So, you are trolling the players in the lower ranks with your smurf and troll on the forums. GG
I’m not saying I deserve to climb but your logic really also implies that in order to climb from bronze to silver that a player should be required to defeat a player from plat or diamond. Not saying all smurfs are plat or higher but I’m just saying that the requirement to get out of bronze/silver should be to be better than actual bronze/silver players, not the other random people that are there.
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Maybe not Diamond but yeah Plat should be in there. Playing like Gold in Silver is not enough to climb and it shouldn’t be. It’s a 1000 SR difference but a very little one in skill. That’s why a Master can smurf in Diamond but a Diamond can’t smurf in Plat effectively the skill is just too similar.
I’m just saying, that if you are at least playing with the skill of the rank above you then I see no reason to not be able to get there. Either with a time commitment (and a like 51 percent win rate) or with little time commitment if you are drastically better and therefore winning a lot.
I guess that would be ideal but it would require a working matchmaking that doesn’t randomly match you with smurfs and throwers. No way that will happen any time soon lol.
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I mean we both know the many ways the matchmaker for OW is lacking. Both in making the game’s competition meaningful and in helping it be enjoyable.
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Depending on how one plays, that can be attainable in a weeks time at about 6-8 hours every day minimum. OR slower progression players, that would be 2-4 weeks shipping time.
Realistically, I think Level 120 would be more ideal. Less than that they might still buy the accounts off streamers or boosters.
The ones that throw are actual smurfs, the ones that arent and climbing were placed lower and passing through like i stated to Comix, theres a difference. Ones smurfing to troll, throw or boost, the other is a new owner of an account but an older player “passing through”
And that’s what I was saying as well. Anyone “passing through” is not the problem I have. The ones actively trying to stay there just for the luls is. Even though I don’t believe they’re why I’m at a lower rank. They can take an otherwise enjoyable play experience and suck the fun right out of it.
recently? about 2 years ago?
The majority of “smurfs” are players one tier above the rank that they’re playing in, who have purchased a second account to practice characters that they don’t main. And if you can’t beat one of these players, you really shouldn’t be climbing because the next tier is made up entirely of them.
That said, I do believe in hardware bans for cheating and frequent rage quits. In silver, I think there are leavers in at least 40% of the game and I can see how that would prevent someone who doesn’t have hours every day to play from climbing.
I really don’t understand why players, especially in silver, are so convinced that higher tier players have nothing better to do than to, not just play on an account below their rank, but to actually maintain that account (i.e. grief in enough games to offset the massive SR gains that their account gets for their wins).
Smurfs will never be hardware banned or banned at all. The obvious reason is they make money from smurfs. They’re a typical gaming company that prefers revenue over community feedback and gameplay.
I do believe they hardware ban cheaters though, unless that’s changed for whatever reason?
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That’s the problem. Everyone is somewhere “on an alt”, “with a friend”, “just for luls”. The top 20% of the playerbase blocks up the ladder rungs, by showing up for a few plat matches, worrying about actually losing sr, and swapping over to bronze/silver account to destress and meme.
They need a reset, and I think they should try harder to match accounts by age (xp/lvl), despite variances in skill. I’d be interested in seeing a single match with proper main accounts.
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It’s already been proven that hardware bans don’t work.
These players aren’t “goofing around” in lower ranks to hurt you. A lot of players in high tiers of play maintain those accounts by only playing their mains, only playing when they’re completely warmed up, and only playing a few games at a time. Having another account lets them practice more and play different characters–characters who they play at a lower skill level.
It is interesting that so many people are defending smurfs. They are literally destroying the playing experience for everyone in the tier they are smurfing in.
People complain here because they want to enjoy overwatch, they want to play against players of a similar skill and have closely contested games, but the majority of their games are ruined by the ‘smurf experience’.
I understand that even without smurfs there will be lopsided games sometimes, but I have been playing this game on and off for a long time, this wasn’t a major problem in the first several seasons, these seasons were amazing, the games were fun, people were usually respectful and worked together to try and win.
I happily played around the Diamond/Master level and really enjoyed this game. Then the smurfing problem slowly started to get worse and worse until eventually I stopped enjoying the game as a result, and I quit.
