Stop the smurfing in overwatch

Competitive Discussion
1

I am a bronze - gold Overwatch player and can I please write a motion to PLEASE, for the love of the game. Or whatever is left of it. Stop smurfing in this elo. It is actually cancer to the game and has made everyone I know quit. On top of blizzards allegation problems and all the other issues Overwatch has I love this game. I want to keep playing this game. But I cannot continue to do so when I want to play in a group with friends and keep constantly getting dumpstered by diamond+ players that completely prevent climbing. I would not complain about this if it were not for 10 minute dps ques, time of my life I will never get back, to enjoy some overwatch. Just to then get trashed on by someone who spent 20$ intentionally threw games (which should be downright banned) then decided to ruin everyone’s day except for the lucky team this individual landed on. 1/3 games I have played, the last 5 months. HAVE HAD SUCH SMURFS. That’s 1/3, of my game time, that I will never get back, wasted just so someone whos having a hard time in their own rank will not allow people like me in the middle to have a chance to learn and improve. I dont want to hear “get better” I don’t want to hear " your just trash" because of course I am. I am a casual player, I play overwatch comp maybe five games a week, I pretty much stick to norms now just to avoid this. I HAVE BEEN GOLD SINCE S3 Just for the reason that I do not have much time at all if ever now to sink into competitive games.

So I know it is funny to people on top to trash people on the bottom, but from those of us trying to learn and improve on your game, PLEASE GIVE US A CHANCE TO LEARN. Thank you.

Please improve the internal mmr system like league of legends has to create a smurf q for these players, do not put them in games with people of their own rank when they can outperform anyone every game. That should be obvious.

PLEASE LIKE THIS POST SO MAYBE BLIZZARD CAN DRAW SOME ATTENTION TO THIS ISSUES WHEN THEIR OWN INTERNAL STRUGGLES GET WORKED OUT.

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Welp here comes the weird smurf protecting forum users. “You don’t know it’s a smurf” or “Maybe it’s a person who doesn’t play a lot with a ton of fps experience”. Yeah, the guy with the battle tag WIDOW lvl 26 hook shooting on junkertown and trolls the match chat is fresh to the game.

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The thing that cracks me up is this One Weird Trick.

Type into match chat, “Hey, nice smurfing!” - name no names, specify no heroes.

100% of the time the person smurfing will say “LOL WHO’S SMURFING WHAT EVEN IS SMURF I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS WORD IS!” Like literally, 100% of the time. it’s never the poor winston who keeps jumping into bastion’s face, it’s never the Junkrat who stands there while your genji misses 66% of his left-clicks at him. it’s ALWAYS the person you suspect is smurfing.

People KNOW what players at their rank play like and they know what players at higher ranks play like. it ain’t hard, just 'cause I can’t click a single pixel at 100 yards while traveling in an arc doesn’t mean I can’t watch youtubes of people who can :rofl:

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I dont understand why are smurfs issue for you. You said it yourself, you are in gold because you dont invest enough time into game, to improve. So smurfs arent preventing you from climbing, its your time management.

I understand frustration of being beated by high ranked player but why is it so big issue? You play casualy, if ranking up is not your goal, losing games against occasional should not be issue. Smurf is 1/3 of games is not realistic.

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Some smurfs are mistaken because the game pairs them with potatoes and expects carries.

Every once in awhile it messes up and puts on the smurfs on 1 team and it’s a stomp.

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10

this has nothing to do with “smurfs” in bronze

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Smurfs will forever be a problem until Blizzivision realizes that they’ll make more money by fostering a healthy playerbase than by catering to the lowest common denominator players that have an extra $20 and a pathetic need to feel better than someone else.

Seriously, a full quarter of the content in these forums is people demanding that something be done about smurfs. You’d think they’d get the message.

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Very true. This is why I don’t respond to vague smurf accusations, I don’t need any false reports.

I had this last night…

RedTeam: nice smurfing
LucioSmurf: who?
RedTeam: rageragerage
LucioSmurf: lol i’m not a smurf, Ashe is carrying
Me: ty, but I’m not carrying, it’s a good team
RedTeam Mercy: I’m going to stay in spawn the rest of the match. That way the smurfs don’t have fun. Don’t play their game, stay in spawn with me!

