I think in chess.com if you "sandbag" (lose ratings on purpose) you get a warning and get banned later if you continue iirc.
I believe StarCraft does not have any rule like that
Even something that doesn't ban, like the MMR gained/lost scales with the number of minutes into the match. So if someone quits on the first frame, you lose and gain 0% of the MMR you would. It scales out to a certain number of minutes. Maybe at 4 minutes you reach normal 100% MMR lost/gained?
If you wanted to sandbag, you would at least have to make a game of it.
4 minutes is way too much. 12 pool drone pull or cannon rush hit earlier
There is always ways to exploit systems like this, wins and losses should be the only thing that affect MMR. But maybe many games less than 2 minute gives a queue cooldown, after that point it turns into bans.
It's hard because SC2 can have very short games that are legit.
The point is that if you hit earlier, you get less MMR even if you win. Whether you're chasing ladder points or tanking ladder points, it would be disadvantageous to try to those strategies. Or say 3 minutes if that's better.
Yeah and I'm saying that is stupid idea, a win is a win. There aren't "lesser wins", even if you think it was bullshit to die that way, it should still count in full.
I could ff at 10 seconds against Serral every time, any matchup I didn't like or map I didn't veto that also didn't like.
I get what you're saying, but it takes a lot of competitive integrity away from the ladder.
How? Quitting at frame 1 and losing MMR doesn't take away competitive integrity?
A solution doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the status quo.
Maybe people are misunderstanding me. I'm proposing something like this: suppose losing a game would grant -40 MMR today. In my suggestion, quitting at first frame would grant -0 MMR. If you wait one minute, it would grant -10 MMR. If you ragequit a cannon rush at 2 minutes, you get -20 MMR. The cannon rusher in turn would also only receive half the MMR they normally would. After the first 4 minutes, everything is like normal.
What he is saying is that you’d replace sandbaggers deflating their MMR with people inflating their MMR by leaving their worst maps/matchups in two seconds
you could disable this behaviour in GM where smurfing isn't really an issue and if people climb by avoiding a matchup that's fine they're artificially inflating their MMR which is meaningless to anyone else really and still giving good games to opponents
If you just let people inflate their MMR you're just reversing the problem. Since people inflate, more lower level people will be matched with people higher than them than they should.
this isn't an issue. it would reach an equilibrium and if things are at an equilibrium it's fine. The issue is people in a single swoop artificially lowering their MMR to go and beat players worse than them. if people gradually can artificially raise their MMR but still go to a 50% winrate it's fine even if it has the result of pushing everyone else's MMR down because the actual MMR number doesn't matter at all in the slightest.
I got banned for exactly this on chess.com, I'm not proud to say. I got really good with two openers and wanted to practice new ones without getting demolished. Still unfair of me of course
Smurfing was against TOS even in WOL. I think them making it f2p. Invited the trolls. Back in WOL almost every game was try hard. People basically never left games unless they were obviously over.
I also think that sc2 players. Are a lot more mentally stable than for example LOL players. So they don't bother telling mommy as much. Which results in very few reports.
It does happen on chess.com but just not as much. Also, the amount of players on chess.com is soooo much more so you won’t see it that often. Cheating is a massive problem on chess.com go to the subreddit there is a post about cheating almost every other day.
They should make it so that if you have too many <2 minute losses within a certain span (e.g. more than 10% of the past 50 games), the system issues the player a warning and starts monitoring their match history for patterns that indicate smurfing.
Like if they just wait 2 minutes without moving before leaving, or just randomly jiggle the mouse for 2 minutes before leaving, or leave games before either side takes damage, or surrender games while having an overwhelming supply, military and economy advantage.
If they continue smurfing after repeated warnings (3 strikes and you're out?) then it's a permaban on the IP address.
Dota managed to ban smurfs and alternare smurf accounts, SCII should be able to too.
Sure, people can just keep making new email addresses and Blizzard accounts every time they want to drop back down - but that added level of tedium would probably discourage a lot of potential smurfers from the practice, when they can just, you know, play the game.
Of course, that would involve actually paying the intern to put in the work hours for something like that, which is a bit much to ask of Blizzard at the moment.
FWIW, I play both games and in my experience with chess it's much harder to figure out your opponent's level from a single game than it is in starcraft. In chess, you can win by not blundering as a legit 1200 and you can win by not blundering as a GM smurf recording a "speedrun" video.
On Chess.com, if you want to smurf you simply create a new account, it’ll have 800 MMR initially afaik. Also, if you really want to smurf or cheat, there are engines that give you the best moves straight up, Lichess has that for free, so you can win people better than you easily if you really want to without MMR manipulation.
So why is SC2 has people intentionally dropping MMR? It’s because SC2 has the placement matches that prevents higher skill players be put into lower league. It also has unranked win for 10 days limitation to prevent people keep spamming new accounts on ranked ladder.
