There is no abundance of smurfs in Overwatch. It is a fabricated problem by a bunch of people who cannot fathom that they might not be as good at the game as they think they are. Jeff Kaplan and the developers have said repeatedly that it isn’t a problem, and they won’t do anything about it ever (the fact that they even bothered to respond to complaints is charitable from them if you ask me).
Even if every single GM, Masters, and Diamond player had a smurf account, and were on their smurf accounts 24/7, that would roughly mean you would get a smurf in your game only a fraction of the time. Considering that only a portion of those players have smurf accounts, and then accounting for the fact that they’re not on their smurf accounts all the time, meaning you should be getting 1 smurf for roughly every 100 or so games. There are not enough people smurfing to affect your ability to climb. If you think that person who’s tearing you apart in a game is a smurf, I got news for you: most likely they’re not; you’re just worse at the game.
In short, stop whining. Stop blaming outside factors and start focusing on how you can do better in your games.
Bizarrely, the ratio of “stop complaining, git gud” posts to actual “smurfs are ruining my matches” posts is about 5:1. They don’t even seem to be responding to anything in specific anymore. I think they’re terrified that there’s going to be a boosting crackdown and are trying to get some last-minute sales in.
i just won a game after a six game losing streak and in this match i played widow and said duck it. it doesnt matter what i do. I no medal’d (in contrast to my mostly gold medal loss streak) and we dominated them. my contribution was the equivilent of sitting in spawn. if what i do doesnt matter anymore id say its a problem. ps4
Game intentionally pairs you with reliable players when you play badly.
Bad players when you play well. This is the MMR system.
If you do less statistically you will actually climb. Sad but true.b
Do you have a shred of evidence to back up such a ludicrous statement? Or is it sheer intuition?
Smurfs are abundant in game on consoles because smurf accounts are free to make.
I’ve only ever seen Jeff say he doesn’t think it’s a problem; however, he made the assumption that every player on a smurf account is actually trying to win, and he failed to address the impact smurfs have in every single game they play until they reach their usual rank.
I’ve not seen them say this. Please provide a source for your claim.
On console smurfs are very easy to spot through a combination of in game level, gamer tag and gamer score.
So I don’t think that a level 30 with 250 gamer score and a gamer tag of “IOnlyMainWidow” is a smurf. I know they’re a smurf.
Stop being toxic.
Smurfs are not an outside factor.
Smurfs are a real and prevalent issue in Overwatch.
Just because you haven’t had issues with them doesn’t mean that others haven’t.
They have said it agos ago when it wasnt such a big deal. Its problem now. You can even see Jeff kaplan talking about this issue in one of the last dev updates where he mentioned smurf problem on console.
Well it doesnt make much sense tho because community on top is very small. Maybe you mistake plat smurfs for someone higher. I guess its hard to notice higher ranked people on console because everyone is using same gamepad/controller
this is such a dumb post its unnbelievable, maybe you dont reallize that widow does more than just damage, maybe you got key pickoffs or forced enemies out of position to kill you and your team ganged up on them, this idea that a gold medal means you did well as dps isn’t always necessarily true, widow creates a lot of space just by existing, especially if they are good. You could bodyshot the tanks over and over and probably get gold damage or you could head shot 2 people at the start of every fight and get bronze or no medal, you tell me which is better
I definitely agree widow is a great character and well-placed shots can do way more than getting medals. But I can assure you what you are describing was not what I was doing. I wouldn’t blame anyone for saying I was throwing, tho I was not, I was just really really bad. Ofcourse, the point i was making was it did not matter. It would be nice tho to go into all my games now and say “yea guys I won,t medal or anything but trust my widow is better than anything else I play” but that would be inaccurate and would not explain how our team with my basically nonexistant help managed to stop the enemy before 3rd point on payload and then run thru them with 5 min to spare.
In my experience on console, between the people who claim to be smurfs and the people i know that do it and the people who are bold enough to leave their profiles unprivate there are definately alot more diamond smurfs than you might think on console. as far as being hard to tell… i once called someone out for being a diamond smurf i was battling hard in a high gold game. we ending up having a back and forth that went more or less like this.
me: go back to diamond you clearly dont belong here.
him: lolz actually masters but your one to talk u play like lowdiamond high plat
me: i wouldnt know ive been stuck here for ever because ppl like you
him: lmao sad days
so in short. yea you can tell. especially if youve played the game as long as i have. kinda like how some ppl can do the whole guess my sr. after a while it gets kinda obvious.
Also the smurf can be on your team and carry you. But the lower your rank the more people can smurf in it, for diamons only masters and gm can smurf, but for bronze a gold can smurf and ruin a game, making it more people. I dont see too many smurfs anyway in my games (gold), but it might be worse for bronze
Not all smurfs are diamond+, a smurf could be a gold playing in bronze…or plat playing in silver…the skill diffrence is enough to cause issues for the lower ranks. So yes the anirf problem is a problem now and its ruining the game that use to be fun and (somewhat) fair matchs