This kinda shit is exactly why I love Icefrog. They’re never content with the game being balanced, once they get almost every hero to around 50% winrate they love to add a new piece to the Jenga tower of mechanics.
This patch is such an elegant solution to a bunch of very minor hero issues, while also providing a ton of shiny new toys.
For years Dota players have argued that having to click the enemy hero to see their mana is peak game design. It was very rare to see anyone argue on favor of it. Better late than never I guess?
Smurfing was pretty bananas in Rocket League too.
Mixed that with people convinced they should be ranked much higher and the only thing holding them back was their teammates and yes that could be pretty toxic too.
I once unknowingly let my nephew play ranked on my account and I had to rank back up from gold, which is the closest I’ve come to smurfing.
It was only a few games until the mmr leveled out, but the gold games were honestly harder than plat or diamond because of how many people don’t even have the self-awareness to know they’re messing up.
I mean, I’m messing up all the time too, I just don’t need to blame my teammates.
That said, I haven’t played much since Epic got their hands on it.
… or, you know, you could just match them with eachother and some bots, so they don’t realize anyone is onto them, don’t ruin the experience for others, and still get to play what they’ve paid for(sorry if DoTA2 is f2p … but even there, the best players will usually have spent some money).
Robot Warfare on mobile seems to do something like this(you’ll find references to “AI Hell”/“bot hell” on reddit). Part of what players don’t like about it is that you’ll have maybe one, usually none, lower-ranked human player besides yourself on your team, and the opposing team is usually all bots or all noobs, so you either shoot fish in a barrel or invent challenges/handicaps for yourself.
When I would let my daughter play on my account while I built up hers so she would have a good “mech” or three(she still doesn’t carry matches or get more than a few kills if any, but surviving to the end of a match with her dad on her team is a big deal for a 7yo), I would find my account stuck like so for a good while. Honestly prefer it to playing with the super-competitive “elite”, who all use the same OP bot and play he same ways as eachother(I legit prefer the smaller/weaker/faster mechs … ones where I often would be the first to run out of lives in a higher-teir game).
EDIT: removed the s at the end of bot. There’s one bot specifically that the Pay2Win wannabe’s spam.
This is such a great change. I wish league of legends would do the same. In lol it feels like more players have smurf accounts than not. Smurfs contribute nothing to the games and only ruin the experience for the other 9 players.
Playing in plat / emerald elo feels like each game is a complete landslide in favor of one team. I wonder if banning Smurf accounts would fix this issue and make games more fun
Your comment is really smurfy! I was just thinking, “This type of account should be called a Gargamel account, not a Smurf account. Smurfs are nice. Gargamel is the bad one.”
One of the biggest reasons I stopped playing Overwatch on PlayStation a few years ago.
Smurfing is out of control there (unlimited free accounts), and most matches down where I lived in Gold were determined by which team had more Masters players on their team.
This seems like a reasonable approach but the smurfs have already ruined all the games prior to being banned. I wonder how difficult it is to prevent smurfing altogether? Doesn't seem like it'd be easy at all.
Both regions require you to register for the game using a residential ID due to strict internet laws in those regions. China’s are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you’d see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
As for the West, the only companies from my experience that genuinely ask for personal details beyond a username, email address and password are those that host shoddy Korean MMO’s and have notoriously bad internet security. Valve have tried to address smurfing in the past by requiring accounts to register phone numbers before they can play Ranked, but this can easily be bypassed with cheap burner phones and other services.
China’s are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you’d see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
Got any resources to back this up? I have a hard time imagining a culture where cheating is the norm alongside one that ruins your life if caught cheating. One of these things can’t be true.
dota2.com
Gorące