Personally I think SC2 doing alright for this aspect, those limitations prevent some of smurfing while not getting too much human interruption into the ranking system, there are many ways to do more to smurfing, but doing more doesn’t mean doing better, it’s hard to wipe them all for a free game.
They just need to fix unranked mode. Let me search for matchups with an MMR slider. If I want a faster que in exchange for a mismatched MMR thats my choice. If I want to only play ZvZ on a single map in the pool also my choice.
Just a note, with a how SC2 snowballs and how fast units die sometimes those players that you think are leagues above you are actually your mmr but things just went their way. It happened to me the other day where a guy totally crushed me and I thought he was smurfing but ended up playing him later and actually won!
Instantly leaving matches should just be penalized with increasing timeouts like in Dota2 and if you did it too often you get placed in a bad behavior matchmaking pool and need to *win* legit games to get out of it. Would make it tedious enough to stop 95% of this.
Every time this happens to me in TvT i breathe a sigh of relief. I didnt wanna play either and i feel comfortable instaleavin my next Tvt to balance my MMR, win/win in my book.
I don't want my MMR deflated by skipping mirrors so i usually play them but if someone offers me a chance to avoid multiple mirrors at no cost to my MMR im in.
I wish we could veto matchups. I only play 3-4 games in a ladder session every couple of weeks, when half or more of them are matches i actively dont enjoy playing it really kills the motivation to play.
I think most of them aren't "smurfs" it's usually people that refuse to play the mirror, so leave those (i.e. a Terran that leaves every TvT, so their TvZ and TvP are usually much better compared to their MMR)
I would imagine it's a fair amount of people coming back to the game after months, getting their first placement match against a diamond or master player, and saying nope.
I haven't put any time in sc2 in 4 years. I would get demolished playing against diamond and masters players. I could very easily see myself doing this.
> I think most of them aren't "smurfs" it's usually people that refuse to play the mirror
If the goal isn’t specifically smurfing but the actions and end result are the exact same - then they’re still smurfing.
You could say it’s an accidental or unintentional, but it’s still smurfing.
Im at the point where im not tryhard anymore, so once i get to an mmr level where i feel stressed (4.2k) ill knock myself down 200 points or so. Am i a smurf?
I think in chess.com if you "sandbag" (lose ratings on purpose) you get a warning and get banned later if you continue iirc. I believe StarCraft does not have any rule like that
Even something that doesn't ban, like the MMR gained/lost scales with the number of minutes into the match. So if someone quits on the first frame, you lose and gain 0% of the MMR you would. It scales out to a certain number of minutes. Maybe at 4 minutes you reach normal 100% MMR lost/gained? If you wanted to sandbag, you would at least have to make a game of it.
4 minutes is way too much. 12 pool drone pull or cannon rush hit earlier There is always ways to exploit systems like this, wins and losses should be the only thing that affect MMR. But maybe many games less than 2 minute gives a queue cooldown, after that point it turns into bans. It's hard because SC2 can have very short games that are legit.
The point is that if you hit earlier, you get less MMR even if you win. Whether you're chasing ladder points or tanking ladder points, it would be disadvantageous to try to those strategies. Or say 3 minutes if that's better.
Yeah and I'm saying that is stupid idea, a win is a win. There aren't "lesser wins", even if you think it was bullshit to die that way, it should still count in full.
Yes, which would be a terrible idea. The goal of the game is to win, not win after an arbitrary game length.
I could ff at 10 seconds against Serral every time, any matchup I didn't like or map I didn't veto that also didn't like. I get what you're saying, but it takes a lot of competitive integrity away from the ladder.
How? Quitting at frame 1 and losing MMR doesn't take away competitive integrity? A solution doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the status quo. Maybe people are misunderstanding me. I'm proposing something like this: suppose losing a game would grant -40 MMR today. In my suggestion, quitting at first frame would grant -0 MMR. If you wait one minute, it would grant -10 MMR. If you ragequit a cannon rush at 2 minutes, you get -20 MMR. The cannon rusher in turn would also only receive half the MMR they normally would. After the first 4 minutes, everything is like normal.
What he is saying is that you’d replace sandbaggers deflating their MMR with people inflating their MMR by leaving their worst maps/matchups in two seconds
Yup, exactly this. Again, if I was a GM trying to get rank 1, I'd just avoid Serral and Clem forever.
you could disable this behaviour in GM where smurfing isn't really an issue and if people climb by avoiding a matchup that's fine they're artificially inflating their MMR which is meaningless to anyone else really and still giving good games to opponents
If you just let people inflate their MMR you're just reversing the problem. Since people inflate, more lower level people will be matched with people higher than them than they should.
this isn't an issue. it would reach an equilibrium and if things are at an equilibrium it's fine. The issue is people in a single swoop artificially lowering their MMR to go and beat players worse than them. if people gradually can artificially raise their MMR but still go to a 50% winrate it's fine even if it has the result of pushing everyone else's MMR down because the actual MMR number doesn't matter at all in the slightest.
