Why not? Break it down for me. If they’re playing at the same level, what’s the real difference?
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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:
- All alts are perfect clones of some main (no smurfing, A=1).
- People who use alts are uniform by rank (hardcore and high ranked players don’t alt more or less than casuals and low ranks, B=1).
- The number of alts per person is rank uniform (hardcore players don’t have more or less alts, C=1).
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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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You can type another 1,000,000 words, but it doesn’t change the simple facts I’ve already laid out.
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Yes, thats exactly my point. Low ranked players wouldn’t like it at all because they’d just get curbstomped because of it. Imagine how much worse it would be if people didn’t even need a different account to derank? Every season they could get pushed back to 2500 and just climb back up to GM, and then get to do it allllll over again. MMR resets would be really dumb.
You’d be creating smurfs out of people who had 0 intentions of doing so.
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You’re forgetting that a reset entails global placements. Actual placements. A reset is much different than re-seeding how you finished last season, or bringing a new account into a fully developed structure.
It doesn’t work like that. They would have to throw placements which tells you there is a smurf/alt problem that needs to be solved before you can truly solve rank structure.
A reset entails placements that form winner/loser brackets. It sieves and partitions players back to where they belong within a few matches, and the mismatch “disruption” decreases ~O(lg(N)) in the number of matches played.
So no, that GM would have to throw, placements would be fast and relatively painless. You would get back close to where you belong, and where you belong would be more calibrated for active/live 2021 playerbase.
Chaos wouldn’t suddenly exist where it never did before. And throwers/alts should be sparse encounters, uniform and balanced out in a large population of true mains (unless they have fundamental problems regarding the population and alt % they’re not telling us about).
Unless you’re changing something, than no, an MMR reset would place everyone gold. Do you not remember season 18?
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It would seed their first placement match at ~2350.
That is not “placing everyone gold.”
It takes ~14 matches to place N=10,000 players to within a 200sr resolution.
Try again.
They know but they prefer that new accounts money over the competitive experience
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Not in Blizzards control though, you have to make a new profile on the Xbox.
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Blizzard can control it, though, by forcing linking to a Battle net account (just like you have to do on PC).
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Dunno maybe there was something funky with it being on Xbox, no idea tbh. It’s a good job smurfing and alt accounts are 1000% less of a problem than people moan about ha.
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It’s a huge problem on console.
I know of some players who have dozens of accounts across all ranks.
Smurfing is the main reason why I’ve quit playing Competitive on Xbox because I just got sick of games being decided by which team had the better/non-throwing smurf(s).
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Meh, I played on console for about a year, didn’t have any of the issues other people seem to see ‘every’ game. Or if I did it was extremely rare, so rare I can’t even remember any specific examples.
(I don’t know your rank)… But I find it very telling that on the forums the same group of people moan about smurfing and alt accounts, and a lot of them happen to be low ranked on the ladder… I’m just not willing to accept that’s a coincidence 
I’m convinced it’s people simply getting frustrated because they aren’t climbing. Understandable. But not the games fault overall.
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It’s not every game, but it’s still more often than not. It was just getting worse and worse with each passing season, too.
Last time I bothered to do placements (which was about 2-3 seasons ago now) I was Gold Tank, Platinum Support, and was never able to do my Damage placements since queue times were horrendous (this was pre-Priority Pass).
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Fair enough, i’m mid-high gold too. I could count on one hand the amount of times I think i’ve been destroyed by a smurf.
Tbh in a totally opposite view. I LIKE playing against smurfs. I got very good at Halo 2 back in the day… Simply because I was lucky enough to play with MLG members in private games and it forced me to adjust It acts as a wake up call and an extreme warm up, tear the next game to pieces.
But hey, I like throwing myself in the deep end with everything I do.
I just think a lot of people use smurfing/alts as an excuse for not improving… Not saying that’s you specifically… But if someone never made it out of bronze… It’s 100% not the games fault.
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Errrhmm…
What ladder?
You mean the OW Competitive Slip & Slide?
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