Reporting all smurfs as gameplay sabotage

#250

Except it isn’t wrong, and you forgot the important words in my opinion.

Game design wise, you balance for those who can actually play the game, not those that can’t or require a crutch. You can never, ever tweak a skill curve to appeal to everybody, never unless you want to homogenise everything to the point of this is pointless.

You cite Mercy as an example, yet look at the complaints from people wanting Mercy to be viable everywhere. She can’t be. Furthermore, given that there are skill ceilings and skill floors, when you take individual skill into account and you try to multi-balance? Yeah, you’ll end up with hero’s who are fine in one tier and not in the other.

What do you do at that point? Balance for the highest tiers.

#251

Has 4 accounts

says others to go outside.

Welcome to blizzard forums where people can act like underaged morons, and nothing happens

#252

Sorry, but the OP is right.

If you can report inactive players for sabotaging, and if some even report people for “not playing the right hero” or “refusing to switch”, then smurfing is definitely a way worse offense which requires full Blizzard attention.

It’s done by utterly selfish people who only ruin the game for other paying customers. I guess their ego need that boost in game that they can’t get in real life, or something like that, but it doesn’t excuse the behavior.

Those guys are the typical bullies, hiding in games so they don’t have to suffer the real life consequences for their behavior. In other words, they are cowards.

#253

Now people who are good at games are bullies? Damn must by in a wrong universe.

Yes op is right, just report everyone who beats you, like in 1 out of 1000 cases his going to be a real smurf so i understand and its justified.

#254

I mean i get this but still. Last 2 season are a total pain in high rank up to the point that i had to take breaks thanks to how stale and controlled the meta is… and ofc balanced around having as many casuals as you can get in GM… like GM atm and since 1 year agol is a total joke that everyone can hit just from grinding on consistent heroes. And that’s my main problem with this game atm… The pure consistency some heroes lay down in the game without any mechanical skills.

Like Overwatch is an unplayable FPS and the most easy moba game you can play atm…

#255

You seem to have the wrong idea. Smurfs is a word for a second account. People who derank to ruin low games on their smurfs are terrible yes and they are punished by blizzard. You can´t be punished for being better at the game and having to get your way up in ranks from scratch, whether you have another account or not.

There is nothing wrong with normal smurfing, the only kind that is wrong is if you purposefully throw games to stay in that rank. Overwatch is by far the least smurf infested game there is and i can prove why.

  1. The game is still high priced, unlike F2P games and the cheap ones like CS. It isn´t F2P, yes i already mentioned the cost, but remember other F2P games have huge issues with new accounts being made, that often use hacks, cheats or other things. Overwatch has none of these issues. Barely any.

  2. The game doesn´t reset your rank each season, so a smurf will stay high ranked as soon as he gets higher ranked. He will be banned/punished if he purposefully throws to lower his rank again as well. In other games you start from scratch each season and have to batter sh*t players every single season to get to the high ranks.

  3. Blizzard has shown rather steep punishments for doing things that are not allowed by their TOS, or said directly by them. This is not even debateable compared to other games, overwatch has no cheaters at all, prob very hardly linked with how strict they did their first ban clears etc. This means that the only ones making new accounts are usually people wanting to follow the rules and play the game, they have no interest in doing bad “smurfing”, cause that will get you punished. But having an alt account, no matter what is not a ban able offense.

might i add, that every time you report a smurf for gameplay sabotage, that is actually a false report. Meaning that you are completely at fault for getting banned for false reporting people, which we have seen happen before.

#256

[quote=“Wickedlike-2109, post:253, topic:12868, full:true”]

Now people who are good at games are bullies? Damn must by in a wrong universe.[/quote]
I think you perfectly understood what I was saying, but you are just trolling either because you are a smurf yourself, or just because you’re on the Internet and logic doesn’t apply.
Good players aren’t bullies. Good players who get intentionally down ranked to feed their egos by steamrolling less skilled players are, though, because they only think about their own pathetic pleasure without challenge and they don’t care if they ruin those matches for the others.

