Told you there should be nothing linking to the individual himself ; otherwise he could be targeted by the most angry readers. I might add that there are a lot of users around here who don’t see with a keen eye when their doings are denounced… and so if the smallest rule is broken in the process, they will report it so that the author gets silenced.
Now, you can’t denounce that individual ; but we can still discuss the case without breaking any rules. And that by debating over the phenomenon in general ; and anonymizing any source material.
I took a look at it, and I must say this user’s procedure was quite unusual. However, after careful inspection, I’m not sure there is botting involved, and I’ll explain you why below :
First, the profile :
https://i.postimg.cc/bYQR8bYq/2020-10-04-AFK-smurf-Profile.jpg
- The key point here is that he has zero APM, but not 50 resources. Meaning that he keeps mining, but does nothing of it. That’s one way of ensuring defeat, though in teamgames there is no guarantee of it considering the others players might still outdo the opponents (as seen in the upper right example). Anyhow, the point is that’s an attempt at freelosing, but without insta-leaving.
- The resources left are about the same from one game to another. This might be due to the mining being a bit random rather than him not leaving at the same time, and it’s at ±5 minerals each time which is extremely close.
- The guy is master, has been twice GM. Yet he has a bronze team league. This suggest the user has the skill to go way beyond his current ranking, and loses deliberately in order to get matched with lesser opponents.
- His teammates aren’t the same everytime. So its random team 4v4, and he is doing his freeloses alone.
- What is not shown here is that the games he’s involved in can last 20-23’ minutes, but he still queues them about every 10’. So he not only AFK but also leaves them before the end.
- Also, he already has all the teamgame achievements, so this is not farming.
Ingame :
https://i.postimg.cc/Bnhgk0SD/2020-10-04-AFK-smurf-ingame.jpg
- From what I’ve seen, he slightly moves the camera/screen downwards at the start of each replay. On the second or third replay you initially provided, there was others truly AFK users, including one who apparently was on the phone because he started playing a few minutes later. And for this one, the camera didn’t move in the least at the start of the game. However, the camera move is nearly the same each time.
- On the illustrated example, he missclicks the camera which as you can see above ends up well North from his base. That means he’s there at some moments for sure.
- Side note, there was another AFK user in this one. Which suggest this issue isn’t infrequent…
From the whole analysis, we can deduce that :
- He’s imputing manual commands at the start of some the games.
- He does not only AFK, but also leaves them early, at about the same moment each time.
So my conclusion is that he’s there at the beginning of some games for sure, but not all, while the games’ ends look somewhat automated. So I can’t rule out an external program, particularly for the end.
As for the why, well it’s made to lower his MMR so he can play lesser users (and as you could see decreased in leagues progressively, becoming gold, and then bronze later, which suggest he left league and then got placed again).
And the reason why he does AFK 5’ instead of leaving right away, IMO could be that this way the other users could not take control over his units, and that making sure that his resources wouldn’t be shared with them. So some sort of method to ensure the game is a defeat, and that his MMR indeed lowers.
And I who thought I had seen it all regarding smurfing… 