Ran into a six stack of smurfs, reported them as cheaters

Based on some data in the past its a bit lower than that. From the data Jeff showed one time 2500+ was in the top 30%.
Mid was a bit closer to 2000-2200. Which sort of makes sense. The scale if from 0 to up towards a limit of 5000 depending upon how many people there really are to have to place.

Show me the exact line which says

The exact line that DIRECTLY COMMENTS about smurfing

how can it be intetional when people below 3k have no idea how to group up and just feed their brains out

Manipulating your SR/MMR, whether intentionally losing or otherwise, is against our EULA, the spirit of OW & sportsmanship in general.

Smurfing is when you intentionally lose a game.

Nope I in fact quoted it in a reply, it addresses nothing at all to do with smurfing, only what obviously comes across as throwing. Again, y’all are stretching things out to hilarious degrees scraping the barrel for crumbs to think that Blizz has officially sided with your feelings on skilled players making new accounts.

It isn’t their choice where they place.

Impossible, below 2.5k is so weird, got several accounts legit hard stuck gold, and ive been diamond/masters for a good 10 seasons

And to the reason for my gold accounts, its basically my OTP accounts for heroes i need slight work on

There was also a jeff post that detailed one incident as a quick example of how they tracked someone who was using a new account from streaming. They saw their main MMR/SR ranking and compared to the new account and it matched to where they were supposed to be within a reasonable number of games as they expected. In general, blizzard seems fine with how quickly someone is reallyplaced.

What they do dislike is someone intentionally playing the system to inflate or deflate their rank to stay at some place they shouldn’t be. Account selling or say gameplay sabotage where someone tries to lose somehow to stay in low ranks.

Most people don’t want to be in low ranks and want to play with people who are at their level.

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So all the players who arent good and feed their brains out, they arent intentionally throwing

No, they aren’t.
Being bad at the game isn’t against the rules.
Smurfing is when they are doing it on purpose.

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I have accounts at higher levels than my main, but only because I play 10 hours a day on them, and guess what, only gain 1sr a day. Gold is terrible

And you can tell the difference between a smurf player who is intentionally bad and a new player who is unintentionally bad, can you?

The obvious cheaters in chess have like 99% optimal computer moves and always take 4-7 seconds to make a move never premoving or taking long time to think in complex situations.

Good cheaters in chess are good enough to balance their usage of computer moves with human moves making them harder to catch from a systematic standpoint.

An obvious thrower in OW will just stand in a corner doing nothing or keep jumping off the ledge. A smarter thrower will try to act and intentionally play poorly like the people around them.

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I dont think you understand what a smurf is and you keep conflating it with an alt account. A smurf is someone who is intentionally taking actions in order to keep their MMR lower than it should be with the goal of playing lower ranked players.

An alt account is an account that one buys and plays normally.

The former is a ToS violation and the latter is not but the latter is not a smurf.

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… Lol what!!!

Throwing to lower your MMR/SR is one thing, making a new account as a skilled veteran player is another.

Smurfing means you make a new account and youre playing newbs as someone already skilled in the game.

if the game’s algorithm to detect actual player skill and its ability to then place you against others of comparable level actually worked, this would be an issue for about 5 games at the most.

At no point in the OP’s post was it implied the team they faced threw their way from their claimed 4100 to the lower SR. In fact if they all had “theme” names it’d be highly unlikely and more likely they started new accounts with the names in mind.

Why are we bringing up chess?

It’s almost impossible to verify a smurf with a high degree of confidence if they’re actually trying to hide their tracks. Most don’t, and just sit in spawn.

But how do you tell if someone is a smurf when they just play more aggressively out of position and miss more shots than usual?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is doing things like feeding or jacking around in spawn or just not playing.
Sometimes it can be difficult, but there is a lot more than just “playing badly” that goes into a game. Thing like positioning or map knowledge are things that a more experienced player would know, but a new player wouldn’t.

Different examples of obvious cheating versus subtle cheating.
Obvious throwing versus subtle throwing.

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Smurfing is the manipulation of SR as i Said SR is based on the PLAYER’S performance and yes making a new account is Smurfing since both methods (getting a new account vs throwing till you’re at a low rank) have the same end goal which is to play at a lower rank then actually are. if Blizzard isn’t ok with Boosting since it’s placing players at an SR higher than they actually are then they shouldn’t be ok with smurfing which puts them at a lower SR than they actually are

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