Then you can permaban them for throwing. Easy.
They’re losing more money by not retaining the players that are jumping ship due to smurfing and the myriad of other problems plaguing the game.
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Smurfs mean people are buying multiple copys of the game they already own, Blizzard isn’t likely to discourage people spending more money on their services.
oh i know furrycummies he’s a pretty cool dude
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this is probably true, but it’s hard to calculate so I doubt they will react to it. I also think they will lose customers by instituting role queue, but it will also stem the tide of people leaving for other reasons.
so blizz has a lot of tough decisions on their hands
Don’t forget to clarify whether you mean people that have alternate accounts and play normally, or throwers who intentionally lose games to lower their SR and then abuse people significantly lower than them.
Low bronze has a really bad problem with throwers. There are LFG groups full of people intentionally losing games to derank. I’ve rather thoroughly documented how widespread the deranker / thrower problem is in LFG.
This might be flawed if 2 people know each other IRL and one Of them is gm and the other just uses their phone number and gets gm on a new account
True, but it’ll be better than what we have now.
I have an account in mid Diamond (my main), this account to play at gold-plat with a gold ranked friend (not tryharding) and a smurf (in the total meaning of that) in silver. The silver ranked accoubt was also sometimes in bronze. So far i did not get a single notification about a possible ban while going 50-2 and 0-30 back to back in matches 
So it seems to be fine with blizzard
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Kills-Deaths? Just 2 matches? Basically Blizzard requires people to report bad behavior, which I think is one of the core problems. Based on that requirement, I now report rather freely. If I suspect foul play, I report them just in case.
I would prefer if Blizzard would just engage some machine learning algorithms to monitor the trends of players games and flag people that are abusing the system. Maybe in ranks with large numbers of people, they’re just isolating the smurfs and making them play against each other through the hidden MMR stuff. I would much prefer it if Blizzard would just be transparent about what it’s doing. Give people a detailed post match report that said which stats it’s using to categorize you, and give you the opportunity to adjust your play to get favorable results.
You can report every player in every game for everything after the match if you are willing too. The system does not care how ofteb you report but how often someone is reported. So basically feel free to go wild with reporting as there is no drawback implementef
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Smurfs are not that big of a problem honestly. The vast majority of the playerbase (>85%) lies in plat or below. In order for every single one of your games to have a smurf in them, every single person in diamond, masters, gm, and top 500 would have to have a smurf account and actively try to ruin your games. Now, of course, the percentage of those ranks who actually smurf is obviously far, far smaller. Therefore, there is no realistic way for smurfs to be ruining Overwatch.
(Credit to SVB in his youtube video for breaking down why smurfing isn’t a huge problem in Overwatch)
More concerning problems with the ranked experience are that ladder breeds toxicity, a lack of role queue, people all too willing to throw or give up, and (at least at the higher ranks) oppressive metas that are not all that fun (bunker comp, goats, double sniper, grav dragons, etc.).
I think people in this thread are mistaking “smurfs” with “alts”.
Alt Accounts: alternative accounts for someone to learn new heroes on without sacrificing their main SR. They will play at their best on those characters and climb as high as they can because they want to genuinely get better at other characters.
Smurf Accounts: Accounts that are purposely kept at a lower rank, either to play with lower ranked friends, or just to stomp lower rank players. They will ‘soft throw’ matches, meaning not try nearly as hard to win, in hopes that they can lose enough matches to keep the account at a low rank.
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Not all smurfs are only diamond+ players… a plat in a silver or bromze could look like a diamond+ player to the true bronze/silver ayer. So that said there is a lot of plat players out there ans some are just barely under diamond and along with that they are skewing the mmr/pbsr numbers for lower ranks to unreachable hights for those lower ranks to reach so imstead of them performing well and geting 25 sr they do well and only gain 15 cuz they cant out perform 2-3+ ranks higher stats all because a plat + wanted ro play with his buddy and stomp some lowbie…kinda like the equivalent of a lvl 80 horde runing around in a lvl 20 alience area slaughtering newbs just cuz he can…
This is my new account and I have steamrolled tons of games on it. The problem was that I was a sym 2.0 main and when my hero was effectively removed I couldn’t stay in gm anymore. I was causing terrible games for my teammates in gm so I made this account But I got placed in plat where I stomped a lot of people.
