Problems with Blizzard's solution to "Smurfing"

First things first, I'm new to the community. Hello everyone! And happy valentine's day!

Okay, so I watched the videos on youtube on the blizzcon 2009 event, specifically about the battle.net 2.0 features, and I came up with a problem.

Blizzard plans to charge retail price for every new battle.net account to solve the problem of "Smurfing" (a bored pro creating a new account to pretend to be a noob so that he/she can own other noobs) But that just raises more problems. Let's say you're new to sc2 and initially, you don't really care about your win/lose ratio. As you become a better player, however, you begin to realize the importance and value of that record. By the time you've fully realized this, your win % is pretty noobish and pathetic, and you know you just can't win enough games even bring the record to a 1:1 ratio. As far as I know, in the older blizz games like wc3 and the original sc, you can just make a new battle.net account, wiped clean of all records, and started building up your win % from there. But since Blizzard plans for charge $50 (retail price) for every new battle.net account, how is anyone going to fix their records? Especially me, since I know I'm not that good a player and occasionally I'll be making new accounts to improve my records (I'm still doing that on starcraft, I'm not a good starcraft player either).

So what do you think?

 

Battle net attempts to keep your win ratio at 1:1 by matching you with players of equal skill level. As you improve your skill level your poor ratio/stats will mean you are placed against people who are now much worse than you thus your ratio will trend towards 1:1

I think this is fine (If its how you say?) and smurfing needed to stop. Blizzard has made this decision based on the power of battlenet's in game matchmaking system and hopefully it lives up to their/our expectations. Likewise this stops people who are initially very good but then fall behind holding win ratios of 5:1 etc because they were able to smash through new players.

Its enough to make a statistician weep for joy

 

THat's absurd! Basically, some beginners will be subject to guaranteed defeat by better players because those players just couldn't handle their ratios by themselves?! I don't see this as a solution. But I have trust in Blizzard, stuff they do is almost always good.

 

My first thought was "Just allow people to clear their records when they need to." Of course, the potential for 'smurfing' there would just increase. My next thought was "How about clearing all records at scheduled intervals?" It's a step closer to solving the problem, but theoretically would create waves of unbalanced matchmaking each time they wipe the slate clean. Perhaps then the best way would be a type of long-term reputation system overlayed with the general matchmaking.

Example: Say win/loss records are wiped monthly on B.net. However, one particular player manages to earn high win ratings for 6 consecutive months. For this achievement, the player earns a status boost that "survives" the monthly clearings for a time. Similarly, a player who has had high win ratings for say, 12 months or more will have a status that is not only higher than the 6 month equivelant, but will last much longer. In theory this could divide the playerbase into tiers based on how skilled they are and how often they play.

 

I'm great with their work at stopping smurfing, but I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but

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So. This means that if me and my brother want to play on Battle.net using one cd-key together, we'd have to pay another $50 if we wanted separate accounts? I mean, that's cool for the people who want to make different B.net accounts so that they can smurf, they're kinda stuck, but now the people who may need to share a cd-key aren't allowed to keep their friends, stats, and clan separate? Especially with the new social system that's coming with the improved Battle.net.

My brother and I specifically won't really be affected by this, as we were going to buy 2 games to play together anyways, but I think this is as much of a slap in the face as it was when they were 'discussing' LAN and said college kids (and others who may have a terrible-beyond-use internet connection) effectively can't play the game with other people.

 

Alasdair Cd-keys aren't going to be tied to computers anymore, they will be tied to accounts like WoW is.

 

Your matching is based on your record over the previous two weeks, not all-time.

 

hey kaaraa has a point there T_T

 

i'm not big on making new accounts. I've had same blizzard account for at least 6 years losses and all

 

So you can just stop playing for 2 weeks to abuse the match-making system?

 

Anyone who cares about abusing it isn't gonna just stop playing.

 

Off topic: I want SP stats! Not only achievements, stats that show who has beaten mission x in the shortest amount of time possible - who has done the most terrible terrible damage or is the most efficient death / kill ratio etc.

