Id wager the effect is still significant in GM and at least observable in masters. Anything lower then that I’d agree it’ll have close to zero impact. I’d say what you quoted me saying is technically correct, but misleading. So I’ll clarify I wasn’t trying to imply anyone was getting squeezed out of diamond let alone gold haha
As you said the only negative an average player will experience from smurfing is more frequent bad match quality.
The scale and size of the playerbase N? It’s not as absorbant as you might think - because of how alts perturb the laddering for all. Every alt imparts geometric interactivity. For k alts you get ~O(k(k-1)/2)/ln(N) more disruption, SR buffering, etc. The ladder absorbs and dampens these effects by making everyone suffer “only a little bit” for a game played on your alt. Play another game on another alt and they all “suffer only a little bit”. Pump the ladder full of alts everywhere, and we’re all being knocked around by these effects.
It might only feel marginally incremental for you, but know that it’s really really bad out there. Alts are like pulleys, they’re a mechanical pay-to-win advantage on the ladder. You get to buy-in, spend some time banking SR on the alts, and cashing in the moment your play diversifies to swapping between them. This ignores more complicated effects that alts can involuntarily induce, like pump-n-dump and wintrading. And in this model, we’re treating all alts as “nice guys” here as if smurfing isn’t a thing.
Alts change SR movements from zero-sum to constant-sum. The absorbing process or ladder response has to compensate for geometric disruption, meaning someone playing linearly (1 account) is always at a disadvantage.
Ok lets pretend you are in Gold.
You get a GM/T500 Smurf on the enemy team. They stomp your team.
What are the effects of your essentially ‘forced loss’?
What are the effects of the other teams ‘free win’?
Honestly I dont mind about scaling and all, but damm I despise smurfs and alts.
The problem is the numbers still don’t line up. The bulk of alts are simply not +2 tiers higher level of players, throwing games so they can play -2 tiers under their main.
mid-plat is barely playing above gold the same way mid to low diamonds are pretty much the same as 2.8k players. Yeah ok a little better, but not put 5 players on your back, nothing anyone can do about it level of better.
heavy rank compression is only past 4k.
Plus the match maker is already 100% ok with players being 1000SR apart in lower ranks anyways. So the bulk of smurfs are player who could legit be in that game on their main anyways. Even if it’s a 3k player in a 2.1k game.
The big impact of lower border account is the attitude of players looking to scapegoat. Being right now the low border players get blamed for everything.
They Win? Smurf who ruins games.
They Lose? Boosted alt who ruins games.
I’m not even talking about what ranks the alts are at. I’m treating them as clones. The impact is by count alone, not rank dist. I’m talking about the collisions an alt imparts on it’s neighbourhood, and how those perturbations are attenuated and absorbed by the ladder population.
Every alt is initialized with ~7200sr to dispose of. That has to be absorbed by the ladder population. That’s a lot of constant-sum inflation. It’s potential energy that gets converted into kinetic (zero-sum) events as you win/loss. So it has to dissipate into the bath.
The issue is the scaling. Every alt can basically tax ~O(k(k-1)/2) neighbours with extra work, who in turn adjust their neighbours with O(ln(k)) less but still extra work. It doesn’t equalize, it amortizes. It raises the temperature of the bath - which is small, sparse, and lowpop during offhours. So now you have no-alt main accounts having to compensate for these repeat entrants into the system. The rank metrics and percolation through them is disrupted.
tldr; It’s more work - i.e. games played. You’re not getting a natural amount of games played for your deserved mobility/progression. And this holds independent of rank, and even if 100% of alts are “minimally disruptive” i.e. perfect clones of their mains.
I remember during that season 18 thing where everyone placed gold, I’d just queue up with the people who were a similar SR before and the enemy team cried saying we shouldn’t be playing during it and matches were super easy. MMR reset would be super fun for high ranked players, but a majority of players would absolutely hate playing during it.
I didn’t read all the balogna that this post has generated, but it’ll all come down to Accuracy vs. Precision.
Accuracy is the proximity of a measurement to the true value. SR is not accurate. It fluctuates according to a number of factors that include alts, smurfs, disconnects, attitude, alcohol intake, team comp, etc.
Precision is the degree to which a measurement is repeated under the same cirumstances. As someone who has created and had fun with multiple alt accounts and watched GM’s on smurfs climb the ranks again and again, I can say with some certaintly that the SR system is precise.
The fact of the matter is people like you kill this game faster than any ult or whatever kind of rigging you like to adopt for why you are where you are.
To top it off, you are no where near below 500, you just decide to be there, because you decide to throw, like throw in a sense that not even me in my drunkest state could throw the way you do.
And you throw on purpose on your stream, where everyone can witness. The only reason why your throwing games did not get any of the popular social media attention is because you do not have enough viewers to get you on the “social media throwing” radar.
