Super easy solution to the smurf problem... EA doesn't have the guts to do it. It's called MFA and the rest of the industry adopted it years ago. Look at COD, if I want to play on my friends xbox I need to use a pin on my cell or one that I had previously setup. Doing that ties the EA account to your personal identity. That is how the world works now. I work in enterprise IT and most online SaaS apps and games alike now leverage multi-factor authentication (text, phone app, email a code, etc.). Once you put MFA in place no more multiple accounts for the same game and smurf issue is solved for good.
@c0ld1 wrote:Super easy solution to the smurf problem... EA doesn't have the guts to do it. It's called MFA and the rest of the industry adopted it years ago...
I think every F2P game has the exact issue, and they're usually competitive titles as well. So I don't think the industry has adopted anything.
I've never heard of MFA before, what is that?
When I hear people complaining about smurfs, I think the issue is that they want easier opponents. There's a couple solutions to that. One, you gotta make the game more casual friendly, and it seems like they've been trying to do that. I think the recent updates have been pretty good, not perfect, but a lot of good changes have come in the last year.
The second thing is what I keep going on about, game design. Give us more to do than just try to kill each other. Let us loot some stuff in order to be prepared for next round or something. Make interesting spots to explore again. Add more PvE elements. The extraction genre has so much potential that hasn't been realized yet. Apex would be the perfect game to show others how to do it right.
Once you start associating those multiple email accounts with a single phone number, all those secondary accounts won't get created anymore. Again, not too had to do, EA just has to get some guts and do it. If you require a phone number, SMS text code when setting up a new account and then periodically for subsequent logins, those cheaters are going to drop in numbers.
You'll also figure out real quick how many smurfy multiple account people you really have. They likely know already if they care. Seeing the same source IP address with multiple logins isn't hard to find in your web logs.
The other factor is that lots of people like to look like a smurf. They do the no badges on their banner cards thinking they look cool.