#258

Look… gameplay sabotage in this game is one thing and one thing only: throwing.

Why?

Because in order to “smurf”, players with new accounts would have to first sandbag themselves and prevent their own team from winning in competitive, which is throwing. This is already a reportable offense and it’s the best that can be done. No one can be punished for playing better than everyone else no matter how many accounts or what SR they have because that’s how the game is meant to be played. They can only be punished when caught in the act of de-ranking themselves. Because that’s the only time they are doing anything wrong.

#259

Naa smufing is gameplay sabotage they trow to maintain rank then stomp to boost their egos both are sabotaging the game

#260

ye the matchmaking is 100% pointless with players doing smurf accs . ruin almost like 80% of my games.

#261

Don’t blame the player blame the game, its not like they made any attempts of fixing matchmaking lately, don’t just abuse report system just cos you hate new accounts.

#262

new accounts are fine, alt accounts are fine

but as soon as a new account who was previously playing a hero E.G rein, and was loosing mildly switches to genji or tracer and starts kerb stomping my entire team, they are a smurf, and they are sabotaging the game, and deserve to be reported and banned

#263

This why elo hell kind of exist smurfs are filling low elo ranks and you get atleast 1 smurf per game if not multiple i admit when i was good at this game in season 6 i would smurf and play with my low elo friends and we played around 20 games i dropped a single game out of the 20 and it was because the enemy team had 3 gm smurfs its really hard for a real platinum player to change the direction of the game

#264

they can be acting like they’re really bad and keep missing every shot how are you going to report them you can’t report someone just because he is bad

#265

ıts not smurfing.You can see many of them in QP.
I saw 30 lvl god like tracer player.Its a job.They rank up accounts,lvl up accounts and selling for more money.Why one player need sumurfing?There is no real reason.If they pro players or youtuber they can have one more for fun or secret games but w hy all good players have many accounts?Becouse its business.They selling accounts.

#266

I like it. XDDDDDDDD (need 20 characters)

#267

So my experience of the past three games in Competitive.

Against a Smurf four-group (it was obvious). They did nothing but spawn-camp, take us out and eventually just let us capture the points and did nothing but emote and such while we did so.

I don’t know about the other two players in their team so I reported the four-group for inactivity and sabotage.

Game two, same four group, same thing happened, same reports.

Game three, team let us win all three points on Blizzard World, then they went ham and got three points with four mins to spare. They let us get another three, we managed to get them to OT and they got three. It was 6-6. They were genuinely trying to make the match last as LONG as possible. Did nothing when we were on the offensive then activated when we were on defence. We managed to then get them off somehow and won 9 - 8. On Blizzard World.

Now, I was playing with close friends and this may seem silly but we’re adults, have jobs and other responsibilities. We enjoy the game and like to play in Competitive with other people of our skill set. We don’t want to be playing childish games with man-children who happened to be skilled at the game who think this is hilarious, in a very real sense. If this was physical sports in an educational environment, this type of thing would be seen as bullying.

When it comes to Competitive sports, there is a reason why there are Weight Classes and degrees of separation for athletes and I know that’s why the ranking and SR is MEANT to do, but more has to be done.

I know smurfs who just want to try a few games, reset their elo and such, and go from there. That’s fine as within a few games, they’ll be placed accordingly. Though people deliberately throwing, deliberately wasting time and deliberately just using their skills to harass lower tier players isn’t acceptable.

It’d be fine if it was one game in a blue moon, but this was three games in a row.

A big help would simply be an ‘Avoid As Opponent’ feature and have it the same as the team mate one. Which is three at max. Though no idea how that would work but its one solution I could think of.

It does just get so tiring and so draining when you just want a few Comp games with friends and it turns into a night like this.

