I’ve been reading things regarding this problem but what can be done about it ?
Share your suggestions and ideas. Here are mine, even though I don’t think they’re very viable in practice but I guess I should get the thread started with some examples at least (the order is very arbitrary and does not indicate a preference):
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A more official form of ladder (in parallel to the current ranked ladder) that would be tied to a govt. ID would make smurfing less of an issue. It would not be mandatory because it would be opt-in and the normal ranked ladder still available. Just like in IRL sports when you want to compete at a regional, national or international level there are organizations where you register as a participant. I know that in practice this would probably not be possible or very hard to put in place, so it’s probably not viable.
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Hardware based identification of players? Not ideal either, could be bypassed with some effort, but perhaps making it so that bypassing it would be equivalent to cheating in the game (so, a bannable offense). Definitely less trouble to implement than 1 and could increase the ranking system integrity somewhat, but many issues appear (changing computers, playing at a computer club or at a friend’s house, etc…)
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Statistical methods using a lot of the data of what happens in games. Now, this one I don’t know how feasible it is, but the same way some experienced players can somewhat identify the level of a player given a replay, perhaps some AI system could identify the level of players by examining the same things. Sounds super complicated to me to put in place.
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Making it reaaaaaaaaaaally hard and reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally long to create a new account to then get to ranked games. Now this one is probably a major issue for new players who want to get to ranked as they’ll have to go through a painful grind, but this would stop people making many accounts very fast (I think that getting through the 50qp wins is done in about a dozen of hours of play time) which is pretty fast.
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Making alternative accounts a TOS violation. This one sounds like a pain because it would have to go through the report system pipeline, which would need some kind of human intervention dedicated to that.
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Relying on third party leagues and letting them have their own ladders, with dedicated moderation. This would require blizzard to give the tools for community created ladders and leagues, to automate things like custom game creation with the participants of each matches, so that things like FACEIT, ESEA etc could support ow2. Sounds like a pretty viable option but the fact that the ranking of each league would not be in line with the “universal” ranking of the current ladder (gold plat etc) feels not that satisfying to me.
Anyway, what are your ideas for this ? I am interested to see if there will be some original ideas for that. I believe that in my list the 6th one is the most practical one even though I don’t like it that much.
Maybe player skill peak at certain ranks should be static? If I peak in Gold then I should stay in Gold. Why should they put me in Bronze because of a few bad luck placements.
My suggestion is for players to just accept that smurfs are practically an inevitably and that it’s better to focus on what is in your control since smurfs have little to no impact on your rank in the long term, just the short term.
For developers, smurfs are also practically an inevitability, so it’s more important to have some barriers to entry to reduce their numbers alongside good systems to move them up and minimize their effect on lower ranked matches and to punish them for throwing. If you do those well, they are significantly less of a hassle/headache than anything you suggested. Overwatch 1 did them better than Overwatch 2 except for console, in my opinion.
Regarding your suggestions: 1 would require OW and Blizzard having access to a lot of sensitive user data and make them a valuable hack target, some cheaters have apparently already gotten around 2, 3 would see AI produce a ton of false positives/produce unreliable results, Overwatch 1 did 4 (and I recommend it returning), 5 can’t work without 1 or something like it, and 6 would be prohibitively expensive.
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So I think the idea of just accepting the frequency of smurf players is not the right call and I think that while not true for everyone, the frequency in which they are encountered is much higher than some people might think. If they are present to some degree in even 10% of games, that has a noticeable impact on the player experience. A much higher degree of focus should have been placed on counteracting this. I agree with you though that option 4, while not perfect, would help to discourage players from making smurf accounts, as it would ideally dramatically increase the amount of time invested to do it. I understand new players wanting to experience competitive mode, but fast tracking the process leads to an easy manipulation for smurfs.
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My notification indicated that you are responding to me, so I am operating under that assumption. I did not say that anyone should necessarily accept the (presumably current) frequency of smurfs; rather, I’m saying that smurfs will always be greater than zero (because the resource requirement to stop them is unreasonable if not impossible). As a result, developers are better off using their finite resources to limit the frequency through barriers to entry and then limiting their effect once they are in the competitive mode. But in my opinion, that’s not being done well right now. At all.
I’d argue that only OP’s 4th idea is viable in the context of limited resources, and as I said, I support that and strongly believe Overwatch 1 did it significantly better. In fact, I would have/had no problem getting 50 wins on a new account in 10 hours even though I was playing unfamiliar heroes and dealing with the terrible quick play matchmaker.
I’m not sure 10% of games is too concerning. I had a longer write up covering the math of 10% of each rank being smurfs before re-reading your comment, but the math is different.
Affecting 10% of games means 1 game out of 10 has a smurf. 10 games each with 10 players means 100 different players in total, 1 of which is a smurf, or 1% of the players. I guess you could make it up to 5% of players with a full team of smurfs, though that doesn’t always happen, and my brain doesn’t want to do any more math right now.
Smurfing is not an issue. The issue is those people who go 50-7 in your games are actually in that rank. I’ve dropped from plat to silver and I just can’t win. There’s absolutely no way there’s this many smurfs in the game. It’s just more likely that ranking system is absolutely horrid and good players can’t climb. From silver to plat, I guarantee you the rank doesn’t actually reflect the skill level.
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I average 30%-50% weapon accuracy in Bronze also 15%-25% critical accuracy with positive K/D and still lose. Then there’s the people with 10% weapon accuracy or less in Bronze that do belong there. My matches are a huge mix of all the outliers I mentioned above. It’s why the system deranked me to this nightmare rank. Gold isn’t even good, just the normal skill level but metal rank across the board is plagued by these people. I can’t wait for the soft reset but my hopes aren’t high it’ll fix this issue in the community.
I really wouldn’t get your hopes up. I’ve played this game since 2018. Absolutely nothing changed in the ranking system and especially match making. If anything, it got worse with OW2.
Remember when they said they were gonna match ranks role by role? Yeah… What a joke. 3 times in a row just now I got tanks that got absolutely rolled by enemy tank even when they played hard counters. I’m not putting the blame on others only as well. Sometimes I’m in games where I can’t even move… I get wrecked. In friggin silver 1… It’s just broken as hell.