Smurfing is a prob but less than you think. I see regular players get called smurfs decently regularly in chat and that excludes all the people that think it and don’t say it
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LFG is a joke. Even if you manage to find players, they all turn toxic and leave after ONE loss. There’s a reason nobody uses it.
If anything, 222 prevents more smurfs than it enables because people can “practice” other roles without risking their main’s precious SR.
Again, sounds like an excuse
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Those kind of smurfs are the minority in my opinion. More common are the smurfs like my brother who can easily get GM in all 3 roles. But they are too scared to play in their own rank so instead they make a dozen unranked to 3800 accounts with 80% win rates and repeat when the games start getting slightly difficult. The whole time malding about bad teammates while smurfing.
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Someone who gets that smurfing isn’t just throwing to stay low. It’s a burner/disposability mindset. Alts are sort of the issue here more than smurfs. Even a perfect clone of your main adds extra SR liquidity to the ladder in a place where it shouldn’t.
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Then don’t Riot Games (Valo and LoL) and EA (Apex) lose a lot of purchases too?
Valorant f2p
Dota2 f2p
who cares how many smurfs they could ban when we can buy smurfs for 2-3$ per account out of lost 40 mln copies from black market? And with games like dota or valorant, there is no problem just to get your smurf account whenever you want.
Smurfing is the way to play for fun in comp. games when you want to chill. It is pepegas problem if they got smurfed - play better or game plays you.
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LFG is unused on Xbox.
Every time I’ve checked it in the last few months there’s never been a single group listed.
And the few times I tried making a group it’s gotten no interest.
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Factually correct. Blizzard isn’t doing anything about it. If they were you see a decline and in fact the problem continues to rise.
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Just another low rank player who dislike smurfs not realizing they create a short term problem, and most short term problems do not need to be solved.
Imagine if you run out of energy drinks, but new ones are arriving in an hour, do you go to the store to get one, no you sit and wait for the problem to go away. Smurfs will eventually get to they rank they belong at, so it does not create an actual issue in the long run, its just creates a short term issue.
Btw I don’t know if you know this but Overwatch costs money, imagine you sold a product someone should only need one of, however they want a second. As there is no supply issue, do you just decide they can’t get a second? Does that even make sense?
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Smurfs are a problem, full stop, and problems absolutely do need to be solved.
That’s assuming the smurfs aren’t throwing matches to derank.
And even if they’re not, how many players’ games are ruined by smurfs as the smurfs ascend through the ranks until they “eventually get to the rank they belong at”?
Competitive is meant to consist of fair and balanced matches. There’s nothing fair or balanced about playing against (or even with) a player who is several ranks higher than you who are only in your match because they chose to game the system and play on a lower rank account .
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I hope you learn to understand what evidence is and what “factually” and “incorrect” mean, because you clearly have no idea
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Blizzard doesn’t mind banning toxic players, throwers and cheaters. I don’t get why smurf should be the exception. Smurfs are as disruptive as cheaters or throwers.
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Absolutely. Even alts are disruptive. I showed the math on how every alt disrupts the ladder (just less so than smurfs). Their disruption is constant-sum, and imparts a quadratic pay2win perturbation on the ladder - distorting ranks, and scuffing the ladder out of esport credibility.
I just captured a bunch of ss/vods from my last 21 matches. 37/232 players were under 3star-bronze border. As a plat border, I’ll count once in each 12 player match.
I sample often across different modes and ranks (via discord allies), and am seeing a power-law relationship in account levels. The number of “freshies” just totally outweights the old vets. And while not exact, it’s reasonable to classify >90% of them as not-new (i.e. alts/smufs).
I think it’s blatantly unfair to be matched with/vs. that kind of ratio. When you watch these washed streamers - their matches are nearly FULL of gold+ borders. Chronics that play all day and are grandfathered-in above the duplicates.
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Because they mostly ban them based on player reports. Cheating was detected by their systems. Its not so easy with smurfing. There is no definition of what smurfing is and there is basicly no difference between bad play and bap play on purpose so it is extremely hard to tell if someone is actualy trying to lose on purpose.
Also you said they ban throwers. I know people who are deranking accounts for years, so no they really are not. Only those unlucky who will accumulate enough reports after deranking thousands of SR.
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They are F2P games, Blizzard has nothing to gain by banning smurfs except for increasing comptitive integrity, which doesn’t line their wallet.
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Who cares? I climbed from Bronze to Masters even fighting smurfs.
Smurfing isn’t a problem. The only reason people don’t climb is because they aren’t good enough or they don’t have enough time. Sometimes it’s also PC related.
Everyone in the game who has climbed has had to fight smurfs. If blizzard banned smurfing the majority of their playerbase would leave. It’s already a dead game.
Smurfs aren’t an exception. Smurfing is cheating, plain and simple.
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Smurf accounts are free to make on consoles.
I used to disagree here, and only report for throwing as sabotage (and only when it was really bad e.g. multi-stack throw groups).
But after doing the math, every alt is an unfair advantage.
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