Should smurf accounts be treated differently in any way?

[BonnoErTilt-1141]

@Jessicka-1960

There’s a reason GM’s cannot group, legitimately, with players and are not placed in those matches.

Cannot group in GM, really ???..

[Jessicka-1960]

@Level-11869

? i don’t know what you are trying to get at.

Rankings are organised and have different rules according to SR. There’s limitations that prevent players in Bronze through Diamond joining games with an SR range of more than 1000 between the highest and lowest players.

During off peak hours in some regions it may get a little slacker but this isn’t something you can deliberately breach.

Unless a player has deliberately exploited a system to manipulate their SR, say by knowingly having an account placed at a lower rank.

That would be considered circumventing those rules, which is cheating.

If you do it in a group, which is often the case, it’s also boosting.

[PATBUTCHER-1227]

BAN THEM.

…I mean I joke, but I also don’t. I wouldn’t shed a tear if the smurfs got banned. Naturally, this is excluding how difficult it would be to distinguish a smurf account at level 1 and a newbie account at level 1.

@rotteendmoon-1645

If the smurf hates Overwatch so much that they buy accounts just to soft throw games, then they have to look in the mirror and ask themselves, “why am I still throwing $20 bills at Blizzard?”

“Because I’m insecure and stomping people lower ranked than me gives me joy and makes me feel better than I know I am. I’m totally pathetic…” - That’s their reasoning.

@Jessicka-1960

People will talk about ‘practice’ accounts but they simply don’t exist. Self imposed limitations don’t make it okay, and people will break them when they feel they can justify to themselves it just as easily as they can their knowing what they’re doing is harming the matches they play in.

True. If honest people want to practice, they’ll practice at their rank. Otherwise they aren’t really improving, are they? It’s simply another excuse…

[Level-11869]

@Jessicka-1960

That would be considered circumventing those rules, which is cheating.

that isn’t cheating because when you make a new account you have no sr. the devs have already said that making a second account isn’t cheating/against tos and to make a second account (and play ranked) you have to place somewhere. the system is prepared for players to get placed inaccurately so it quickly puts poorly performing players lower and better performing players higher. there is no cheating occuring, the system isn’t even being cheated.

@Jessicka-1960

If you do it in a group, which is often the case, it’s also boosting.

boosting is a bannable offense, making an alt account isn’t.

[ToxicDaddy-1109]

We can literally have thoughts and discussions around this. Problem is, nothing will even be remotely thought of about it on Blizzards end.
It’s revenue, and after people complain about smurfs so many times and how the game is no fun with them, those people keep on coming back to play. Blizzard just laughs each time we complain about it. They know people are just not going to quit Overwatch over smurfs, so they stand by their opinion, there is nothing wrong with a smurf.

[Darkfire76-1688]

I hate smurfs so much I wish there was some way to track them down IRL and block their provider from allowing them access to the game, and perhaps even sue them if they get around the IP ban in some sort of class action suit on behalf of the other players who are paying for the service of this game.

A good start would be to infiltrate popular streamers feeds and channels, hard ban all of them who have made a bronze to GM video, demonitize the videos and report for copyright, ruin their entire livelihood they have built off of being a streamer.

Next, go after smurfs who reside outside the U.S, since they don’t have the same constitutional rights. The governments of the nations they live in would throw jail time and fines at them if blizzard notified them, especially the ones in asia, those guys get black vanned for anything almost.

Start a campaign of fear to reduce the temptation of anyone even thinking of smurfing with heavy fines and jail time, lawsuits. Trust me, after a few examples are made it won’t happen anymore, or very rarely.