Not a bait post I swear. Obviously If the game goes f2p the raw number of smurfs will increase but if the game sees far more genuinely new players compared to smurfs then wouldn’t that mean you’d see less smurfs per game? If going f2p created like 1 million smurf accounts but 10 million new players what would that mean?
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Kevin, smurfs aren’t the problem. That is a red herring. The real issue is that a lot of degenerate people are f2p only and opening up the floodgates to them will make the game a lot worse with or without smurfs. Try Paladins for a taste of a “competitive” free to play community.
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well it would create more accounts, which a lot of people might call smurfs, though those being people with the sole reasoning of making an account to ruin games?..probably low, unless they are really bored.
Yes. I have 3 accounts and if the game was f2p I’d have probably about 10 accounts by now for different things
It will create a lot more smurfs. The nature of the game encourages it. Not only there is no disadvantage in starting a new account but it also has the advantage of having more flexible mmr compare to an old one.
Because of my time in Valorant, ive come to think that the only way a fair competitive game can be free to play is an insane level requirement for ranked… for OW, possibly one star. 25 levels is far too low for free to play, both for smurf purposes and for new player reasons. In Valorant, simply too many people have “alt” accounts. This means a ton of throwing, smurfing, and generally people who dont care about the game or their rank, which is dangerous. Perhaps make online only accounts, that you also have to buy, but just not as expensive as a PvE + PvP account.
The game will become more casual. Maybe a higher level requirement for comp might help that?
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Going f2p will not only cause more smurfs, but worse than that… an un-precedented number of blatant hackers. Smurfs at this point have the cover of Blizzard not actively banning them for it. Hackers are kept at bay by that. If it goes f2p, there’s no real punishment. Just make a new account and end back in 4k by the end of an afternoon anyway.
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I think no, but only with good politic of management.
New players will dilute the actual amount of smurfs, but you have to make harder to queue to new account in ranked.
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Have you seen dotoo valve new model?
- Only phone number for join ranked
- Smurfing in any way is bannable (ow is legal) and reportable (ow what?)
- “overwatch trial system”, when you report some1 for smurfing (or other stuff) they select some expert good endersed player to review the replay and classify what happened.
This is doing the war to smurfing.
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Technically speaking, yes. But I think that most players that want to smurf have likely already dropped money on at least one other account. I think a much bigger problem would be an influx of hackers and throwers. OW’s cheat detection is… not fantastic, and no active moderation would leave everything up to the automated report system.
Not just smurfs, but outright hackers/cheaters.
Unless blizz did faster banwaves they’d be a much more common occurrence.
Not really.
Played to counter strike from the launch and when it become f2p, nothing is changed.
You find more people trying to find excuses because they get killed, but in reality, you don’t find more real smurfs or even cheaters.
People will assume other are smurfs/cheaters because is more easy than face the reality.
Yes.
You’ll see both a rise in New Players and Smurfs at the same time.
Now, console, on the other hand, is basically Smurftofia. I don’t know how the game sharing system works on Console, but it creates a mountain of smurfs, for free.
So yeah, technically, you have a way to make an unlimited amount of smurfs from 1 account on consoles.
On console no
On pc absolutely.
Bronze would literally be more smurfs than real players as one team has sweat squad and the other has people who can barely run the game.
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For famous game like cs:go, do this passage from buy to play to f2p don’t make a real raise of smurfs.
Why some people are so sure this will happen for overwatch?
Seems more people need to think there will be more smurfs.
Not a surprise considered the history of this forum about exagerate/lying about problems.