đŸ“” Solution to identify Smurfs

General Discussion
21

It’s something like this. A door lock can be picked by people that want to pick it.
But that doesn’t stop you from installing a door lock in the first place.
People who are hell bent on going past the door lock will, but it keeps majority of them that don’t have the resources / intentions to it away.

22

Of course smurfin is not a offence, but for sure is something that ruin the balance of the ranks and the experience of new people (real ones) into ow; sometimes I’ve seen level 20-60 facing smurfs
 funny
 (edit no is not funny for them).

So even if we have one or two smurf less I’m agree with any idea that will lower their numbers.

So I like the mobile number idea.

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23

They buy accounts as well and that’s helpful.

24

I know, and for sure I’m not against the business profit, but I think that there are other ways rarther than ruin gameplay experience of new players (ofc not blizz fail but is how the people take advantage of the ‘‘system’’), I mean there is blizz shop, action figures, shirst, etc that help no?

25

Why fix something that’s making you money, on top of that you need to waste man power on something that will potentially be easy to abuse. And all for something that’s not an offence.

26

As said before, none stated that is a offence (at least I didn’t), is simply a mechanic that ruin the game experience
 I even met people boosting their friends


27

I’m not talking about not allowing people to have smurf accounts. That’s perfectly fine, its a revenue source for Blizzard. All I’m saying is we have a mechanism to identify a new account as a Smurf, thereby allowing such accounts to start getting placed against higher tiers during placement, instead of having to start up against lower tiers.

And although their is a method to abuse it, by using another person’s mobile user, It’s like the door lock example I stated before.

28

As far as I know, it isn’t forbidden to have multiple accounts and therefore to smurf, I think you are allowed to own 3 different accounts. I know smurfing is a problem but some times you lose to a smurf and sometimes you win because of one.
And usually smurfs don’t stay in low elo for a long time.

29

That’s exactly what I thought at the start until the past 3 days I encountered a humongous amount of them, it did feel like my game was being sabotaged greatly, and the guy getting the boost was simply cheating by using a 3rd party to increase his chances of winning even if it was not a software, I dropped more than 150 SR due to that and constantly got boosted people on my team.
Now I know this should go both ways, like getting a leaver on your team then getting a leaver on opposing team the next game, so it should balance itself out, yet for some reason I kept getting boosted people solo (Who clearly don’t belong to my current SR) on my team, and boosters on opposing team (Don’t know if it has something to do with MMR or I was just unlucky but either way, it would be either unfair or boring).
Also something worth mentioning: This problem showed mostly last week as we are getting closer to the season ending.

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30

This solution proposed above is only a way so that MM knows how to place smurf players in placement games. It’s not a way to stop smurfs from playing on other accounts. I know the MM quickly progresses higher skilled player up the ranks, but there is some amount of damage done in that process. Although small, a lot of tiny drops combine to form a sea. The effect of smurfing can add up over time to cause bigger issues, at the lower tiers.

I hope this solution helps solve that problem, whereby smurfs are moved up the ladder instantly, rather than progressively like it is today.

There isn’t a restriction on the number of accounts you can hold. You can own as many as you want.

33

Also please note guys that when you face a booster/boosted duo, do report the boosted person prior to the booster for CHEATING and think as followed:
1- No need to get tilted by a godlike widow, he is GM/T500 and I am mid diamond so obviously he is better than me.
2- The booster will always find a way to quickly level new accounts and carry on his business (especially that there is money involved), the damage he gets is minimal if banned.
3- The boosted is someone desperate for rewards he never earned, and wants things to come to him easy, getting banned and having to level a new account all over will affect them greatly + costs them time and another boost purchase which will eventually get them banned again until they give up (Above that, it’s your job to deal with the issues ingame, and Blizzard’s job to deal with the legal/financial problems, so do your part and don’t worry they will manage to do theirs).
4- If the boosted people are constantly getting deprived from playing their accounts then they know there will be consequences to their actions and eventually stop buying the boosting services which on the long term affects the boosters as well.
5- Again: Don’t get tilted, don’t rage your team, acknowledge the fact that someone is getting carried on the enemy team (or even your team), report them and move on

BONUS: I won with my duo friend a couple of games vs those people and it felt good, however that is very unlikely to constantly happen (we did shame both the booster and the boosted on all chat when their game ended with a loss but that wouldn’t make a difference, just felt nice).

34

But Architect even with the proposed solution a booster can keep doing their job.
In fact faster.
They just have 1 account they have at GM, which is verified to a mobile number.
They buy any number of new accounts and keep using the same verified number for the new accounts and they have a faster leveled up account.

After the accounts leveled up they sell the account to a buyer, and the buyer can then change the verified account’s mobile number to a new one.

It won’t deter that from happening, but it will prevent new accounts from destroying the lower tiers.

35

I am definitely not disagreeing to your mobile suggestion, my idea Star is for the community to report these cases constantly (Boosted prior since he is the one breaking the rules, without them there would be no boosters)
 and as I edited, blizzard will manage to find a way to fix the issues with the boosters.
I just didn’t wanna make a new thread for it, kinda taking advantage of yours :stuck_out_tongue:
But ye overall I tend to agree to your mobile suggestion if done properly.

36

At least if a player is reported for being boosted, Blizzard has a way of seeing the original number that was used for verifying the account.

So to keep the costs low, a Booster would use a few set of numbers to keep building alt accounts. Any accounts that are known to have one of those black listed numbers that a booster used, can be black listed :smiley:

For Blizzard it’s easy to find out the numbers that boosters are using to verify their accounts by just buying a few from them :smiley:

That can deter boosted players / boosters :smiley:

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37

Ah well that’s more of your domain as programmer than mine, come to me for advice whenever you want to build something ^^

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38

So if Blizzard went to a boosting site and purchased say 50 Gm accounts, they can get to know what the original mobile number(s) used to verify each of those 50 accounts were.

They then get those numbers and add it to their blacklist, if in the future any new player accounts verified numbers had one of the black listed numbers they know the accounts purchased from a boosting site :smiley: .

So although boosters could level an account very fast to GM, they risk getting that account perma banned, and hence never being able to sell it :smiley: . But ofc Blizzard had to purchase 50 or so accounts to get a black list in the first place, so that sales might be well enough for the boosters :smiley:

39

And with a fraction of that money the boosters can buy a bunch of new numbers and
 omg gtfo man it’s Sunday and the last thing I want is to think about Blizzard’s legal/financial issues XD

40

Yeah it’s not so a great solution to deter boosters, because they can keep getting new mobile numbers for new accounts. They might even get one new number , for every new account. They’ll just end up charging the buyer for the overall cost.

However if they got a new unique number for each account they’ll have to play it from the lowest level from bronze upwards. So to ease / speed up things they could get 1 mobile number for say every 3 accounts, so they have to level up 3 times lesser number of accounts to GM.

41

Well at least you gave an opinion, as long as the post is read, and the issue is acknowledged they will manage to find a proper solution for it, don’t get yourself worried unless you have shares in Blizzard, then that’s a completely different matter :smiley:

42

Naa, no shares
 I never knew Blizzard was a public company with an IPO. I thought they were still privately owned. :smiley:

Okay they are a public company with shares. It’s 74.29$ a share as of today :smiley:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/atvi

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