Why is this not ban able! This is ruining lower players games I don’t know why this is not ban able but it 100% should be
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The report system is automated. If you report them and it accumulates enough, there you go.
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As it currently stands, owning alternate accounts is not a violation of the rules. Jeff Kaplan has explained more detail here:
He is also made a very in-depth post on the older forums. (Click here)
That being said I am all in support of Blizzard reevaluating their policies and working to find ways to make sure that anyone who is disruptive, no matter what account they are on, is prevented from accessing the game during a suspension.
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To be fair, I don’t think should be done until they look into their automated reporting system. The problem is for example you main off-meta or unfavorable heroes, you might get consistently reported and thus get a suspension off the reports.
Yeah, I’m starting to think alternate accounts maybe should be considered violations of the rules. If an alt account is playing way out of rank in my low MMR game, how is that not cheating? He’s winning because of things he did outside the match.
I’m always tempted to report these guys with “Cheating” and “Abusing new accounts to play out of appropriate MMR ranges”. I don’t yet, but man, do I want to. Play on your real account.
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Tonight, my friends decided to move to a new game. More than 50% of our overwatch games have a master-skilled smurf player ranked as silver/gold.
Games are a stomp. Overwatch is not enjoyable anymore.
R.I.P. Overwatch. It was good while it lasted.
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Not that it actually stop smurfs…
Dota 2 ban smurfs, and they are still here.
people always whine about smurfs, but keep quiet if one is in their team.
Its not bannable because it brings blizzard money, if they start making money with ow2, i bet they will adress the smurf problem
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bc you are unable to smurf to understand
No bans = no smurfs.
Why is it not against the policy? It is basically an unfair advantage, dota 2 bans smurfing why shouldn’t OW do the same? Because of money probably! a valid way to fix this is to use HWID identify their GPU,CPU,RAM and everything that is bound to an HWID and when they have the same ID they get automatically placed in the same rank as a previously identified HWID matches with let’s say a grandmaster dps player.
Even if they believe there is a disruptive problem with alternate accounts, finding ways to enforce it without introducing some level of compromise is difficult.
This idea does not account for households with multiple players. Say Tommy, the big brother is a grandmaster, but Timmy, the younger brother, is a Bronze player and both use the same computer or console. This would disrupt matchmaking.
(Sorry brought up the wrong scenario for you specific case)
I’m pretty sure my smurf account’s placements were sabotaged by the system. It realized I wasn’t where I belonged so it trolled me. I moved back to this account and teammates actually knew what to do.
You make a good point definitely, but if Tommy is a grandmaster and Timmy is a Bronze player isn’t it up to Tommy to say that Timmy cannot play because of this? he can but on a different console since it is quite normal that a household has 2 consoles, of course it would be a little weird for restricting Timmy any access to Tommy’s account because of this “HWID” identification method.
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In many households it is very common for siblings to share computers or consoles.
Its actually very common to have one console for each platform for most console owners, this is because many games (not Overwatch have shared-screen multiplayer experiences) and the console operating system encourages the use of multiple users.
It does cause hurdles. Now I do believe if there is extremely abusive behavior (not just using an alternate account), that if necessary Blizzard should block the hardware ID or IP address from any accounts accessing the game (and they have done this for the most serious of offenders).
True, I get that the issue is something that is hard to deal with but it is very annoying, smurfing ruins a lot of potentially winable games, it ruins the competitive side of OW and that’s just a shame really. I do understand consoles encourage people to connect and play together through one console but seeing as how it goes now most family’s with two children have 2 consoles for each child, but than we are excluding those less wealthy families and that is an other hurdle, it is hard to find a solution to the smurfing problem but I do think there is a way to fix it without hurting the PC or console playerbase
(forgot to hit the reply button so i had to delete to reduce clutter)
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Just as a note, instead of deleting a post, hit the pencil icon to edit a post to make changes.
Yes, I do believe there needs to be some efforts to control or at least de-incentivize players from creating alternate accounts, but any solutions that I have seen (or come up with myself) have some level of compromise. I have a video going up very soon that tackles these issues.
ahh, thank you for the tip.
To be fair compromise is always there, you’ll have to sacrifice some things to make something better, I would love to see this video! where can I find it when you do eventually get to it? is it on youtube if so, what is the channel if i may ask?
Note that I am right now in the middle of editing this video as we speak (I have been working on it all day.)
Thank you! I will keep a close eye on it! have a good day/night and thank you for giving me more insight!