ID VERIFICATION WILL STOP CHEATERS AND SMURFS

[nitsua]

VAC bans and Trust Factor exist, but they all share the same weakness: they're tied to an account, not a person. A cheater gets banned, buys a $5 Steam account or spins up a new one, and is back in ranked within the hour. Trust Factor tries to compensate by throwing "sketchy" accounts together, but that just means smurfs and repeat offenders get pooled with new/legitimate low-level accounts, making the actual new player experience worse.

ID verification tied to ranked/Premier access raises the cost of a ban from "make a new email" to "acquire new documents." That's a real deterrent. Korea's ID verification for games hasn't killed any communities and their country is the home of one of the biggest esports, League of Legends, and it didn't kill their playerbase.

It also solves smurfing, which is arguably a bigger day-to-day problem than cheating for most players, high-ranked players stomping low ranks on secondary accounts wrecks matchmaking integrity just as much as an aimbot does. Tying one verified identity to ranked progress makes smurfing at scale much harder to sustain.

If Valve wants Premier to be taken seriously as a competitive mode, "anyone can rejoin instantly after a ban" isn't a sustainable design.

[Nieey]

[FrancoDi🥚]

a

[Fr4ntic]

tltr : im in low trust

[The Leaf]

no thanks

Wouldn't work anyway, there are millions of leaked ID floating around, a number that grows everytime some guy has the bright idea to add IDs to random ♥♥♥♥ on the internet