It is not fair to regular players. There’s a reason why:
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A few streamers (Hats off to Super who never did this challenge. Big respect to him) are ruining games in lower rank (From diamond in the most cases except bronze to GM).
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The origin of these accounts are strongly questionable in my opinion. Some of these accounts have good skins. An average viewer doesn’t know the prehistory of these accounts. I think it’s important because these accounts may even come from a third party. In this case it’s not impossible that few streamers are boosting accounts for a lot of money with “Unranked to GM” alias to keep the real reason hidden. I think it’s unacceptable.
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Why would they do that? They get the game advertised because streamers are pushing the marketing slogan “be better, play more”.
And i recently saw a streamer playing Reinhardt without a shield, he literally didn’t use it and as far as I understand he didn’t get any bans.
how would they do that? there is no way to tell if someone bought an alt or is just naturally gifted at the game. you cant punish someone for being too good.
if its being streamed you could make an argument but its still not their fault that their alt placed in gold.
it has been stated multiple times that alts are not against tos.
It is not impossible that they will sell the account later for a lot of money. I think money is the motivating factor in this case. Business is business. Secondly why don’t they play at their own rank? I don’t have a problem with they are playing the game well. My main problem with these streamers are playing much lower rank with an account of unknown origin in my opinion. Thirdly the 100th UR2GM is very suspicious. If the same streamer does it too frequently it’s not impossible that accounts are boosted by them for money.
then ban them for account sharing…
well yeah, it gives streamers free content that people enjoy watching.
for streamers its mainly content, for regular people its an ego boost.
Free content? I think streaming money is not enough for smaller streamers. This is why they do this “challenge”.
Played 2 games against that, free sr.
Checked those matches later and his team mate was mad and aksing why he wasn’t banned. Ngl, it was entertaining (his dialect makes it automatically funny) and that’s exactly why they wont get banned. Its decent content and brings attention to the game.
yeah… thats why they go for the free content that will guarantee viewers
The price of GM accounts : From 50 to 900 USD. I looked at a website that deals with account trading. These are dirty things if a few famous streamers are in the business.
no one is saying they are innocent. all I am saying is you cant ban someone for doing an unranked to gm challenge, youd have to catch them selling the account for any action to be taken.
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The problem is, it does well on YouTube/Twitch. Because people watch it.
People will stop (or at least dramatically reduce the numbers that do it), if people stopped watching the content.
Game play wise, it is a non-issue. It is just lazy content.
The only streamers that would do this are the ones not getting views. That isn’t enough money to justify a decently sized streamer risking their career to do.
That being said, some have, but it is very rare. The more common practice is just to straight boost someone’s account for money.
This is why they are lying to their viewers. Old but gold tactic.
They aren’t. Some do it because it is entertaining to have easy games, some do it to educate their audience.
Neither are especially “wrong”. But it is cheap lazy content.
As with anything on these social platforms, it lives and dies with engagement. You don’t engage, it goes no where. Even commenting to tell them it sucks pushes it further.
It is why people deliberately say things wrong in videos. They know people have no self control and can’t resist correcting them. Easy way to push the video.
I agree with you Salinja… But I am MUCH, MUCH, MUCH less positive about wether or not the earth is round or flat, than I am about being postive that Blizzard does NOT care about smurfing. They absolutely do not care. I know that more surely than anything else on earth.
could you define smurfing?
This is the problem. Money is the motivating factor instead of game quality. This is why I switched to Marvel Rivals.
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Yeah, I started playing Overwatch 1 about 2 years before it became Overwatch 2. And at the time, there were not a lot of “new” players. So I got a very real look at what the game is like for new players. It’s easily the least beginner-friendly game and community that I’ve ever witnessed for anything, whether video game or anything else in life.
And the devs wont’ even acknowledge it. By that I mean, you won’t hear the even murmur a hint of a thought about it. You’ll never hear a dev use the word “smurf”. It’s amazing… like in all of the the Dev blogs, interviews, videos, announcements, posts, etc., over the course of the last 4 years I’ve been around, I only heard one dev mention the word smurf in passing, once, when he was trying to understand a question being asked to him.
Meanwhile, over time, smurfing has been historically one of the most complained about issues of all time in the forums, even though it’s less often now than it was in the past, because in the past, Blizzard was just literally selling Alt Accounts for $4.99 and they sold literally millions of them. Millions.
The message they’ve always sent has been clear:
If you are new, than you are dog. Get good, or go ____ yourself.