PostGame:
Our Mercy: That’s so weird, why would they accuse you of being a smurf?
LucioSmurf: I dunno, maybe because I am?

4 Likes
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We dont change game for low elo, just becaue they don’t want to improve and fix their OWN issue like that. “I am gold/bronze” is not an excuse, why do u think it is even normal to play competitive w/o completeing ladder from bottom to top, it is clrearly the only reason to play the game. If you don’t like smurfs - beat them, make this your motivation. I understand it might be hard for newbie, but we all went through that at some point, so your case is not unique, smurfs are the part of any comptetitive game with matchmaker. As soon you accept that as faster it become easier for you to focus on your own improvement.

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16

Throwing games in order to match with low-Elo players is against the rules and should be enforced much more strictly than it is. Excessive repeat climbing on alts is not yet against the rules, but in the last AMA Blizzard did refer to that as “abusive” so we can expect there will be rules against it and systems to prevent it.

Sure, no competitive multiplayer game will ever be entirely free of smurfs or cheaters, they will always be finding a way through the cracks… but that doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is an acceptable part of the game, or that developers shouldn’t continue trying to prevent such behavior.

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What am I trying to win exactly and what do you mean by getting you “false flagged this time”? You appear to be a bit confused and unstable.

Welp, it was fun while it lasted.

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its not smurfing its just blatent cheating at this point. I see so many aimbots, or aim assists, rein shield scripts Anna dart/nad cheats. predictive cheats and everything else under the sun its amazing.

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It is not just the smurfing that is the issue, you can have 2 equally skilled players against each other on the same heroes and one of them is going to be doing 200% more damage/healing than the other just because of the way the servers work. A few games later and they will be on a different server with the skill levels flipping again. You will get lower skilled players being heavily favored by the way the servers work and it makes them look like a really good player.

For the players that do smurf, they could probably just start everyone at the top and let them fall to their correct skill level rather than starting them off against the lowest skilled and letting them destroy every game they play until they start a new account again.

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I think “smurfs” aren’t always the people you think they are.

At face value, there’s no reason to assume they’re a player with skills far exceeding your elo. They could simply be a player from a skill bracket just above yours, especially considering how varied the team skills can be!

Ideally, most of your games are going to be within some range of your local skill. However outliers do exist, but they typically are only 200 SR or so above or below your current SR. :slight_smile:

The matchmaker sometimes picks up players that have a large range in difference in skill/SR and counterbalances strong and weak players on the same team, against a team of players with more similar skill. It’s like having a mix of Gold and Bronze on one team, and a more homogenous team of Silvers on the other. Both average out to about the same SR as a team, but the skill range is more extreme for one side.

Also, if you’re interested! I made a tool that simulates matchmaking!
It’s not official, but it’s based on a relatively simple and well-known knapsack algorithm, and seems to work very well for the purposes of simulating matchups!

If you want an idea of how some of your games are matched, try it out! :slight_smile:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XtVVYyEx0__EwdrGJ0WGbZr_rUI3Up94Wacu-Fi2kRc
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Yes, of course. The Tracer that spawn-camps our Soldier, duels him using only melee and blinks and wins is just a better than average player.

Also they were absolutely trying a strategy they thought would work, and absolutely not amusing themselves while throwing the game by playing far away from the point and away from their team. That soldier totally got past in the last couple minutes by pressing the sprint button extra hard.

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I’m sorry. I didn’t intend for my message to be taken that way! :sweat_smile:

Um, I do acknowledge that actual smurfs DO exist! I was just getting to a more general case of what you’re more likely to experience. Like, sometimes a player might seem that way, but it’s also possible that it’s just a higher-than-average player in your game! :sweat_smile:

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There is a wide variety of skill levels, for sure, but if you watch the replays you can very often tell, especially for smurfs who are trying to win. They very often don’t try too hard to hide it, they just try not to carry so hard that they get too much PBSR and pull too far ahead of their group.

