY an nother account and play at a lower skill to for the MM to place them in lower skilled games (where MOST of the community is ranked), thus giving them more play time and less wait time. Even if (according to jeff) players play true to their skill and get placed in the rank similar to their “main”, they will run into the same long Q times. So, buy more alt account and keep them at a lower rank to maximize your play times. Simple. They make money all round.
Thats why i dont play for SR anymore. I just try my besst, play for fun and Gold guns. OW is not worth your mental health. only grind if you are going pro. else its a waste of time.
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One thing I was thinking about. So far we’ve all been thinking about negative consequences or ways to deter smurfing (the stick). What about positive ways (the carrot)? For example, what if there was a ‘coaching’ function so you can ‘buddy up’ with a low level player and help them in team voice chat. So you don’t play the game but you would still get XP etc for that.
I know that Overwatch’s social system is quite lacking at the moment. For example, there are no clans or guild functions.
Or what about player moderators like in some MMOs who have priority reporting so their reports get more weight than random people.
Just trying to think outside the box here.
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No offense. But why watch people play when they can just play themselves?
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Lol well…I was comparing it to real life. Coaches are often more experienced players helping out in the community. So I was trying to draw a parallel between that and Overwatch coaching. Why not formally reward coaching?
I realise it’s a weird idea but sometimes you have to think outside the box like I said earlier.
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Sounds like boosting with extra steps
Except that coaching is a indirect way of helping players. Where as boosting means the smurf is in game. Being told what to do, and having someone do it for you, are two totally different things.
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There’s ways to fix it, but Blizzard isn’t interested. Even Jeff said they’re not doing anything to improve matchmaking until OW 2 lol.
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