Please can we atleast address the issue, smurfs ruin the game. They go to lower elos cause they can’t compete in their own, like what in the world
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Uh, by this definition, they’re not smurfs
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They go to lower elo to wreak havoc because they want to pad their fragile ego’s.
Is that better?
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Yes, that makes me feel better, smurfs are just bad. Then they proceed to tell me that I’m gold and i suck yet they have to buy another account and purposely do bad to get to my rank because they can’t compete at their own rank 
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I wish the Competitive Level Requirement would be changed from level 25 to level 350
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lol I think you’ve gone a bit too far mate, maybe like 100
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Level 500 and a questionnaire when you log on asking if you are a smurf or not.
Smurfs are real and everywhere. I play against plat or high golds in pugs. It helps me recognize that level of player in a silver game. A diamond would be godlike in low ranks though.
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Let’s go with “account must be 1 year old with at least 14 hours of gameplay per week” and only after they’ve completed 5 page questionnaire and submitted a 2000 word essay.
Do you also feels like this when there is smurf in your team and you will get free sr or do you feel like this only when smurf is in enemy team?
You don’t see how you contradict yourself, do you?
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Of course he doesn’t. People like him only complain about issues like this in order to feel as though they didn’t deserve to lose their last match and/or deserve a higher skill rating. Well, take out all his games in which there was a smurf, and guess what, the amount of games he’s played with smurfs on his team and on the enemy would pretty much cancel out and he’d be at relatively the same sr.
If you want to make the argument that your issue is with the quality of the game, then smurfs aren’t the issue. The only way for a smurf to get to a lower tier is to either throw or play at a level lower then they actually are. If it is the former, then you aren’t against smurfs you are against throwers, and throwers can get and do get reported and banned. If it is the latter, then they are just going to get placed at the level they played at and there should be no problem.
If they decide that they are going to tryhard every game from thereon, then that is just called climbing, and you run into players playing well and winning every match. If they decide that they want to return to their previous elo at that point, the only way to do so would be to play at a level below their current rank, aka throw, at which point, like I said, they can get and are reported and banned.
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If they can’t compete at their own rank then clearly they don’t belong in that rank and would just naturally lose sr lol.
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Yeah no. Smurfs are still an issue. If it’s just an alternate account then fine who cares. But the disposable nature of accounts where someone can throw to play on the lower ranks just for the “luls”. That takes most of the enjoyment out of a match for most players no matter who’s team they are on. For me smurf implies that they are deliberately playing below their real rank. Whether by throwing or buying low rank accounts.
Yes that account eventually can get punished for throwing but what do they care? They just go get another one.
Of course they can still compete at (or at least slightly below their rank) but guess what? The toxic players who deliberately smurf below their rank, (once again not the ones who just have a second account and try at all times) don’t do it because they can’t compete. They mostly do it because they want to bully weaker players. We need to start calling these people what they really are. Bullies that ruin games for people whether they beat up on them and scream “git gud lol” or if they are on their team and berate their teammates for being “hardstuck trash”.
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Jeff recently admitted that smurfs are a problem and said they’re working on a solution.
That’s an old topic at this point. There are videos you can find where they talked about several topics with content creators, including this. Jeff literally said that they do not have a problem with people having multiple accounts but they hate when people manipulate sr/the matchmaker.
Please at least go watch/use those videos before you keep posting this same reply. At this point it’s just spam.
It is not. It is still relevant because Jeff noted that the solution won’t be coming until Overwatch 2 or later.
It’s not spam to alert people to something the lead game developer has said to expect from Overwatch in future.
How about, instead, you stop trying to be a forum moderator.
It is when there is a more relevant/recent version of those statements but it’s not in the forums so I guess that’s too much effort for you.
It is spam when it’s the exact same reply word for word. Less people are taking you serious each time you post it.
How about instead come up with something original?
So as far as solutions go we have the following broad categories:
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Ladder reset. Cheap bandaid solution. You could pop this in next season. Signal/Noise ratio is recalibrated. Warps people back to the middle for a second chance and better incentivizes them to carry on. Unlocks mobility for some accounts. People settle in new ranks (not necessarily their exact old ones), because of the reset effects. The smurfing issue continues, and the ladder gets reset once more. Reset fixes a lot of side issues unrelated to smufing (like low pop sparsity, non-transitive sr trading, and silver tanks in plat games).
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Ladder protocol rework/redesign. Better algorithms that are robust against adversarial performance manipulation. Solves smurfing by making it ineffective and unviable. Includes better scoring functions for psbr/soloagency. Presumably goes hand-and-hand with reset to fix all the other issues. Requires a lot of work. Not viable until OW2.
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Uniqueness Methods. Hardware/Build ID. Unique account per unique client install per unique hardware. You could still smurf on your other account on the other PC. Phone/SMS type protection - you could still use your mom’s phone, etc. Discourages and mitigates alternate accounts but not necessarily smurfing behaviour. Probably not viable until OW2 or Bnet platform update.
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Prestige/Priority Mode. Paid subscription model for a cleaned up ladder. More agents to police bad behaviour. Stricter punishments. Paywall encourages serious behaviour. Offsets lost revenue from burner account sales. Should come with added perks like faster tickrate servers and shorter queues. Also not viable until OW2.
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I think most people. Whether they think smurfing is an issue or not. Would welcome a ladder/matchmaker change/redesign.
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Well that’s part of it. The overall ladder redesign should happen for OW2. Better matchmaking, different ranking algs/system to reward solo agency and performance, and robustness to sabotage.
The only real viable solution is to just pull the plug next season and give us a kind of soft (or hard) reset to get the ball rolling. That takes almost no dev resources and should solve more problems than it creates.