Smurf accounts are ruining games & deadlock

[Tyye]

Hey, I've had a few games now where very apparent smurf accounts are just dominating and ruining games. The symptoms are pretty clear when its a brand new accounts, level 0 with 1 friend (probably the inviter) and according tracklocked.gg they have less than 5 games played.

My most recent game (30715000) had two players who just devastated (one being their very first game) and to add insult to injury, they artificially prolonged the game by not finishing objectives when they very easily had the opportunity to do so. Its not a skill issue either, in this particular instance the rest of the team matchups felt pretty fair and balanced.

I know this game is in alpha and I'm trying not to be salty about it, but after 3 games of this exact same behavior, with the exact same circumstances (brand new accounts, 1st-3rd game, some players being toxic af) unless valve mitigates it, its gonna really sour what I think is a good game.

I think a few really ways to somewhat mitigate the problem would be
A. introduce a time limit for new steam account to either receive a key or queue for public matches. It wouldn't punish existing steam players but at least slow the flow.
B. Introduce somthing akin to TF2 Free accounts where the steam account needs to be "activated" by owning another product on steam, maybe even with a minimum price of like 15 dollars.
C. Introduce new player portrait iconography (This is somthing that would be nice anyway since in most games ive been in people I find cut new players a little slack). If this was a thing, I think it would help hone down fake accounts since if you're getting dominated by a greenie it can help both teams recognize and report problematic accounts when there is an obvious discrepancy between skill, rank, and playtime.

Just venting my frustrations and hoping anyone with the ability to do somthing about it will hear it.

[Charles: The High Dolphin]

Same here, 5 games, 4 with overwhelming Smurfs.

[Edgar Al-Mossad]

Late bump, apologies. Call me a necro'er if you like.

Surprisingly there actually is a money threshold on a steam account. Its around something like £5 to turn a "limited" steam account into a normal one that is eligible for a deadlock invite.

Given the nature of why someone would smurf in a early access game in which you gain nothing other than personal satisfaction and the ability to call your enemy team trash, you can reasonably understand that many will HAPPILY fork over 5 for some random sale game on steam and pubstomp away. for nothing other than satisfaction.

Its not particularly hard to spot these folk too, all follow a very similar theme,
lvl0/1 steam account, No badges other than maybe 1/2 games owned badge (refer to the previous paragraph for how this connects) and maybe one or two friends.

Alot of them who don't fully privatise a profile will simply private their inventory so you cannot see steam account age through trade offers.

This will probably become a recoccuring issue inwhich the only solution is, taking the L, leaving and lowkey griefing your teammates further or well.... nothing!

[gamesdude109]

It's rough out there. Love the game to death and have gotten a group of friends really into it... but tonight 3/4 of my games were suspected smurf accounts (Leading the leaderboard with steam levels 0 or 1, very few hours played.) I've had to chill on the game for another week or two... I just really feel overwhelmed losing this hard over and over again, really ruining the game for myself and friends at the moment.

[asl pls thx]

if i had to guess it's less about smurfs wanting to pubstomp and more about queue times at higher rank due to player count

[Sham!]

Publicado originalmente por asl pls thx:

if i had to guess it's less about smurfs wanting to pubstomp and more about queue times at higher rank due to player count

no, you can find posts about smurfs (and cheaters) dating back to september/august, when the playercount was pretty much peaking

it's the invite system, it's literally built to be exploited by bad actors, but viral marketing takes priority over a properly managed closed beta

[{disaster} Take]

The answer to this thread is either paranoia or cheaters.

Smurfs don't just kill time for no raisins, part of the reason they smurf is to dominate. If they're rocking your teams ♥♥♥♥ in, then uselessly pottering about doing nothing much, the more likely answer is a cheater. Or someone who's also not good at the game but just so happens to be doing really good in fights this game.

Smurfs aren't likely to spend money just to smurf. Free to play games are the main targets because they're free to play. It could be the case that Deadlock has way more smurfs that I think, but I don't think it has enough to be a problem.
The ones who are likely to spend money on a new account, however, are cheaters. Paradoxical, I know, isn't money supposed to be a roadblock? Well, cheating comes with a ton of rewards if you don't get caught, so of course! It's not the roadblock it used to be. Steamers, people earning money from playing games, get caught cheating live, so it was obviously worth the risk for them to fork over knowing they could make the money back streaming as an apparently super skilled player.
When it comes to calling your victims trash, the possibility of slipping up deflates the ego. So, instead, why not cheat? Makes slip-ups impossible! Call the enemy team trash from moment one, continue to do so throughout the game, never slip up ones because cheats have got your back. It's basically a text adventure at that point.

Cheaters tend to cheat because they want to be at the top now, or just to upset people and crazymake, and so they end up skipping out on a lot of the skills required to be good legit, so a cheater could shred fights up easily, but then make a ton of noob mistakes that lower skilled players don't know they can pick up on, such as pottering around the map doing nothing much, either because the cheater literally doesn't have the skills to know they're making a mistake, or because they just don't care as much about doing the game as upsetting other players.

The BEST argument you guys have (and I think if there is in fact an abundance of smurfs, this would be the exact reason) is that the higher skill level players aren't getting enough matches because of skill rank disparity.
I don't think they're not getting matches, though. I think they're getting goofy matches with all over the place skill ranks, but they're at least getting them. I'm not sure what reason they'd have to smurf, given that smurfing at such abundance would inevitably just re-create the environment they were supposedly trying to smurf away from in the first place.

Other types of reasons for smurfing exist, but the money wall tends to dissuade those.

I dunno, I think you've probably found cheaters.