There are no real incentives to stick to your main account, but the game REALLY NEEDS IT.
FACTS:
There is a smurf/new account in every single game (competitive or QP)
These new accounts make the Matchmaking alghoritm struggle immensely to determine their real skill level
These players purposely buy new accounts to get an unfair advantage exploiting the Matchmaker (or to “play with friends in lower tiers”… much less common)
In higher levels queue times get really really long, wich makes some people make a new account to lower them.
CONSEQUENCES
A lot of extremely unbalanced games - either you stomp the enemy team or get completely rolled, no middle ground
The overwatch devs have a really dificult time balancing heroes around certain skill tresholds
An immense feeling of injustice on “normal players” wich leads to frustation and other negative mental states
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
Since alt accounts are not bannable (as said by Papa Jeff) and these people will not suddenly stop buying new accounts without any incentive to do so.
Introduce several incentives to high level accounts like cosmetics for playing regularly and a higher priority on every queue similar to priority pass - Seems to me a fair reward for sticking with the game for so long and investing so much in your account
Make low accounts with very high stats and performance queue times a bit longer by lowering their priority finding a game
Tell me what do you guys think of these and discuss in a construtive conversation.
I have heard that other online multiplayer game companies ban or suspend smurfs. Like Apex, LoL, Valorant and R6 (R6 resets mmr every season). Then how could they have done it?
would it be a good idea to make a max 1 under level 200 account on a each team that way there max 1 smurf on each team and one cant really do everything they have to rely on their team
Regardless of the intention, smurfs and alts have the exact same impact on other people’s games and the matchmaker. Granted, the impact is exaggerated in the OP, but the impact is the same.
Majority of times, people accusing someone to be a smurf, are people get killed and simple can’t accept there are people better of them. (competitive or QP)
Not just that but several other flaws in the game. One is toxic hero favoritism that the devs have openly admitted to practising and that has caused not only a massive decline in playerbase due to the game not being as enjoyable to play as it would be with objective balancing, but also has always induced higher tiered players to buy alts so they can play a variety of heroes while still winning games.
Another one is the dog handicapped matchmaking that the game has in all the gamemodes. If we only faced better opponents that were as good as our teammates as we kept getting better and winning more games, there would be absolutely no issue. However what handicapped matchmaking does is that instead of getting that much more better opponents, you might just get absolutely (relatively) horrible teammates instead. So instead of giving your opponents +100MMR (not how MMR works) because you got +100MMR, it might just give you teammates that are -100MMR from the previous teammates. Games like these are always skewed up in favor of the better averages and not the teams with higher variance, which is why you get punished in some games for doing better. Not only that, but having worse teammates and “fighting your own shadow” constantly is a completely frustrating experience everyone dislikes. Best fix for this? Buy an alt account for $10 because that’s your only option to fix it
Replace the balance devs with devs who are actually good at their job and balance the heroes around their realistic potential in the highest tiered ladder gameplay, so players won’t buy alt accounts to play heroes who are balanced unfairly and in a very toxic/bad manner
Raise the level cap of competitive to level 100. This will make making alt accounts for comp gameplay much less intriguing as instead of a single long session of gameplay, you’ll now have to grind for at least a week to get into competitive and that’s a high investment into an alt account. This will also reduce toxicity/gameplay sabotage that alt accounts/smurfs are notorious for as they can’t risk getting suspended before actually getting into comp
Allow players to decide whether they are fine with handicapped matchmaking or not in favor of match quality over quantity. The game is filled with leavers and alt accounts because seeing a gold player go up against a current seasonal T500 player is insanely common in gamemodes outside competitive. In those cases it’s most likely that at least 1/3rd of the gold players’ team will leave the game as soon as they catch onto what’s going on which will render that game ruined, especially if those leavers happen to be tanks and nobody wants to backfill as tanks which can take minutes to find
Address these issues and the game might come back alive again even without OW2 because these issues have been eating the game for such a long time, that it’s actually insulting to us players that they haven’t addressed these issues yet.
Usually people don’t have the slightest problem with other people being better than them.
What they do have a problem with are people who are better than them who abuse new accounts to manipulate matchmaking to play against people who are worse than them.