Smurfs
Can anyone tell me what reporting "Smurfs" actually does? I feel like it never really does anything
Forum Discussion
I'm glad you asked this because I have questions about smurfing too. It has to be one of the most difficult forms of cheating to punish because how do you actually define and even catch smurfing? For instance, I had two guys on my team in wildcard last week that said they both came over from Fortnite and it was their first week in apex. They were even scared we had lost once because we fell off a tall cliff and they were used to taking fall damage in Fortnite and were surprised when they saw apex didn't have fall damage. They both got shotguns and just shot at people the best they could, but they had built up lightning quick reflexes from their time in Fortnite and we actually finished 2nd place in that wildcard match. Makes you wonder when people saw them with fresh accounts and default skins if they didn't report them for smurfing. So, how can we tell someone isn't just a veteran FPS player who happens to get lucky in their first apex matches versus a smurf.
On the flipside, my first victory in apex was my very first match after my orientation matches were done. I was placed with two guys with new accounts and they both told me they were championship players who were trolling beginner lobbies for the fun of it, and that if I kept my mouth shut the whole game and just stayed behind them they guaranteed me my first victory in apex. I didn't know this violated the rules at the time so I went with it. It's funny I was so green at the time one of them said "You M-F-, you just made me waste my push" and I responded "Hey, what does a push look like? I'll go try to find one in the loot boxes in this building." They laughed at me and explained what a push was, and told me to stay in the firing range for awhile before playing when I told them apex was my first FPS game. lol Anyway, we won that match and it was definitely smurfing, they could have been reported for that.
So, I'm wondering how do they know someone is smurfing? Also, as the OP says, does it do anything to actually report it?
As long as they are below lvl 100 (even tho I know ppl that are lvl 250 and still can't hit anything), you can report them for smurfing. If they get reported 10x, the account will be banned.
"It has to be one of the most difficult forms of cheating to punish because how do you actually define and even catch smurfing?"
It isn't complicated at all. Two different accounts running off the same IP address is your first red flag. Sometimes this is legitimate. Two siblings who play on the same hardware, etc. But it's very obvious when that "new" player gets matched into a bot lobby and leaves with 25 kills and 6k damage. That's red flag number two. Red flag number three is when a single IP address has DOZENS of individual accounts. There are more red flags but these are already more than enough. Respawn should freeze every account on the IP address except the oldest. Or grow a pair and develop an mmr system that identifies mechanical skill and automatically rushes a "new" player to their correct mmr without giving them dozens or even hundreds of easy lobbies. At the expense of real players.
Of course, the matchmaking in this game is so loose that the developer could implement auto mmr on new accounts and we would likely never even realize it. Bad matchmaking is their cover for anything they do wrong and for anything they passively allow the players to do wrong.
So sure, they could identify and eliminate smurfs tomorrow. In any one of a number of different ways. Ban the account, or just move the player to their appropriate mmr without allowing them cake walk matches. Either would work. But their player count would look so much worse if they purged that I'm sure EA would panic and... I don't even know. Shut down the studio altogether? As if there's much of it even left at this point....
Nope, you have to artificially inflate your player numbers any way that you can, and you also have to prop up content creators any way that you can. Up to and including the tacit approval of various different forms of cheating. Of which smurfing is only one. Respawn loves to say that multiple accounts are okay as long they are not created with sole purpose of cheating the matchmaking algorithm. So I'll say it for what must be the tenth time in these forums: If anyone can name me a reason for a secondary to exist other than to cheat matchmaking then I would love to hear it.
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