It would definitely create a more ‘trial by fire’ environment for legitimately new players, because yes they will be dealing with a lot of smurfs; but my counterargument to that would be, but isn’t it worth it for the health of the overall community?
At the point it is right now I literally don’t play Comp because smurfs are so constant and so frustrating. I’m not a bad player, but there are people who are untouchable for me, and they always will be. I want to play with people who are roughly at my level, and right now every time I see a level 2 account queue up with me I groan because I KNOW it’s going to be some Genji smurf who’s t*abagging my entire team while we can’t even get out of spawn.
That’s just not fun.
I’m sick of smurfs, and there are not a lot of good options to solve them. This is literally the BEST idea I’ve seen because it doesn’t require you to register a phone number to make an account, doesn’t cost the players or the game company anything, and probably actually would cut down on the problem because I think smurfs would get tired of stomping actual, real honest to god newbs.
Smurfs enjoy smurfing on players who are below them, but I think there’s a difference between ganking a bunch of infants and ganking a bunch of middle schoolers. Smurf people are terrible, but they want the players they’re playing against to understand that they’re being dominated. Real newbs usually have no clue what’s going on.
Edit:
Also, if you were a regular player, you could just avoid comp till your account hit 100 if the smurfs really got to you. A smurf would have to level their account up to 100 in order to ‘smurf’ with ‘regular players’, which would create 88 hours between someone making a smurf account and smurfing normal people. Most real newbs probably wouldn’t complain about just dicking around in QP or Arcade modes for the first 88 hours they played Overwatch; I don’t think I even played my first comp game on my Xbox account until I was well past two stars.