I tick many of these boxes. And despite this being my only account I am accused of smurfing a lot.
It is flattering. And hilarious.
But doesn’t that just mean we’re reporting everyone who beats us? Is that the bar? No one should beat me in Overwatch, but then also those who I beat are throwing. So I’m the only person playing Overwatch correctly and at the appropriate level. It’s like driving – you’re the only one driving at the correct speed. Everyone slower than you is an old blue hair, and everyone faster than you is a maniac.
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No, we’re not talking about reporting. You can never trust players. We’re talking about statistical analysis of a players performance over the history of the account. And possibly looking at other accounts on the same ip address / hardware and comparing them.
Right now the only detection they have on “throwing” is inactivity. Or very minimal cheat detection. There is nothing in place that would look for players “soft throwing”. It’s because technically it’s “allowed” right now. Even though it destroys the player experience (which goes against their “Play Nice, Play Fair” policy).
With machine learning you can build a model that looks at mechanics and player behavior. Key in on things like reaction time, accuracy, etc. For any given player there is a variance that would be within the realm of possibility. You just go a tad beyond that and you find players who are smurfing. Wouldn’t be perfect and would require a bunch of testing. But if you adjust the sensitivity of that correctly, you catch most to be a deterrent (but let some slip thru) without punishing legit players.
There are other things you can detect, like a player flanking AND taking someone unaware at an above average rate for the account. Which by itself would be not enough. But if they go back to the old behavior, and then later return, and have a see-saw behavior, with enough data you can better solidify it.
So are we running everybody’s numbers through Excel before the match, or are we sitting in spawn to do that after the match begins? I ask the because once the match begins it’s just a factor of who is getting kills and who is getting killed. And if we’re looking at everybody who is performing well, then we’re in exactly the situation that I described above.
Machine learning is much more complicated than an Excel spreadsheet. And we’re not talking about players doing anything. This is a system that the developers build. It wouldn’t be an immediate thing as you would need a history of behavior to prove anything.
How long it takes to detect could be a couple hours to a week depending on the age of the account. True, they could buy a new account, but at least you have a deterrent there by banning their accounts (which isn’t happening at all right now). If you wanted to go a step further, you could detect that the new account is the same user. Either thru billing information, ip address, or hardware information.
Some people will get past it. But if you make it harder to do and more of a deterrent, you significantly reduce the number. Some people are going to do it and slip thru regardless.
It just seems like that is punishing, and eventually banning people for learning the map. It gets to the point that I don’t dare use that overlook on Dorado, lest the algorithm decide that I need to be removed.
Let’s hope that your vision doesn’t come to pass.
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Yeah. It seems well intentioned but ultimately a dumb idea.
Sometimes you play a match and a couple of mistakes are made and you get totally steam rolled.
Does that mean someone was throwing, or it was badly matched… No, people just made mistakes.
I’ve had 2CP matches where on defence no ones done more than about 500 dmg because we’ve been totally rolled.
Banning people for that would be the dumbest thing ever.
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Smurfing and having an alt-account are not the same.
If you create an alt-account and then proceed to play on it all the way up to GM/T500, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Smurfing is where an experienced player plays on a new account and keeps it at a deliberately low SR. The games are not at all balanced, and they have every intention of staying in that ELO so they can stomp games.