I wonder how many players

If playing vs plats doesnt make you better then nothing will. Some will get better. Overtime things will balance…

I dont understand why this has to be discussed every day.

People act like smurfs only land on the other team… what nonsense

It still balances out in the long run.

Back in my day games didnt have a system to seperate players based on skill… you just joined a server and dealth with whatever BS going on.

These days. Crying about not climbing… crying about being put up against players they would face if they climbed

Lol seriously

The only impact smurfs really have in game is sort of sucking the air out of the room. Like that one person in a group who has a knack for killing the mood at any party/event they go to some how.
So smurfs in games make some SR correct players not want to play +1 more game and that slows down the comp grind needed to rank up.

but that’s about it…
being the smurf is an equal opportunity jerk. You win some with them, you lose some with them so it’s a wash.

You have 0 clue what my post is about and I’m not going to bother explaining it to you.

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No, i know. Nobody cares though. F bronze lol

Everyone deserves to have a game against people of similar skill.

Having people who belong 2000 SR higher than you in your game is surprisingly not instructive. If they’re on the other team, they just kill your team over and over again, and you hope they win quickly instead of just screwing around refusing to touch the objective while they spawn camp you. Real learning experience that one is.

If they’re on your team, and you win quickly, that’s just artificial SR gain, and you don’t really learn anything. In fact, because they’re doing most of the work, your SR gain will be low due to PBSR.

There’s nothing good about smurfs. Smurfs should always be reported for Gameplay Sabotage.

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Sub 800 SR it’s worse than that. You never know if that’s the game a smurf is going to be throwing to maintain their low SR, or if they’re going to be winning for / against you. It makes games miserable, really.

As you go higher above 800 SR, the population increases enough to lessen the impact of smurfs. Then, once the population is high enough, you’re right. It’s 50/50 whether the smurf is against you or with you, and it all evens out if you play enough games.

Ranks just fit to a bell curve, it isn’t enforced. Human skill fits to a bell curve naturally. There isn’t a max population at a certain rank, so no one is forced into or out of any rank just by the presence of other players.

Skill does inherently decay without use, so if someone skipped a season, they would likely come back and lose some SR naturally from their loss of skill, but they would balance out at their new SR, and be able to get better and climb again.

The places where the equilibrium is most strained is at the edges of the curve, Low bronze, and top 500. When populations get super small, it’s hard to match up people of similar skill level, and the games get more chaotic.

Nah, think of all the whiny 13-17 year olds who think they’re stuck in ELO hell in plat, but believe they belong in masters? They’re exactly the kind of jerks that spend a ton of time throwing down to bronze just for the lulz. It’s not hard to believe there’s griefers, they exist in every PVP game.

Not to mention, they form full stacks in LFG every day. I like joining them, refusing to pick a role, and reporting them all for Gameplay Sabotage.

I think most posters are missing the point in this thread. The distribution of players across ranks stays roughly the same. So, if a significant number of players drop rank on purpose, other players are necessarily pushed up because there are now more players that are “worse” than them.

If smurfs are as prevalent as people claim, this could mean that many players have been indirectly lifted out of bronze by smurfs deranking (besides via games against throwers).

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Well for a lot of players there is absolutely 0 gratification left to play at a level where everyone is as good if not better than you are. Especially when all your hard workgets continualy thrown away by throwers and leavers.

So, the next best thing to amuse ones self is to drop and feel like a pro lol or validated

Not gonna get better either.

Throwers to bronze most often go as 6 stacks, based on a number of factors:

  1. 6 stacks of throwers are guaranteed to lose
  2. Throwers convince themselves that throwing as a 6 stack “doesn’t hurt anyone”
  3. Throwing alone is too unpredictable. It would be very unlikely to work.

This is based on my many reports of thrower 6 stacks as they form in LFG. I often join their groups and tell them I’m reporting them before doing so. Some have come along to cuss at me after “friending” me to explain what a loser I am and to tell me bronze people are worthless, etc.

So, all that to say that the people that benefited from the 6 stack thrower groups are likely 6 stack groups themselves. I’ve even heard tell of 6 stack thrower groups having to work hard to out throw each other, which I think is the biggest justice of all. The majority of people don’t play in 6 stacks, so they’ll get no benefit from the SR gains of the throwers.

Not to mention, they’ll probably have crappy stats against the throwers, and not get very much SR from the thrower game.

Then there’s all the victims when the throwers stop using 6 stacks. Throwers down in low bronze absolutely destroy games. It’s completely random whether the thrower will be throwing, winning, etc. So, they might be interested in dragging the game out as long as possible by killing everyone, but letting them get the payload to the next point in overtime to extend the game.

Smurfs do nothing but damage to ranked play. There are no net benefits to smurfs. (smurfs are the ones who throw, not just alt accounts)

As I said before, there are no bell curve enforcements, no one rises automatically, they only get SR for winning, and lose SR for losing. No one changes rank automatically. No one is getting easier games because smurfs got involved (best case scenario is no impact). Even if someone did get a bump of 100 SR somehow, if they didn’t belong 100 SR higher, they’d slowly decline back to where they were.

Humans naturally tend to fit to a bell curve. It’s not perfect, and the ranking system does nothing to enforce a bell curve fit.

Of course, we don’t actually know exactly how the matchmaking system works, so what you say is pure conjecture. I am not arguing that there an “enforced bell curve,” and I’m not quite sure what the fascination with the bell curve is. The matchmaker is designed, it’s not some natural measurement, it creates the matches and assigns ratings based on factors that are hidden to us. If they want more or fewer players in a rank they can make it so.

Blizzard says they don’t force losing streaks:

Scott says:

We’re always trying to put you in fair matches that we think you have a 50% chance to win, and do it quickly so you’re playing Overwatch instead of staring at a queue timer. We never intentionally seek to put you in an unfair one.

The things they compromise on are for how long it takes to find a match. They don’t give you a known low or high chance to win unless it takes too long to find a 50/50 match.

I didn’t say they force losing streaks or anything remotely close. The system gives and takes SR based on various factors, and those amounts affect how players get distributed across ranks. If they wanted more bronze players, for example, the system could make it more difficult to stay in low silver with slight changes to the amount of SR gained and lost for those players. I’m not saying they do this, I’m saying they could, and we don’t actually know either way.

They’ve said what SR gains are based on.

They’ve said quite a bit about it, and most of it is collected in one place to read:

Yes, they’ve said quite a bit about it. But we don’t get to see what actually influences individual SR gains and losses, it is entirely hidden from us. Claiming they do or don’t do anything to affect how players are distributed is speculation. All I ever said is it could work that way.

They’ve been transparent about this in the past. In season 2, roughly (don’t quote me on this) over 50% of the playerbase were in gold and plat. I’m not sure about the exact number but the majority of players were concentrated in that SR range. As a result, matches were somewhat unbalanced. They flattened the bell curve by doing an MMR reset in season 3. While it was a complete mess for most of the season, the distribution of players improved and match quality got better. I wouldn’t say it’s an issue if they wanted more players in bronze, as reducing the number of silver players by putting them in bronze would simply increase the skill level of both tiers. Don’t see an issue with that as long as it’s not too high.

A de-ranked due to tilt silver mercy would be able to carry in bronze (assuming there’s no other silvers or above). That’s how bad bronze players are.

I wouldn’t imagine it’s more than 1000 probably even less

I’m really not sure about that

Yeah, I remember the first time I play UT online. I thought I’d be good because I could beat the bots on the highest setting. Obviously I was wrong. I would have a k:d of, like, 0.1 in deathmatch.