Why do they do this? I am curious. They actually throw their placement matches?
Goooood lord how many of these topics will there be this week?
Smurfing is NOT bannable! Throwing matches or boosting IS. Smurfing, in the Blizzard definition, is just having an alt account. This is NOT a bannable offence.
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People have to throw a loooooooot of games if they want to be stuck in a lower MMR. It’s not just 5 or 6
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Intentionally losing games to manipulate the SR is bannable. Playing good is not.
Ahh I see. Why would they do this? Rigs the system? Wouldn’t that make them stuck in bronze? How does that make them get better? Sorry, I am an idiot that is confused lol
The terms are interchangeable(especially in this community).
@OP
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Legitimate Smurfs, people that intentionally throw games to stay in low ranks, only want to play to ruin other people’s games. That is what they find fun, they don’t care about getting better.
The problem with the word Smurf is that people use it and cheaters to describe anyone that is better than them, or just have more game sense than them, too. It doesn’t take much to be called a Smurf. If you come from an FPS background, you are inherently going to be better than most that haven’t played FPS before, which is a large portion of who OW was marketed to.
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Exactly this, thank you. I didn’t feel like finding the quote on mobile.
Ohhh I never knew that! I thought a “smurf” was someone who drops to then exceed to grand masters or top 500. Is that a “booster”? Maybe I am confused? So “smurfs” are basically trolls that are on the down low?
Thank you for explaining! Very helpful haha
The other variable being there are some people who have alt accounts where they don’t or probably won’t play their main character except every so often.
Let’s say you’re a Reinhardt main and you want to learn Widowmaker. Even if you’re an awful Widowmaker and the MMR system places you low you can bust out Reinhardt in some instances to carry games and I doubt the MMR system would catapult to your Reinhardt rank unless you did so in a lot of matches. You wouldn’t be banned for being terrible at Widow either and if you continued to lose games with her the system would indeed keep you lower.
A booster is someone high ranked who plays on a low person’s account to get them to a rank that they could not get on their own, a paid service basically. Smurf in this community is used interchangeably. In the classical sense it means someone who is throwing games, but in this community it means almost anyone who has an alternate account. Both can be correct if you look at my explanation above.
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You don’t get to judge someone on a game you didn’t play with them in.
A booster is a person who will either drop low or make a new account to get with low ranked players to boost them higher. For example, the last free weekend we had, I made an alt to play nothing but my absolutely worst heroes on this account so I could learn them. I wasn’t throwing or anything, I’m just trying to be a better Genji and don’t want to ruin the games for other people at my elo.
But in many of my games there was this duo a Hanzo and a Mercy that would do absolutely nothing but boost Hanzo. Fine, whatever, friends duo and it’s cool, whatever. So in your first season of Comp, it starts people around silver/gold and adjusts from there unless you are playing like a way higher elo player which gives you a much higher MMR to base it off of.
The Hanzo was a T500 player boosting that Mercy both on and against my team many times for the entirety of the weekend against actual new players. It was pretty disgusting.
This is an alternative, too. More widely used since it isn’t as easily detectable as what happened in my games.
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I think also in your case it wouldn’t be bannable for either the Mercy or the Hanzo.
Let’s see, if you’re wiping the floor with the other team solo, you’re smurfing.
In ranked, most likely, but not 100% guaranteed.
Probably not, which is just as disgusting.
Smurfs/alts, whatever you want to call it, is Blizzard’s way of making money. They don’t seem to care.
They dont make money of console smurfs slash alt accounts. 
If the smurf is throwing in the game your in yes, if they arent than no
Smurfing has never been bannable, the developers themselves have said so.