I’ve just been causing terrible games since this last rework so I just stopped playing. I don’t fit anywhere in this game anymore
This is nonsensical reasoning. There is no reason that you need to be diamond+ to smurf. 92% of the player base is above bronze in rank, so if just 1% of silver+ players were to smurf in bronze, there’d be enough smurfs to have more than one in every match (distribution wouldn’t be that even of course).
In my experience, it’s more like 20% of matches that have a smurf in them. I’m not going to do the exact calculation right now but 0.25% of the higher-than-bronze playerbase smurfing in Bronze would be far more than is needed to have that happen. (The actual number would be smaller, but need to do math to say how much smaller).
Those matches are being ruined. Just because 100% of matches aren’t being ruined doesn’t mean your game experience isn’t being ruined. The ‘100% of matches’ is only a requirement if you define ‘ruining’ as ‘making it literally impossibly to climb (in the literal meaning of literally)’.
In short, SVB’s video completely fails to support its thesis in any way. It doesn’t even try to argue that smurfs aren’t ruining games. It only argues that for people in upper-middle ranks (plat, diamond) there are not enough smurfs to statistically prevent them from climbing.
And yeah. Smurfs aren’t stopping you from climbing. If the video were titled ‘Why smurfs aren’t preventing you from climbing from Plat to GM’ that would be accurate to the argument that is actually presented and actually proven.
Meanwhile, smurfs are a big problem in the lower ranks and are ruining the game for a lot of people.
Yes, absolutely true. There’s even a difference between low bronze and high bronze. SR 500-800 is practically guaranteed to have a thrower / troll / smurf in every game. Once you get about 1000 that likelihood drops of significantly (definitely higher than 0% chance, but very much smaller than 500-800).
The worst of the throwers cause their team to win, and spawn camp, and make the enemy team tilt and get demoralized, then finally leave to avoid gaining SR. They also make sure to cause the game to be drawn out as long as possible, letting the enemy team get almost to the end of an escort map, or win 1 point on a control, or take 1 on an assault. It’s really quite infuriating.
I’ve encountered the same Mercy troll multiple times that goes out and 5-golds by killing people with her blaster and spawn camping just to assert his twisted sense of dominance. One time was grouped with an Ana, and they just stood off to the side to make sure that we advanced the cart on Route 66 to the checkpoint so we didn’t run out of time and end the match quickly.
No, it’s the dev is not that good. Riot for example, implemented a system that identifies smurfs from normal players, and matches smurfs against other smurfs. And their smurfing problem is worse cause their game free to play. The overwatch development team just sucks, that’s something that i’ve came to realise after the lack of content in this game for a year
Ok let me shed some light. Im a past diamond before I took a 1.5 year break. Nowdays I dont have the time or energy to care about my rank so I lol around doing whats fun in silver. YES because Im not very good at what I find fun.
When ppl are talking about smurfs they are not talking about ppl with alt accounts practicing dps or something of that nature. These smurfs are usually where they belong and their presence wouldnt be as easily identified. What ppl are complaining about are the other kind of smurf. The kind that derank to dominate. These ones are easily spotted.
The argument that if every game were to have a smurf then everyone in plat or above would have an alt account is silly and here is why.
lets assume that every game would have a deranked smurf. Every game will have 12 players. if one player is a smurf that is 8.3% of the players in a game. Now there is a pretty small group of players that reside below gold if you compare with everything above 2000. It wouldnt be much of a streach to say that every other game have an abusing smurf. Im not saying that is the case but the actual math doesent tell us that is impossible.
In reality I would imagine the amount of abusing smurfs vary alot depending on rank low bronze-high silver.
Mid silver where I am I see them alot. Not every game mind you but alot. Its either by throwing or by dominating but I see it alot. If I would throw out a rough estimate Id say maybe one out of three games and make no mistake, these ppl have been throwing to get there. Also as I dont care about my rank anymore Im just as frustrated when they derank or dominate in favour of my team.
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If they don’t address smurf problem then the game is dead.