Or play on your main and use quick play for practice.
Yep, that’s the message Blizzard is sending loud and clear now that they’ve 180’d their stance on alt accounts with the change to the game’s monetisation:
“Troll QP. QP MMR doesn’t matter.”
However, that addresses only one of those 4 non-smurfing reasons to have an alt.
This would be a fine alternative if it wasn’t for the whole “lol it’s just QP” mentality that half the playerbase has.
Sorry but this would be terrible. They want to eliminate the most smurfs and alt accounts and giving OW1 smurfs a free pass would just be stupid.
As for the “playing with friends” thing. If you are so far apart that you cant play together then you should not be playing in comp together. They would falsely alter your SR or you would falsely alter theirs turning them into boosted accounts.
Play QP if you want. Because you seen not to care about comp when pairing together with a vastly stronger or weaker account. Its simple as that.
As for the “but I want to play other heroes!” thing. Just do? Experiment if you want on your main and if you dont want to dont. We already have different SR for the roles and open queue.
Also “but what about the same role!!” is stupid. Because as soon as you would say “nah this round I play my main because I am on a lose streak” makes you a smurf.
All in all: no reason for alts or smurfs anymore. It was maybe a good idea before role queue for different roles but not anymore. Its not needed and I am glad blizz is making shure its as annoying as possible to get another account.
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It’s not a free pass if the alts are linked and one ban = all banned.
The friend was so far apart I couldn’t even play Comp with them if I wanted to.
??? I care. I’ve posted this already. Don’t put words in my mouth. I care about matchmaking in all game modes.
MMR/SR is per role, not per hero
That’s the point of alts, as I mentioned. You don’t have to manipulate your main accounts MMR just to play something different.
Fact is you dont need it. If you want to train or experiment with a hero then do it. You can back where you at if you play your main anyway. You dont need a new account for playing a new hero. Stop this nonsense.
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You don’t get to decide that. In fact, if I want to I can easily add numbers to my accounts and continue using them for the legitimate reasons I’ve already stated.
And if I do, I will be doing the playerbase a service–not unintentionally throwing matches in order to play weaker heroes.
Haha yeh. I respect the agree to disagree.
Well, it’s not like I don’t understand your position, think it has some merit or even think that this is will as massive a problem as other things. There’s even part of my position that you could argue is hypocritical. I dislike one tricks, but I don’t think they should be banned or forced to change but that’s because they’re worse at other characters and I think it’s silly to mandate people he good at X number of characters before being allowed to comp. So technically you could argue that I should be in favour as you’re looking to improve on off heroes before playing at your normal rank.
However, where it hits a wall for me is that your purposefully choosing characters that your worse at and manipulating your SR and the match’s outcome by not picking X, even though it may be most suitable, because you’re much better at it. On the other hand, I agree that I don’t think it’s reasonable to play a hero you can’t play well in comp (as I write this I don’t think you actually said this, but I feel that this is the logic behind the multi account), however I think the various non-comp modes are enough to get oneself competent enough with the hero to begin using it in comp. It won’t be as good as your main, but there’s always gonna be a spread of competency with the various chars you play 
I kinda see it as a way of foisting your concern of losing SR on your main to other people lower down on an account that’s less important to you, even if you’re trying to win with the arbitrarily limited selection 
In all, I’m not a fan of and disagree conceptually with what your doing, but I don’t think it’s a massive issue. However, there’s plenty of other issues caused by alt/smurf accounts which I really don’t like and unfortunately I don’t really see a way to stop one without the other 
Or rather, blizzard can’t be bothered doing anything about anything so I’ll take whatever I can get
Well, so long as at least one of us is happy lol. Instead what they’ll do is somehow create a scenario where you can’t do your thing but the really problematic smurf/alt accounts aren’t hindered at all 
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Too many alts were a problem causing MMR/SR inflation in the game. This from someone with eight accounts btw… fully support the move to limit them down.
You can always rotate off that phone number to a new account, not sure how long before - probably a week. If they combine that with a system for MMR/SR decay or at least less weighting for inactive accounts, that would work.
With character restrictions, and phone, they are doing what they can to limit it. People thinking it will have no influence are simply wrong. Even if it cuts alts in half, that’s a huge difference. With F2P, they have to take some measures.