I mean we won all three games but it just felt hollow, wasn’t any fun at all and put all of us off from playing the rest of the night.

So yeah, would be nice to know what would happen in these kind of situations and what can be done? Or what potential solutions are?

#268

It’s always easier to chalk up your bad SR and blame smurfs and throwers, like 90% of ladder players below GM do (ofc I pulled this out of my butt, but we can all agree that players tend to do this a LOT). Just take the blow and go on with your life.

But let me tell you a story. I bought a new copy of the game like two years ago, but before you guess, I was planning to play legitimately to the best of my abilities (and I still do). In qp I pretty much stomped the other team on my then-main Tracer, and promptly got called out for smurfing. For the first five games tops. After that, I got matched with and against shiny borders all the way until level 25, and ever since I’m playing comp and warmup arcades exclusively on that account. But, until I reached my first star under my portrait, gold and plat folks kept calling me out (and probably reporting) for smurfing, despite my best attempts to play as good as I could in every one of my games. I improved a lot since then, so I’m not saying there were zero pubstomp games in the mix, but within a couple games the matchmaking system balanced me close enough to my main SR range so that’s that.

However what I saw a lot was countless players explicitly throwing games, because “we already have a smurf on our team so whatever”, lo and behold 5 dps + me as Moira. For an entire night once. Those people had roughly the same attitude as OP and commenters supporting OP, and they legit thought that anyone below level 100 cannot play the game (somehow when asked why plat border players are in bronze, they couldn’t answer), one of the guys - level 700-ish, silver border with one star - even claimed that he was only playing comp since level 25 and he climbed only 200 SR during that time, not believing anyone below 100 could be anywhere near plat. I also had some guys telling me that as someone below level 100, I should play supports. Sure enough, after my 3rd slept nanoblade they called me out for smurfing.

So what’s the moral of the story? There’s none. Simply don’t judge players by their level, because it doesn’t mean a thing in Overwatch, it never did. If that guy is a legit new player on your SR, let him play what he chooses first, because likely it’s his best or near-best hero, or if it doesn’t suit the map or the comp (eg. choosing Widowmaker into a close-range comp with let’s say Rein-Zarya and Moira-Lucio, or playing Junkrat on Nepal: Sanctum where teams tend to play Pharmacy), explain them to the best of your abilities over comms why you think it won’t work. If it’s a smurf account, only report once they already threw the game, since it doesn’t matter if you report them at the start of the game - you’ll likely lose either way with a downranking smurf in your team. Also that being said, I don’t think I ever had a thrower smurf in any of my games (probably two at best), I simply know I have plenty of room for improvement :man_shrugging:t2:

Oh yeah, and I also have a third account currently sitting at level 25 where I am only playing Genji, Hanzo, Zen and Rein, neither of which I can play, and on that account I also got called out as a smurf. I mean, not all new players are clueless, when I first started the game in December, 2016 I already played on both free weekends, watched hundreds of hours of compilations and analysis/coaching videos, so despite my… let’s say mediocre mechanical skill and apparent fondness of Junkrat, I knew most flanking routes, cheeky trap spots and hero counters, but smurfing was yet to become the red herring of salty dudes on the forums at that time.

Ps.: sorry for the clunky wording here and there, apparently on Blizzard forums the letters ‘C’ and ‘K’ cannot be written together, wth…

#269

Agree, and report all dps above 2.

#270

As ive said alt accounts are fine… new accounts are fine but as soon as that low level player who has been playing rein or mercy or any othet low skill cap hero or even a mcree or something normal… as soon as they switch to a widow a genji a hanzo or a tracer and start mopping the floor with our entire team and nothing we do can stop them… they are a smurf and shouldnt be playinh that hero at our rank and hence are smurfs and hence are sabotaging the game so they get a report

I dont see a low level player and instantly think “SMURF MUST REPORT” i wait for yhe prerequisite telltale signs of smurfing then i report