Every alt corrupts the ladder

Competitive Discussion
21

I think your grasping at straws here… from what I understand, the amount of sr gained/lost is effected by your gameplay (things like time on fire) not how many other accounts are in a rank. Now… if it thinks you performed better than what might be considered average for your current rank, it will reward you with more… if you perform worse than what might be considered average than your current sr it will reward you with less.

If we consider that peoples alts perform the same (because they’re the same person) then that average isn’t at all impacted by the number of accounts owned.

The game isn’t giving you less sr because there are too many people in a rank or something.

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22

How did your alt account get to level 142 just posting on the forums?

Surely you wouldn’t use an alt account to the play the game for 30+ hours given that you are so against them?

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23

Actually alt/smurfs can change the population of ranks.

Imagine you have 600 players, 100 for each rank.
Now 100 smurfs are created starting around 2500sr.
For them to drop to 2000sr, they basicly have to swap with the 100 people already at 2000sr (we just assume there is no inbetween for now)
To get to 1500 they have to swap with those at 1500.
Now the smurfs are all bronze, bronze are silver, silver are gold and gold are plat

There are many many many many more factors (to many to even talk about, let alone accurately calculate), but basicly if there are more high sr smurfs/alts than low sr smurfs/alts, everyone else ranks down a little.
If there are more low sr than high sr, everyone else upranks a little.
But all in all this wouldnt result in such a huge mess of “unwinnable” and “too ez” games. That mostly comes from unpridictable behaviour, especially on alts.
One game you tryhard, the next someone said something you didnt like at the start of the game so you might just throw a little or even simply leave.

So realistically you would not magically get to a higher rank if bliz deledet all alts from one day to the other.
However, you might get closer matches, you might enjoy games more, which might help you improve, which might be in the end exactly what you needed to rank up. (But that ofcourse would lead to people ranking down, who did not get the same effect as you)

In the end its all theory and bliz will never get rid of alts (nor will any other company). Imagine there would actually be a “hardcore competitive” where players would play with their real names and had to verify their id to enter (which is basicly the only way to truly have near 0 alts) There simply wouldnt be enough players signing up for that, in turn insane queue times, in turn nobody playing it.

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24

You wouldn’t happen to have an alt account, would you? Definitely not at level 142, right? That would corrupt the ladder, right?

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25

Every single alt affects SR as a measure of true rank.

For a ladder to work as intended, the mass of every skill bracket (SR) is supposed to stay normalized and respect the currency of distribution. Alts make this not so, by assigning additional SR mass to whatever rank they target. One player on multiple accounts is holding a disproportionate amount of SR mass currency to play with.

This shifts the ladder from zero-sum to constant-sum, meaning pay-to-win properties are free to emerge.

You might do a LOT better, especially around the inflection points of the PDF. But suppose we really can’t tell.

Without alts, the “mass” of a rank would be far more “correct” by % SR to dispose of.

You wouldn’t encounter the same 60 people across 300 accounts, trading their inflated SR “currency” back and forth across 3x roles each. You wouldn’t have to mulch through potentially 300 accounts worth of mass. You would be in an ecosystem with 60 accounts, with the disposable SR currency (gains/losses) of 60 accounts. Calibrated and correct.

Ladders are supposed to fix this if they want to be taken seriously. Most do it through periodic resets. This one just doesn’t care because it’s basically pay-to-win.

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26

Kinda a seperate issue from alt accounts, but there really seems to be no way to argue with you. You aren’t willing to budge, and if you want to spend your time raging about the fallacy of alt accounts ruining the value of rank rather than playing to up your own skill, that’s your issue.

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27

Ez fix, ladder resets

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28

not at all, this is such bad hearsay

29

I’m all for this, and after it happens, I’ll go back to laughing 2 months after since all the people hard stuck in Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum then come back to the forums complaining about how they can’t climb, oh and even more topics about smurfs in the mid/low ranks will be even worse, it’s like buying a new account, but not having to spend the money.

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30

Alts are fine as long as people are trying their hardest :slight_smile:

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31

The whole point is that alts create issues, independent of smurfing or ability. They double dip the numbers, and create SR mass where it doesn’t belong on the ladder. Ranks don’t matter when you’re not actually being uniquely quantified.

