There is a significant number of smurfs in Overwatch. In high plat/low diamond there’s at least one smurf about every 4 games, and many of them are good enough to ruin it for others.
The rank system doesn’t protect players from smurfs. It’s not difficult to control your rank growth and it doesn’t require throwing games; a smurf player can simply relax once in a while (especially during placement matches) and just not try hard (which isn’t the same as throwing; besides an average player of that rank is incapable of telling the difference between throwing on purpose and just having a bad day). They also can get new accounts, place low (or get somebody of lower skill to place for them) and them just climb from there; rinse and repeat. It’s also pretty difficult to properly detect de-ranking behavior.
Smurfing will never be bannable (as long as it doesn’t involve account boosting). For obvious business reasons. Also, smurfing is fun; let’s not pretend that blowing away weaker players isn’t fun—because it is.
Smurfs do ruin games. No, they don’t ‘teach younger players’, they aren’t ‘just having harmless fun with friends’, or any other common excuse smurfs use. For plat and lower teams, often consisting of random people, it’s almost impossible to devise a strategy that would effectively disable that one smurf (if there’s only one).
It is possible to detect smurfs. LoL has been doing it for quite some time, for example.
Dear Blizzard, it’s time to start working on a smurf-detection system. Analyze individual player performance; single out possible smurfs and assign them a ‘smurf suspect’ flag; make the matchmaking system take this flag into account. Smurfs should play with smurfs. That’s all I have to say.
There already is a system like this in place: The game has a hidden MMR metric. As a smurf in lower Elo you get considerably more difficult games since you will be matched versus other high MMR players (“smurfs”) in the same SR range.
With that said you can often still stomp hard if you swap to your main hero pool (given you main high impact heroes) and start shotcalling because the other smurfs usually don’t play to win but to make big solo lul plays, practise off meta heroes, aim etc
You’d want to hope that the system was working. Imagine being a legitimate player and the system thinking you were a smurf. You’d be stuck playing high MMR games yet stuck at a crappy SR. (ie. Imagine playing at a Master MMR in Gold or something because the system assumed you were a smurf when you just got misplaced in the first place, when the reality was maybe you should have been in high Plat or low Diamond)
Doesn’t really make sense does it?
In all honesty it shouldn’t do this unless it is to account for decay.
Not sure how to deal with the smurfs honestly. You’d just have to hope that the smurfs your team gets and the opposing team gets would even out with the throwers both teams get.
OP is absolutely right.
Smurfs are the cancer of this game. Especially starting from high diamond onwards, you’d get at least one of those every 2nd game.
They totally ruin competetive experience for a huge number of players, because basically smurfs either:
have fun without playing for victory, never switch and just ignore their team, sometims pulling “git gud, hardstuck dia (plat, master, etc)” comments. They just dont care for win or loss;
absolutely demolish competition with superior skill. yes, i talk about these 30-40sh level tracers, widows and such, who can single-handely decimate high diamond (and sometimes even master) team without breaking a sweat.
And the point is, this problem gets worse and worse with every season to come, because there’s nothing to gain for high ranked players by playing on their own rank. SR? They are already GMs, and could become them again if they wish. Golden guns… dont even make me start about it.
Fun fact is, both former top500 players i know personally have spend last 2-3 seasons chilling on diamond smurfs. And with every season players get even more and more bored - resulting into more and more smurfs.
Do something. MM isnt pulling balanced teams as it is, 8 games out of 10 are complete helpless stomps, and smurfs only make it worse.
Analyzing player performance should be done over a long course of time, multiple games, not just based off their initial placement. And the ‘suspicion’ parameter should increase over time, if the suspicious performance continues, and then it should involve human inspection as well.
It’s clear that multiple accounts are becoming a problem. I would like to see some sort of system where an account can play different roles at different SRs.
If you are a diamond tracer but want to play tank in low gold that is fine but tracer gets greyed out you can choose her for fairness reasons. Integrate it into the LFG and police LFG to deal with the road to bronze trolls
I know this because a self proclaimed Smurf (someone who intentionally deranks to stomp on lower skilled players) was complaining on the forums for a season ban for boosting, when they were the only ones who play on their account and they only play solo, instead of smurfing, which is what they admitted to doing.
They define smurfs incorrectly, so no. They think that a smurf and an ult are the same thing, so their official statement about smurfs (which was stating that they are fine) was actually about alt accounts, not smurfs.
So there is an official response, but they missed the point by saying that smurf accounts quickly reach the correct SR range. They derank or stay low on purpose, so this is clearly not the case, which means that they confused smurfs with alt accounts when responding about smurfs.
Edit* I hope a certain someone doesn’t join in and start arguing logical fallacies with this one
There is only one way to lose rank, That’s to lose. So what you’re saying is, you’re always on a team with a de-ranking player? Or when the player decides to stop de-ranking, he’s on the other team?
