I’m actually with Shadow on this one. Playing in the lower ranks I see teams wanting to coordinate/play together as often if not more frequently in QP compared to comp where everyone just tries to deathmatch/solo carry and if they lose it’s everyone else’s fault.
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Only 1 Account can be linked to your phone number. Smurf problem solved 99%. Let’s see how fast high ranked smurfing with 20 accounts will run out of phone numbers. Let’s see how account sellers deal with that. 1-2 months to get smurfs to their real rank, no new phone number for new account. GG. K tx bye.
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Except there are not only several apps you can get an extra phone number on for texting and calling purposes for free, there are already people that use multiple numbers for having multiple t500 accounts. Just have a family member or friend who will never play OW give their number and then you’re done.
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No, the problem is that because the first ~25 levels takes a decent chunk of time that you could be playing comp, most people just buy a level 25 account that someone else leveled for them. Then, you have an account that was probably leveled by a plat/diamond players, but a T500 player is playing on it, so the MMR is somewhere in plat.
Two smurfing level DPS (hanzo/mccree) 30 players absolutely wreck plat elo today…great.
The best part? Their % is only 50% win rates: Throw, Carry, Throw, Carry, etc…
It’s like stats doesn’t even matter any more…
Please fix this…
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Always thought it was pathetic that the only qualification for comp was level 25. It shouldn’t be that easy so I would like this for competitive in general. It should feel like the major leagues not a joke like it is now!
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That’s why raising the level cap to 75 or 100 will make farmers charge the account $ much higher due to much more work, which then, players will buy less accounts due to inflated prices.
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You can literally buy a lvl 100+ account for $20.
Would it help? Probably a bit. Would it make such a difference that people would REALLY notice? Doubt it 
Add one (two?) things to this: You only get XP in Comp and only if you win.
75 and 100 too low. I’d prefer level 350, but honestly, anything’s better than 25. They really should do this. Give smurfs another hurdle to clear before they can ruin matches. This could save at least 25% of matches from being one-sided, I think.
It will kill ranked 
for new player’s
This doesn’t address the problem I raise though, which is the high level cap causes low ranked players to sell pre-levelled accounts, which results in high ranked players purchasing low ranked accounts rather than levelling them themselves.
They want to be stupid and spend 20-40 bucks more than buying a new account then let them. They obviously don’t have other hobbies to spend it on. Then when they get banned for throwing in order to maintain the low rank, let them spend it again on another.
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The only accounts that are particularly expensive are GM accounts. Most of the mid-rank accounts you can buy are level 50+ already, and only generally go for $30-$50.
I could literally buy 4 plat accounts each above level 100 for $30 each right now. That really isn’t that expensive, especially for streamers and people who use these accounts for boosting.
If I wanted another account and the level cap was raised to 75 or 100, yeah I’m just gonna spend the extra $15.
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This has a been a suggestion for all roles long before role queue came around. The fact remains that level 25 players don’t know this game very well.
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Or just let smurfs be against other smurfs (DPS for DPS, especially). one can EASILY tell if one is a smurf or not.
Everyone knows that a true level 1 in the game will not skip tutorial…
Even if the account is bought, if there is a drastic change in gameplay or varying stats (carry, throw, carry, throw) - account should be “tagged” as a smurf at least until they are ranked.
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This doesn’t make a lot of sense. How exactly are you encountering these players unless you yourself are in the same range that they are?
Should be so easy to fix by implementing a pure solo queue like we pointed out a bazillion times already but uncle Blizzard knows what’s best for you and solo queue ain’t in the works.
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I probably fit into this class - bought game day one, been stuck in bronze for all seasons with occasional peaks into silver (but never can sustain). I can really only solo queue (I had used LFG before role queue, LFG is useless now). At this point, I focus on tank main, but while I know I don’t have plat tier-type skills, I also know I’m not playing bronze-skill tank play based on what I’ve watched from videos, etc. It did take me a while to get there over maybe 5-6 seasons, at minimum, and I’m still learning and making sure to avoid bad habits and gain better ones. I don’t care about getting to plat or the like, but I do want to get the heck out of bronze.
Regardless, the point is here, I’m now in gold-class in terms of my player level, but due to how your SR of the past haunts you, stuck at bronze. I’m trying to work it out. Started this latest season at 1350ish, and carefully played (only a few games a session) about a dozen games in that first week to get to 1450ish (not all wins obviously, there’s times that a team just doesn’t work out, and there’s those close matches). Surprisingly, I didn’t think I saw any smurfing during that week.
And then for the last week, I’ve hit smurf city in about 75% of the games I’ve played, I’ve estimated. Whether it is the smurf on your team that bails as soon as the game goes south or the smurf on the other team that carries them, all those matches felt like it was completely out of anything I could control to try to correct, in contrast to games against teams that should be “equally matched”. In that week I’ve dropped to 1200ish. I played say another 8 matches today, 6 of those were smurf-havens. The two that weren’t were actually fun matches (even though one was a loss); that’s the reason I want to like this game.
I understand everything Blizzard has said of why it allows smurfing, what it has tried to do to minimize it, and so on. What I don’t understand it why it does not consider player level as a fundamental matchmaking criteria alongside SR. I would rather be playing with other players that have a player level within, say, 50 of mine that also have similar SR, even if that means I’m waiting 10 minutes now for a tank queue at bronze instead of the near instantaneous matching I get now.
Something seriously needs to be done, and maybe they’ll have a better solution come OW2.
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If it were a tournament with prizes, I might agree, but since this is a casual video game, that seems a tad excessive, imo.
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