32

Its not. The best would still be best but the same racer or player should not be represented many times on the same leaderboard.

If each player has two accounts at similar ratings than the top 500 is actual top 250.

I hope you can understand now by the example.

It might not stop their absolute performance or skill but it absolutely flaws their relative ratings and comparisons because of the top few stealing many spots.

Ratings are supposed to be relative. In Case of OW i would not be surprised the same few people have even 3 or more accounts so the whole % skill ratings are vastly incorrect.

Top 100 should be Top 100 not Top 40 or less.

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33

Pretty much. Alts and smurfs make ranks pointless.

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34

The game compares your stats to other player stats to determine where you should rank. Your individual games don’t actually matter as much as you think.

If you have one GM playing in Plat… putting up GM stats. Then the average in Plat is skewed upwards on that hero. If that player has 10 boosting accounts in Plat, putting up the same numbers… it skews the average even more.

Considering the millions of alt accounts that have played and interacted with the ladder system. The integrity of the ranked mode is completely broken at this point.

The only saving grace is that it seems to be dynamic. In that it is comparing you to recent stats, not historical stats back to session one. Or it just weighs recent stats much more highly when doing the comparison. Every ban wave of aimbots seems to shift people upward a bit.

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35

Its nice that OP admitted to be corrupting the ladder as he has alts too :slight_smile:

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36

Have you ever heard of the term “Bracket Stacking”?

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37

Yes the same number of active player playing in the game or given ranks. But its still extra accounts that are in the pool.

I.e. Create a Knockout Ladder for a Tournament. And lets reference Baseball stats for moment.

If you have 20 accounts that are normally in given pool half of them would be knocked out by second round. Then half again and again. This is normal. But say its 1 day wait time to get into round 2.

Now take the same ladder and add the same amount of smurfs from a higher tier playing in this pool with the 20 originals. So now thats 40 accounts. So instead of just getting done with round 1 in a day, its now taking round 1 twice as long to move out of across the board.

Now look at the stats this way. The original 20 accounts are like Little League, and the players have their stats punched out 0.255, 0.133, 0.198, etc. Nothing specific, just using numbers. And the playing field is a Little League regulation ball field (90-110ft) which is roughly as large as the entire dirt diamond area of a Major League field.

Then you add Major League (smurf accounts) and their stats look like 0.754, 0.899, 0.586, etc. Its drastically huge of a difference.

Now you cross reference these and compare, the difference is exponential where you are talking Little league players have like 10% chance of a home run, where as these Major League players would be hitting home runs 100% of the time, but their stats would be incalculable in comparison to the Little League players.

Now thats if none of them decided to throw or troll the lower leagues/ranks.

With Each Smurf account winning, that now diminishes those legit players that actually are in that rank trying to climb, down. So if they had an average of 15k damage, 20k heals, 50k block damage, etc… that has now all diminished and affected how their SR is calculated for their improved climb. in fact its probably crushed because its well below their average.

Now those with the smurf(s) on the winning team get a false boost in performance and will have a diminishing return sooner than later when the system thinks they need increased difficulty by including higher SR players to go against and/or include bad players on their team for them to carry.

38

So why do you have a level 142 alt? That’s almost 20% of your total play time on your alt, assuming you only have one alt. You claim your alt is just for posting on the forums, but you don’t get to level 142 by posting on the forums.

Did you make an exception for yourself because everybody is doing it?

It’s hard to take you seriously when the problem you complain about is a problem you also contribute to.

If both (or more??) of your accounts are bronze, aren’t you pushing other bronze players up the ranks where they “ruin” games for others? Surely your multiple accounts don’t corrupt the ladder?

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39

If you bother to read what he has been posting, it revolves around Alt’s in the Competitive SR Ladder.

Account Levels are able to grow even through Quick Play. Levels play no actual relevance to the SR situation other than a good indicator of a Smurf in the lower half of the Competitive Ranking System. You do not get Smurfing in QP.

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40

yo I like you my man, spittin logic