I hadn’t really touched the game for a year or 2. I just recently got back into it and I can hounestly say after playing again for 3+ weeks - Competitive is a lopsided joke, it sucks, and it is boring solely because of Smurfs.
Basically there are three types of scenarios:
- The smurf is purposely de-ranking and delibately losing
- The smurf is practicing and won’t work with their team to try and win
- The smurf is incredibly good, and makes the match lopsided
Now the third is actually the biggest issue. To give you an example I just came from a game which prompted me to post here. I was up against x3 non-ranked level 30s who were amazing, very clear they knew how to play well. We had x1 non-ranked level 30 who was clearly new.
Our tanks would get destroyed in seconds, our team were calling them awful and being extremely toxic. But really, what could they do?. They are Gold/Plat players getting destroyed by players clearly playing at a Master/GM level. Yet people sit there and take it out on them.
And this is the current trend in competitive, 50% of the games I play there is nothing but toxicity towards the people not keeping up because of the lopsidedness of the match. Whether it be the team I’m on, or the other team, there is nothing but blame for non-smurfs getting destoryed by the smurfs.
But that’s just my opinion based on my experiences, I will stop playing this game again soon once lockdown ends because I don’t like watching people get bullied, blizzard seems to only care about sales, and well, this game is just really boring and no one wants to fix the biggest problem with it.
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Um, no. It would require over 17 hours of play a day to get to it in a week. It’s literally 3 weeks of a full time job. To be able to even see people try to win games in a video game you bought. No actual new person would achieve it before they quit. Outside of cancelled schools and everyone unemployed, it would realistically take someone 3-4 months to achieve.
Well-intensioned “alt accounts” still disrupt ladder integrity. Massively so.
- The advanced game sense leaks into lower-tier matches. Despite lower mechanical output (on the hero they’re “practicing”). It still ruins games.
- Burner mentality. Lootbox roles, no regard for winning. Selfish play. OTP “I’m here to practice X”, cancel, leave, or derp through matches to swap back on main.
- Sparsity, low-mixing, and non-transitive effects. Huge population gaps and lack of activity at some ranks during offhours. Same pool of alts reshuffled with/against eachother with a few randoms thrown-in. High (or poor) calibre opponents/matches hosted entirely at the wrong ranks. Longer wait times to match high mmr low sr (or vice versa). Almost no sr is won or lost because the matchmaker has nothing to bite into and zero-sum from further up - people are afraid to grind up there or put off by queue times so there isn’t anything to mix/trial from above or below many ranks.
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Nothing prevents you and your son from playing. If you have two computers, each with their own account, you’re good to go. Even playing simultaneously.
The MAC Address PLUS other hardware-specific information can readily and easily be used to limit COMPETITIVE/RANKED play on each of those machines to ONE account.
From the game’s perspective, you have said that you will play RANKED on your account from a specific device and no other. You’re free to play with an alt account in ANY other game mode.
This will drastically reduce true smurfing/twinking while preserving the ability to have alt accounts. But each account and each computer can only be valid for ranked play ONCE.
Even this won’t completely eliminate smurfing, but smurfing will be a LOT more expensive and therefore a LOT less prevalent.
Having played in bronze since beta, I can testify that almost NONE of the accounts playing in bronze TODAY are anything other than alt accounts. Sometimes they’re smurfs, sometimes they’re not, but nobody on Earth is buying their first copy of the game anymore.
I also know from multiple friends’ experience that they see smurfs all the time de-ranking and ranking back up again many times in a season SPECIFICALLY so they can get lots of golden guns. They’re gaming the system, not necessarily doing it purely to crush the souls of ACTUAL bronze players – although plenty of them get glee out of that too.
Bottom line is there’s no way to deal with smurfing that doesn’t involve utilizing some kind of hardware information to tie the account to a single instance of that hardware. I’d love to hear alternative ideas if someone has them, but in my experience as a software engineer who’s done a lot of this for the casino industry, I can tell you this is the method that works.
Side note for the people who say smurfs need alt accounts to practice other heroes/roles/whatever. B.S. They can play QP anytime they want for practice, the same as the rest of us.
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So not true. If you start off low enough getting out is damn near impossible.
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