When they are throwing, they will try a bit harder to hide it, but fairly often they can’t lose without making it pretty obvious… particularly when there are throwers on both sides, it becomes a reversal-game of escalating efforts to lose. Not that every thrower is a smurf, but unless there was some toxic chat going on it’s a pretty good bet that they are either a smurf or deranking an account to sell to a smurf.

I certainly don’t always get my guesses from what I think at the end of a match confirmed by the replay, but generally I find if it feels like there’s a thrower or a smurf in the match, there probably is even if it isn’t who you first suspect. Oh, well, sometimes you find a cheater instead of a smurf, there’s that too.

If you watch a replay and it’s really hard to tell, it’s probably a stuck player who has been getting better but failed to climb and not a smurf, or conversely a player who is drunk and/or high and/or listening to loud music and not a thrower. (I’ve had the dubious pleasure of enough mics held open to expose us to the loud music and stoned blabber on the other side to have a pretty good idea what that looks like. For cryin’ out loud, if you’re going to smoke up and blast the tunes, switch to push-to-talk…)

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24

Smurfs do need to be banned. Its why a lot of my friends quit the game, even the casual QP people. It ruins the game, and is the primary reason I don’t play comp after finishing my placements, and can never even touch platinum anymore cuz of it.

And people keep saying “don’t blame the smurfs, its a you problem.” Except I’m in gold, and there’s so many people who think its funny to smurf when they’re main is in masters. Tiers exist for a reason. But apparently, it was never disclosed I’d be fighting people four entire tiers above me. Its ridiculous.

But will they be stopped? Nope. Blizzard is too greedy. They rely on their clearly flawed MMR system, and won’t do anything since every smurf account in the game just means more money in their pocket.

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25

I still don’t feel completely comfortable suspecting every abnormally skilled player as a smurf
(or thrower, or smurf & throwing) though. I think the occurrence is very rare, at least in my own experiences.

I think much of any of it deals with inherent gaps in skill present within the nature of matchmaking, not saying this has anything to do with skewed matchmaking, but that gaps in skill do exist. Could be someone having a bad day on your team not pulling their weight, more than someone else on the other team single-handedly killing your entire team.

But that’s about as controversial as I’d like to get about this!

I think smurfs are about as rare in comparison to well-intentioned players, as it is as rare as the number of cheaters in comparison to smurf accounts. :slight_smile:

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26

If you want to know, you really have to watch the replay. Someone who was on a flank actually was just doing laps in the back hall, not engaging the enemy at all until with one teammate surviving they jump down to get included in the last cleanup kills, or they are shooting at the enemy shield and then as soon as it breaks they start shooting the payload cart, or the ground near the enemy’s feet …

It’s pretty easy to hide throwing from your teammates POV during the match, but a lot harder to hide it from the replay view, and frankly, most don’t bother trying to hide it from replay viewing because they know not enough people will bother to look into it and they’ll never get actioned based on that. If they can get through the end of a match without being called out for throwing, that’s good enough for them.

I don’t know what ranks you’re playing at… but you certainly won’t see many derankers in gold or above since deranking generally occurs to put a new account down to the bottom of Bronze, or else to put an account back down to the bottom of Bronze from where it has risen to after a weekend of smurfing (which is probably not gold, or if it is, just barely gold).

You’ll see the most derankers/smurfs in low triple-digit bronze, simply because the population is smaller, so even though there are just as many derankers/smurfs in high Bronze, they appear to be half or as third as common because the real population is that much larger, and similarly again for low silver and high silver.

Once you get to gold you’ll rarely see deranking smurfs at all… they’ll only play one match in their initial placements in gold. You might seem them stomping back up the ladder in the case of climbing challenges or booster stacks, but they won’t hang around in gold the way they hang around in Bronze, and they are heavily diluted out since Gold & Plat are the most densely populated ranks.

Now, gold might have a bunch of new account smurfs stomping their way up, I can’t really speak to that, but that’s a different kind of “smurf” that isn’t technically breaking any rules and won’t ever be seen throwing (unless they rage-throw, I suppose) because they never intentionally derank. I will say, if they aren’t unranked it’s questionable if they qualify as smurfs because if you can’t reach plat in your placements, are you really smurfing?

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