You get ignored so much with your theories that you have to succumb to posting on an alt (smth you oh so clearly are against) for your posts to even be seen. I got you on ignored and I thought that those Options got messed up or smth until I realized you were posting on an ult, hence why I could see them.
Apart from what you consider to be issues with this game, whenever you Q comp people are going to get you on their team and will lose because you decided to throw on hero selection screen, you make it so much worse than it actually is. We all have games where we want to bang our heads against the wall and I can at least link 5 high SR games where the same thing happened, same thing that happens in low elos . If I did not see it live on your stream I would not believe it (you throwing games).
People like you ruin every single integrity of this game, prevent Devs from even glancing at this forum and make every single new player who decides to play this game to turn around and not play it.
People like you who are literally Gold border (and this is literally from his stream, he is a Gold border) and are truly not below 500 sr (he most definitely does not play below 500 sr, he is waay better than that, he throws games on purpose) but decided to be there for the sake of the argument deserve to be banned before any of the throwers, cheaters or anything else.
You ruin Comp games and QP games and Arcade QP classic whenever you decide to Q up for any of those.
How can alts corrupt the ladder if the placement/scoring system is accurate?
The system can’t increase in accuracy and/or precision with alt accounts, no-resets, and non-adaptive payouts. It’s a system based on live score, effcient mobility (first order conditions), and correct payouts by rank % (first and second order). The issues are coupled and disproportional.
If anything, those examples illustrate that the system is broken (SR is pay-to-win, constant-sum, and there is no real ladder integrity).
But really no one should care about “my bro did xyz” because it doesn’t examine the population as a whole. We have models, scaling laws, and global parameters that do, and they have the final say as to what conditions are actually like.
Because it’s a 2nd order system and accurate 1-shot placements don’t decide if SR is accurately or precisely circulating.
“accuracy vs. precision” lol the arguments from kids that managed grade 10 stats.
What’s the difference between an alt and a new player playing at that level?
The new players distribute normally. The alts almost surely don’t.
And both enter near the median, imparting disruption until their final destination.
Any other questions? AMA. I’m around for the next 15mins or so than it’s back to teaching kids math.
Why not? Break it down for me. If they’re playing at the same level, what’s the real difference?
New players enter the system and must be absorbed. Their arrival is say, Poissonian (maybe it’s Erlang), their steady-state rank distrubtion, say, Gaussian. They enter at the median and impart some disruption until they reach their correct rank (which isn’t actually precise, accurate, or correct but let’s pretend).
All smurfs are alts. The fraction is unknown. The best-case, min-disrupt scenario is that:
Even if 1,2,3 hold perfectly (it’s almost impossible for this to be the case) - you have at least as much disruption as new players. So the statement ‘every alt corrupts the ladder’ is valid. Because we don’t periodically reset or adapt SR payouts by population.
But you can actually make data-free arguments on (2) and (3) that show how hard it is to achieve B,C = 1, and how k>0 entrants into the system actually force B,C to become lower (again, because of how the ladder saturates with SR).
But this is just a thought experiment. We already have countless evidence that shows A<1 (smurf to alt ratio), and with reasonable threshold arguments you could bound some lower values for B,C (who uses alts and how many).
Very quickly, the disruption imparted by duplicate accounts (alts) increases faster than new players. Recall, pumping SR into a ladder causes inflation (with geometric dissipate) and encourages constant-sum, pay2win equilibria to emerge, that effecitvely punish and tax the lone-account player.
Mobility gets harder, your rank becomes less meaningful, you have more usurped games, SR no longer tracks skill scarcity just account winrates (which are changed by alt saturation), and Scott is happy calling it an esport.
It already is free to make smurf accounts on consoles.
By “super fun” you mean “they get to stomp typically lower ranked players without having to actually throw down to lower ranks”.
I didn’t read the novel, but I’m going to bet it doesn’t explain how two people playing at the same level are somehow different. Because they aren’t. Fix the placement/scoring system if it’s an issue. If it’s not, then everyone is where they should be. Smurfs included.
I already explained this several times. It doesn’t seem to be reaching the gamer minds so here it goes again:
number of accounts > unique players
If you bloat the distribution with repeat accounts but label things by % players, you are imparting a false SR mapping. No person should be allowed to gain, lose, bank, trade, earn, dispose of duplicate amounts of SR without some zero-sum recalibration to the % players.
New players have a small disruption effect but that’s the cost of doing business. Alts impart ~O(n2) levels of disruption and create all kinds of systems effects we can maybe try to discuss next semester.
Until then please accept the knowledge.
And build a boat for the coming flood.
You can type another 1,000,000 words, but it doesn’t change the simple facts I’ve already laid out.