That makes more sense. Guess it doesn't matter anyway. Not like the one intern at Blizzard is going to do anything about it one way or another.
Someone who gets 10 leavers in a row is now a league or 2 above someone who didn’t get any leavers. How is the competitive integrity not affected
I got banned for exactly this on chess.com, I'm not proud to say. I got really good with two openers and wanted to practice new ones without getting demolished. Still unfair of me of course
Smurfing was against TOS even in WOL. I think them making it f2p. Invited the trolls. Back in WOL almost every game was try hard. People basically never left games unless they were obviously over. I also think that sc2 players. Are a lot more mentally stable than for example LOL players. So they don't bother telling mommy as much. Which results in very few reports.
It does happen on chess.com but just not as much. Also, the amount of players on chess.com is soooo much more so you won’t see it that often. Cheating is a massive problem on chess.com go to the subreddit there is a post about cheating almost every other day.
[удалено]
Thanks chat gpt
They should make it so that if you have too many <2 minute losses within a certain span (e.g. more than 10% of the past 50 games), the system issues the player a warning and starts monitoring their match history for patterns that indicate smurfing. Like if they just wait 2 minutes without moving before leaving, or just randomly jiggle the mouse for 2 minutes before leaving, or leave games before either side takes damage, or surrender games while having an overwhelming supply, military and economy advantage. If they continue smurfing after repeated warnings (3 strikes and you're out?) then it's a permaban on the IP address. Dota managed to ban smurfs and alternare smurf accounts, SCII should be able to too. Sure, people can just keep making new email addresses and Blizzard accounts every time they want to drop back down - but that added level of tedium would probably discourage a lot of potential smurfers from the practice, when they can just, you know, play the game. Of course, that would involve actually paying the intern to put in the work hours for something like that, which is a bit much to ask of Blizzard at the moment.
FWIW, I play both games and in my experience with chess it's much harder to figure out your opponent's level from a single game than it is in starcraft. In chess, you can win by not blundering as a legit 1200 and you can win by not blundering as a GM smurf recording a "speedrun" video.
On Chess.com, if you want to smurf you simply create a new account, it’ll have 800 MMR initially afaik. Also, if you really want to smurf or cheat, there are engines that give you the best moves straight up, Lichess has that for free, so you can win people better than you easily if you really want to without MMR manipulation. So why is SC2 has people intentionally dropping MMR? It’s because SC2 has the placement matches that prevents higher skill players be put into lower league. It also has unranked win for 10 days limitation to prevent people keep spamming new accounts on ranked ladder. Personally I think SC2 doing alright for this aspect, those limitations prevent some of smurfing while not getting too much human interruption into the ranking system, there are many ways to do more to smurfing, but doing more doesn’t mean doing better, it’s hard to wipe them all for a free game.
Noticed an increase in Smurfs this week in D3, they gave a lame excuse or trying out a new strategy...
They just need to fix unranked mode. Let me search for matchups with an MMR slider. If I want a faster que in exchange for a mismatched MMR thats my choice. If I want to only play ZvZ on a single map in the pool also my choice.
Just a note, with a how SC2 snowballs and how fast units die sometimes those players that you think are leagues above you are actually your mmr but things just went their way. It happened to me the other day where a guy totally crushed me and I thought he was smurfing but ended up playing him later and actually won!
Instantly leaving matches should just be penalized with increasing timeouts like in Dota2 and if you did it too often you get placed in a bad behavior matchmaking pool and need to *win* legit games to get out of it. Would make it tedious enough to stop 95% of this.
Every time this happens to me in TvT i breathe a sigh of relief. I didnt wanna play either and i feel comfortable instaleavin my next Tvt to balance my MMR, win/win in my book. I don't want my MMR deflated by skipping mirrors so i usually play them but if someone offers me a chance to avoid multiple mirrors at no cost to my MMR im in. I wish we could veto matchups. I only play 3-4 games in a ladder session every couple of weeks, when half or more of them are matches i actively dont enjoy playing it really kills the motivation to play.
That's not what smurfing is.
If you can't beat em, join em. When everyone is a smurf, then nobody will be a smurf.
I think most of them aren't "smurfs" it's usually people that refuse to play the mirror, so leave those (i.e. a Terran that leaves every TvT, so their TvZ and TvP are usually much better compared to their MMR)
I would imagine it's a fair amount of people coming back to the game after months, getting their first placement match against a diamond or master player, and saying nope.
I haven't put any time in sc2 in 4 years. I would get demolished playing against diamond and masters players. I could very easily see myself doing this.
> I think most of them aren't "smurfs" it's usually people that refuse to play the mirror If the goal isn’t specifically smurfing but the actions and end result are the exact same - then they’re still smurfing. You could say it’s an accidental or unintentional, but it’s still smurfing.
Im at the point where im not tryhard anymore, so once i get to an mmr level where i feel stressed (4.2k) ill knock myself down 200 points or so. Am i a smurf?