I stopped OW a while ago and just read up on the forums from time to time. I had a smurf account in bronze to silver and have to say i feel bad for the players in these ranks. When it went up to gold i just joined a derank to bronze group and we went down quick (LFG is full of them). Afterwards i went stomping up to gold and repeat. I just got board of the stale meta in higher ranks and yes it was wromg but in over 1 1/2 years of the smurf account i did not even get a warning. In the bronze and silber matches i encountered a lot of pther smurfs to be honest and i can say that Moneyvision does not care at all.
How could i got 700 - 2200 - 700 SR and repeated with streaks of 50-2 k/d and 0-50 k/d without a ban?? Like how can you give such a crap about your MM system?
DOTA 2 = free. No money is made from new accounts
OW = money. Blizzard likes smurf accounts because they make money.
As long as smurf accounts bring in tons of extra $$$, they won’t be banned just yet. And I’m not sure if Blizzard will ever action said accounts if the game goes f2p. I’ve seen plenty of evidence that a lot of GM players and a number of streamers have smurf accounts, not limited to bronze. If Blizzard is so invested in kissing up to their beloved content creators, I’m not sure if they’d risk taking action against them, because they absolutely do know that said streamers have broken TOS many times before and are willing to turn a blind eye to it.
A Netflix show based on the game will undoubtedly attract new players to the game.
And for the past months (or years), Dota is infested with smurfs despite the already existing smurf veto methods like SMS lock and games played. Now they just ban the damn account if you are detected to be smurfing.
While also overhauling their new player experiences as well.
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It doesn’t matter what anyone here wants. Smurfs are the only way this game is even making money. Do you really think Jeff would get rid of a way to finance his new pool to chill by?
And guess you will never learn that this thing will never happen because smurfs are the only way there’s money coming from this game.
It’s so, so simple.
And, of course, smurfing in QP is fine, right? Because comp is the only mode that matters.
Following this exact logic, you’re already wrong, because there have been so many times in the past where they’ve made decisions that would impact revenue in the way you’re describing.
Either none of you know how the real world works, or you’re just ignoring it to paint a narrative that fits your views. It’s more complicated than just “banning smurfs means less account sales!” as if it wouldn’t have an impact on existing players as well, like that’s the only source of money and there are no other factors. It’s kind of embarrassing how little thought people put into these claims.
Also, Blizzard is not Activision. Activision does not design Overwatch.
The simple answer to smurfing is extreme gains and low losses. For example, if you take a new account, win one game in “bronze league”; you automatically get placed into a silver match next game; win that game, gold for the next match; after that you move through the ranks in 5~ish games. Losing however, you’ll lose a grand total of 1-2 SR. This actually de-incentivizes throwing games as well.
The problem with the current model, as Jeff puts it, is that the smurf ruins literally 15 games before getting to where they are supposed to be. With this method, they ruin maybe 5 games. The goal isn’t to make it bannable… just extremely time consuming.
What about regular players? should a silver get a win just be placed in gold immediately? Well; kind of. Again, another simple answer is to reverse the flow of SR; winning is better; losing is not good, but not terrible. So, currently, there’s a 5 game minimum for role-que placements; 15 games total for each role. If you take that, and add about 6 games to placements, bumping each role to 7 as a “grace period” for extreme movement; you’d almost eliminate smurfing altogether. Especially if you consider a soft “reset” between each season.
To explain a bit further; the season starts, the first game is played; team A has 6, team B has 6; Team A wins the game; All of Team A’s 6 players are now removed from the “pool after reset” and placed into bronze; Team B remains in the pool. Team C plays Team B and squeaks out a win; Team C moves on to bronze, and Team B remains in the pool. Team D comes out, and Team B gets the win; Team D stays, Team B moves up. Team A and Team C play each other; and Team A wins; Team C stays in bronze, while Team A moves up to silver. After 5 placement games per role; the game assigns you your rank. Wins are worth (for numbers sake) 5 SR while losses are only worth (again for numbers sake) 2 SR. This means that you can have a losing record of 10L-4W and maintain your rank. This defeats the purpose of trying to derank, as you’d have to throw massive amounts of games (most likely being caught in the process) to achieve the ends you seek to meet. If this seems a little extreme, you can also add a multiplier; if you start losing a lot more games than you’re winning, say 20-30L in a row (losing 60 SR, you’ll start losing a little more SR each time. After 20-30L in a row, instead of (2), you start losing (3) per game until you’ve lost another 10 matches, and then you’ll start losing (4). My only caution is that the loss can never be more than the gain. For this example; even if you lost 1000 games in a row, you’d never lose more than (5) SR per game. Meaning if you start winning again, you’ll start climbing again, but much more rapidly than we currently see.
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Deranking is not bannable. Throwing is.
Boosting is border line unprovable
What … do you think … “Deranking” is? 
It is an ACTION in this case, not the effect of your SR getting smaller beyond your previous rank because you happened to lose matches.
Deranking IS throwing matches on purpose to rank lower mate.
So yeah, this does nothing to OW, “Smurfing” is already a bannable offense, because in order to be a smurf, you have to sabotage some of your matches on purpose and THAT is against the TOS.
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To derank you simply need not to win.
Avoid winning is quite eazy, you don’t need to throw match for it.
you already have roadhog, he’s always got his shirt off, and the sexiest character in OW
Genuinely wish that smurfing was a bannable offense. I played with a guy yesterday, obviously a smurf, who was just being an insensitive jerk the whole match. Using the n word, homophobic slurs, and told people to commit suicide. These people are the biggest cowards in the game, hiding on alts and saying genuinely heinous and awful things. Blizzard needs to crack down on smurfing and toxicity. I will admit, I do think that if it is used for good though, like Yeatle’s unranked to GM series (and how it’s actually educational as he talks it through as he plays the game), it can be okay at times.
The sentence was :
“This is bannable because deranking and boosting are bannable.”
Read properly “ing”, action, the term is “deranking”, what you are talking about is an “inaction” not an “action”. Ok?
Sure being “afk” and just “omegalul Rein flanking” around will yield the same result, but that is soft throwing BTW … which guess what? Is also sabotage.
Yeah the sentence is 100% on point. You are just using the term wrong 
The problem I see is what about players who come from a different system or don’t have access to their old account before? Also alt accounts. Personally I wouldn’t mind more aggressive anti-smurf, if there was an option when you start the game that asks “Have you played much before?” and if you say yes it skips new player games and just throws you into average quickplay matches.
That way people who just play on multiple accounts for various reasons, still can without ruining lower level players games.
They don’t make that much money from new accounts.
And smurfs have a habit of buying on the “black market” so Blizzard don’t see any of that.
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DotA2 seemed like a fun game, their esports are a huge deal (much bigger than OWL) and it’s F2P, but my god that game has a bad new player experience.
I played quite a lot of bot games and I felt I was starting to get the hang of it so I played a game with other players (the equivalent of a QP game). There was another new player, he said in chat he was new and the other 3 reported him, and flamed him all game! They also reported me because I didn’t buy an “animal courier” lol. For all we complain about OW that wouldn’t happen here. Apparently that experience is not unusual. They only blessing was that they don’t have voice chat or match chat.
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