Well, the smurfing problem has no solution for months, its time to stop sharing acounts play multiplayers games, they are ruining the gaming experience. people with 100% winrate and low elo, they win games easily and waste your time
look out
I am not against family sharing, on the contrary allow it but only for offline
Iām on the side of keeping family sharing. The things that need to happen are simple to change the current environment for the better.
-elo ceiling method may be added to 1vs1 as well, but no need for a reset, just place those above 2k to have 2k+red elo, etc.
-adding in the ranked lobby system for multiple game modes, regicide, death match, nomad, random map, mega random, feudal wars, etc.
currently above 1100 and people either figure out how to get around my defenses in key ways or get wrecked. While I improve from each win/loss, thereās either more offensive players, defensive types or the in-betweens, I donāt mind any of them; Iāll fight them all seriously.
Iāve been asked if this was my smurf account before. Honestly, I donāt get it.
Iāve also been asked if Iām a noob quite a few times before the opponent fails to take me seriously and loses for it. (Because I donāt rush, and my setup is strange to them)
Then thereās the salty bunch who call my style boring yet lose to it, and those Iāve gotten close to beating in a fairly even match gloat over their victory saying āgg ez, noob, dumb playstyle, one trick pony,ā etc.
Iāve been called a memer, troll, and a whole slew of other things even in team games.
Iāve had random teammates x my base and then resign after calling me a troll(base tends to be fancy, neat and well defended, but I guess itās strange to randoms even tho my eco is good and military well on the way)
smurfing comes mainly in two forms
(Adding in a 500 elo difference limit will further combat this behaiviour by severely limiting the disparity effect on what opponents you get queued with when allied with someone with much higher elo than you - more often friends will queue together and wonāt be too far apart in elo.)
(Instating an unranked ranking in the lobby system goes to fix this problem in a wonderful way, and if someone repeatedly attempts this behaiviour, - letās just say making new emails constantly gets tiring quickly just to make a new account - and while this may be abused using the family share system, itās also not feasible for long once the lobby system, both ranked and unranked, gain a ranking system to verify players by which heavily reduces the amount of games they may try with said account, and it is my beleif that they will tire of it quickly.)
The third way of the smurf is less prevelant, that being in ranked 1 vs 1, and the devs are tackling that issue with the early resign suspensions, and further methods will likely be explored, but removal of family sharing in its entirety should not be one of them. Keeping family sharing away from ranked is a possibility, but not outright removal.
That being said, if no unranked lobby rank comes forth, it will only worsen things for the lobbies.
(Players can no longer just lose upon making a new account, they will need to keep playing for a time, which heavily slows down their speed run into the lower elos, which, with smurfers, would likely be a heavy drain on their want of continuing to waste time.)
Further, if there are 1500+ elo smurfs, there arenāt very many of them, at 1100+ thereās only like, 13k players above me? If that. Out of those itās highly doubtful many of them smurf, and if quite a few of those are duel accounts? Then that just means there are even fewer possible actual smurfs from that elo range. Which means the ones most in danger would be the 700-900 elo ranges, which appears to be the ones the devs are attempting to protect by instating those early resign suspensions. (New accounts start at around what, 1k elo? ) and the perpatrator smurfs are most likely anywhere from 1k elo to 1.3k elo just going off of player number density.
Team game elo is highly inflated and should not be used for referance. A 1700 might as well be near in skill to a 2400 in team games as it stands - itās constantly inflated with little to no actual skill gap and would do well with a ceiling and a reset.
Again. If family sharing is taken from ranked play - it must be done at the same time as adding unranked lobbies into a ranking system to reduce possible smurfs there lest the lobby system just get worse.(allow fam share in lobbies, but their accounts will still become ranked by the lobby system allowing for better player to player moderation)
Just saying itās a problem and āremove fam shareā as a knee jerk reflex would do much more damage to the playerbase than good.
It will take time to figure out proper fixes that donāt screw everyone over.
The other problem is the opposite of the player spectrum; The player that claims or labels others without really knowing, those who get wrecked and instantly feel like theyāve been smurfed and decide to attempt to get that player banned.
