Eshshshss If you can, report these players in-game using the in-game report menu.
If you are unable to report these players in-game, you can also report them here: EA Help | Report cheating, harassment, and illegal content.
EA_Mako maybe you have something to share :) or do we leave this as "solved" with a reply where smurfs and hackers can do what they want while legit players have to waste their time proving their innocence, suffer game quality issues and potentially lose their accounts because they got some RP boost while playing with smurfs/hackers?
Community ManagerEshshshss
Without going into detail, suffice to say that our teams investigating boosting/smurfing can tell the difference between someone randomly getting put on that squad versus someone that's intentionally there to benefit from the behavior.
Keep in mind as well that simply creating a new account is not actionable, the bar for smurfing is a bit higher than that.
Repeatedly creating new accounts or intentionally staying in the lower ranks to try and farm those lobbies would fall under smurfing. Simply being a more skilled/higher level player with a low-level account is not necessarily smurfing.
You're welcome to report as the previous advice in the thread has mentioned if you suspect someone, and the team will take a look. Just seeing a level 50 player that seems to be playing at a Diamond level (as in your initial example) does not automatically mean it's actionable, however.
So no, hackers cannot simply do what they want, and legitimate players don't have to worry about being banned for randomly getting matched with a cheater.
Thanks for the a bit detailed reply.
Conclusions I can draw from it:
Community ManagerEshshshss
That take seems a bit disingenuous.
1 / 4 - Not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that a random person doing the same thing is not ok from this mention. The idea here is that if you're taking actions to intentionally stay in those lower ranks, regardless of whether you're a streamer or not, that will be actionable. As a side note to this, if you're greatly outperforming in those earlier matches, you may notice matchmaking is taking that into account and getting you out of those lobbies faster and in fewer matches - smurfing or otherwise.
2 - Are you intentionally doing this? Not fine. This behavior is investigated by a team manually. It's really not as simple as, "Oh it was a different player that match, totally not boosting 😉😏"
3 - If you have reason to believe it's a smurf or hacker, please feel free to report them. Any penalties from disconnecting are going to be the same regardless of the reasoning behind it. There's not a way to infer your intentions when you disconnect from a match.
It sounds like you may be hinting at some sort of system that would reimburse your RP/remove the penalty if a player on your squad was found to be cheating, which is a point of feedback I've definitely seen pop-up before. That's certainly feedback we can continue to pass along, but as that's not currently how things work, a disconnect is a disconnect.
Community Manager