That’s what unranked modes are for.
false bans aren’t really a thing. Nobody gets “false” banned. I’ve been playing since beta and have had days where I really wanted to play a specific hero. I’ve had report after report thrown at me.
Never even had an ingame warning for reports.
No … they don’t.
I have two accounts personally. Not for one tricking or “practicing” heroes. It’s because I have a desktop PC and a laptop PC and I play very differently on both so I have seperate ranking to reflect this. I also have two phones which I own which will allow me to continue to play OW2 when it comes out.
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No. None of these reasons are even remotely worth giving up the anti-smurfing measures that SMS protection will give us.
Just play on your main like everyone else.
Your reasons are just smurfing with extra steps.
Don’t ruin someone else’s experience just because you want to practice.
As much as I agree 1 number for 1 account is too restrictive the reasons that you are giving aren’t essential. You can do all of that on a single account.
This is exactly my problem with not being able to have alts. I can’t play comp with my friends on my main. I have an alt in plat that has about 50% win rate so I’m not exactly ruining anyones games. Plus people blaming smurfs for their rank is bs bc yeah they may ruin a few games but if ur a diamond level player u will get there if u play enough. Same goes for any rank. Just really annoying that I can’t play comp with my mates anymore bc qp is so boring.
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Get new mates, problem solved. It’s a competitive game, if they aren’t playing at your tier… that’s how it works.
You playing with your friends does not preclude game integrity. It’s secondary.
Thanks for taking the time to actually read through all my points, and construct a well thought out reply! (Pretty rare sight on these forums, usu when people disagree they don’t even bother reading what you write after OP, just outright troll or say “no” or repeat points that have been covered…)
I totally get where you’re coming from, that players should always 100% in Comp including optimal hero picks, and Quick Play and other modes are not for trying. I just have a different take–I think players should 100% try, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to always meta, and I also think MMR in QP and other modes is super important too. And from my perspective, the difference between me trying in an average QP/QPC lobby and my say… Doomfist/Genji… is the difference between destroying the lobby and doing almost nothing lol. So that’s where I have my perspective that alts are reasonable given the limitations of OW’s matchmaker.
Honestly, as much as losing 2 of my 3 accounts is a slap in the face (I’m not vested enough in OW2 at this point to care to hook up another phone, even though I do have an option for another number…), I think requiring unique SMS on all accounts isn’t really a deal breaker for most players. It’s just another slap.
Totally agree. That’s why I think SMS Protect does make sense, they could just give a workaround that preserves the security and anti-smurf features while not shafting multiple account owners. (As I posted earlier.)
But I don’t think alts = inflation… If a GM creates a new account, they skew the system downwards. If a bronze creates an account, they skew it upwards. Unless you mean there’s the tendency for better players to have more accounts–which is fair–but at the end of the day ranks are just numbers. Matchmaking is what’s important and alt mmr stabilises quite fast–certainly fast enough to justify an alt or two imo.
Also, my interpretation is that phone numbers are used permanently: “A phone number can only be used once when making a new account”.
Alts help you not ruin other players’ matches, but yes most of my listed reasons do not impact someone’s ability to be able to actually play the game at all i.e. they are not essential .
The one usage case where it is essential to be able to share a number between accounts–and this point has been brought up in other threads dealing with the SMS Protect requirement–is when a household might not have enough numbers for everyone to play together.
I quit playing the game after dive became a thing.
I was a very high SR widow one trick.
When I came back after not touching a fps game in general for many years, I tried doing my comp placements + a few more games and ruined almost every one of them for my teammates.
I practiced a bunch in quick play beforehand, but it didn’t help.
What helped was creating this alt and practicing. I was genuinely a low gold-high silver player for a bit, and me playing on my main would have ruined sooooo many games.
So yeah, I think it’s justified having an alt sometimes 
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It does most definitely. A GM creating a new account and playing at that level because its an artificial over-representation of the actual, true playerbase at that tier.
If every account was a one-to-one to players, we’d see the true distribution of skill over the tiers. Instead we have a skewed distribution because typically, the higher you go the more alts people have. It shifts the skill level the MMR thinks is median higher and higher but its an artificial representation.
Then thats on you. None of the people on your team will appreciate that you’ve grouped with someone way below your rank. This is why rank limitations are a thing.
Fair but as I posted already…