It is detrimental and hurtful to the playerbase to allow this behaviour just because āsmurf badā
It is much more efficient to just change the environment in certain ways like with the suggestions I posted a few comments above which brings the game closer to being smurf unfrendly while not hurting players by false accusations and unfair bans or removing a nice feature, being family sharing, or restricting in certain ways without proper consideration as to the effects of said restrictions and without thinking of additional measures that should go to compensate the playerbase.
Iāve been called a smurf before. I have no wish to become banned because some pleb feels falsely cheated out of a proper game.
It also adds too much strain on the devs to review incoming reports of said false claims of smurfing and takes away too much of their time that could be placed towards the game as whole; itās much better to focus on things that change the environment for the better and focus on the game as a whole rather than waste studio funds/time on individual possible smurfs or even paying someone else to do it which leads into false bans with far too little context only because a player felt cheated or salty without reason beyond āgot wreckedā.
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My little brother currently uses family share to play, sure I could buy him a copy and likely will if we want to play together at the same time, but for the time being itās a good to use feature. And he loves to play with people online.
And if its possible family share can be deactivated for rankeds and only works for sp quickplay and lobbies @HealFortress that wouldt hurt your little brother but also decimate a force that grew too large
Wouldnāt a ban of family shared accounts increase smurfing short term? For instance I didnāt play on my original account for almost two years so my elo is way lower over there. I can only imagine there is more people that also mainly play on 2nd,3rd,ā¦ accounts.
Thats what a extra reset would be for
This is unlikely to do much, most online games nowadays are plagued by smurfing and they donāt have family sharing. AoE2 costs only ~9$ on various sites, that is not expensive considering it takes months to reach your true Elo. It would be better to address the reasons why people smurf. Specifically, we didnāt hear so much about smurfing until the TG Elo rework which made it very exploitable by premades (before, it was straight out bugged, but it quickly evened the Elo between the premade members, so you could smurf only for 5 games and then everyone had the same Elo).
Although at least disabling family sharing in ranked sounds simple enough to do and would also give Microsoft more $$ so they can hire mode devs.
Family sharing canāt be used while offline.
Use the search function on this forum and read threads about elo inflantion and smurfers to find out that banning family sharing wonāt do anything.
-On gamepass, people can log in 2 accounts using the same library at the same.
-Gamepass isnāt soft locked like steam family sharing (IP and 10 accounts locked). So xbox smurfers can install virtual machines and technically have infinite accounts just by subscribing for $1. So they can keep doing it and get that 1k-4k elo difference even faster than on steam.
-Gamepass doesnāt have focused abuser control features for certain games like steam (vac bans, ip bans, etc). Steam has these tools than help against smurfers and cheaters. In fact these features are used frequently on other games (dota2, CS, rocket league, etc), so I donāt know why microsoft doesnāt use them at all.
This is why shallow measures are pointless. You need to solve the root of the problem. Itās better to improve the environment and discourage smurfing completely.
-Elo reset: Theyāll say goodbye to their boosted accounts, thus they canāt manipulate the matchmaking anymore.
-New elo calculation: There are like 4 better elo calculations suggested on other threads. 2 of them will make smurfing impossible since it will take ages to boost the elo of one account one sidedly (like itās possible right now).
-Team limiters: voobly had team limiters. People could choose the max elo range (from 0 to 9999) in their rooms.
Besides on garena, people could install host bots that showed IP, total matches, winrate, drop outs, disconnects, etc and automatically not allow undesired people (quitters, low or too high points, suspicious winrates, shared IP, etc) to enter the room. That was 10 years ago and it was compatible with aoc.
Even the rgc client for dota 1 has this feature built-in. Guess what, since launch in 2009.
Itād be great if they release an official host bot as free dlc.
VAC bans and any other form of ban is a VALVE thing, only their games support that, read the FAQ and all microsoft can do is to remove the access to the game for that account by developers request, sort like a ban.
Seems like egoistic people get what they deserve
The truth you hear isnāt always the truth you think you hear, so pay attention.
Well in this case it is because repeating it without reprocussuons is just dumb and these people should be punished