Address the issue of smurfing once and for all. My friends are leaving the game one after another. The player population is declining precisely because you constantly cater to competitive players and streamers, while neglecting smurf countermeasures and even encouraging secondary accounts.
Encouraging secondaries? I would have said ACTIVELY encouraging secondaries. In my humble opinion there are some player behaviors that are worthy of condemnation. Cheating is one of them. Smurfing is another. When Respawn fails to condemn secondaries as the cancer that they are then they are de facto actively encouraging people to use them. They say that secondaries are okay as long as they're not being used deliberately to cheat the matchmaking algorithm, but as I've said a million times before, name one single purpose served by a secondary other than to cheat the algorithm. They can't name such a purpose because there isn't one. What they're saying is, in effect, sorry you're hard stuck at D4 but feel free to Smurf your way through the ranks again as compensation for the fact that you think you're better than you really are. Or that actual cheaters have a lockdown on master and predator ranks. Whichever. Both. Don't know, don't care. There's still no excuse for it. And worst of all, it's the perfect workaround if you yourself are a cheater who manages to do it so egregiously that you earn a ban. Fire up your alternate and just keep on cheating.
Respawn, I try to call it out when you get things right. Credit where credit is due. But when you get something this wrong you deserve a call out for that as well. Here it is: Shame on you not just for failing to put an end to the problem, something that would be pretty simple to do, but also, and even more so, for condoning it. I can't think of any good excuse for that. I know why you do it, but you're in the wrong. Period. Just wrong. You're slapping the face every single legitimate player of the game. Which is why there are fewer and fewer of us every single day.
Community Manager