On topic: With all these different leagues I don't really think there will be any problems. People (at least me) will probably care more about your current ranking in your specefic league, and win/loss stats will become less important.

 

I feel pretty alone when on the internet, since I don't really care so much about my stats/ranking, I dunno about you guys, but I play for fun... (inb4 casualf4g)

and on the idea on whipe:ing stats every month or so, wouldn't that pretty much remove the need for win/loss ratio? so what if you had a bad week or just suck in the beginning, you will play vs players with equal score anyway so if you improve all you need to do is to play the game and slaughter the newbs.

tl;dr: I do not understand the OP's problem, and why he's complaining.

 

It's also to cut down on piracy. It won't stop it, but it'll make it more difficult to play on battle.net with an unpaid copy of the game.

New game = new paradigm. In StarCraft II, unless you're an S-class progamer you will never have a good or bad win/loss ratio. Your ratio will always be close to 50% since you'll be playing people of an equal skill level.

This is unlike StarCraft I, where there was no listed skill level, and you could get a high win ratio by beating much lower-skilled players. (That would be called smurfing, except StarCraft I had no AMM or skill-matching system to evade.)

Irrelevant; see above point.

Irrelevant; see above points.

1) You actually get a few characters per game. (Blizzard hasn't decided on a number yet; I expect 1-3 per game.)

2) Irrelevant; see above points.

You won't be doing that. See above points.

I think you panicked, since you only saw one source that didn't have complete information.

No, you get a few accounts per game. Although that's probably a violation of EULA, not that anyone seems to care.

I think it's all character/profile based rather than account-based, but if you violate EULA, you shouldn't expect to go unpunished.

Where did you hear this? And what happens if you haven't played in two weeks, if that's really the case?

 

If you don't play for two weeks, your record will be 1:1, so you'll be matched with more average players. Of course, at the end of those two weeks, everybody will be reset to 1:1 anyway. It's more of an issue if you don't play for a week or so. However, I would like to see the source of that info too, Jon.

Furthermore, I doubt they would base the system completely off of two weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if the last two weeks were highly influential in the matchmaking system's decisionmaking, but I also think it would take in to account many other statistics, including your all-time record.

 

If I understand correctly the OP's gripe is the fact that he's not going to be able to hide the matches he loses by making new accounts. The issue is non-existing, because noone else will either, so the value of win ratings will change.

In pro gaming, skilled players are lucky to hold a 58% win rate because everyone is already so close to the ceiling. AMM tries to give everyone the chance to fight for that rating by matching them with equals. So no, you wont be able to fix your way into a ridiculous 70% win rate by smashing noobs once you've trained up your skill, which is just one more sign of how awesome SC2 is going to be.

 

The source was during the BlizzCon 2009 Battle.net discussion. Chris Metzen and Dustin Browder if I remember. You'd have to watch the whole video to find where they talk about matchmaking.

And if you don't play for two weeks it's your previous two weeks of play time. So you can never reset your record.

If you play for two weeks and get a record of 10-1, then stop playing for two weeks, when you come back your record (for the last two weeks you played) would be 10-1. You'd be right where you started.

 

You COULD theoretically do that but I would rather be playing for those 2 weeks lol.
It doesn't really affect me because I'm more into the UMS scene. I REFUSE to play DOTA though, I'm a Temple Siege fan all the way. I do find it insulting that Blizzard didn't even mention TS while they talk about DOTA all the time

 

Could you link the video? I've probably seen it, but there were so many battle.net videos from then.

 

This does not answer this question.

What if you're a pro player? For the first few matches you'd be playing against not so good players till the match making system works out you're a pro. So if the pro players waited a week or so and didn't play Battle.Net matches right away. In short they could have a few matches of easy win at the beginning.

And for those who do play Battle.Net at the beginning. For the first few matches. It'd not be playing against equal skill. It'd be hope I don't get a pro till the match-making sorts us all out.

What can be done about this initial flaw in the match-making system?