Today, we permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts that have been active over the last few months. Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence.

Additionally, we have traced every single one of these smurf accounts back to its main account. Going forward, a main account found associated with a smurf account could result in a wide range of punishments, from temporary adjustments to behavior scores to permanent account bans.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] xep@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This seems like a reasonable approach but the smurfs have already ruined all the games prior to being banned. I wonder how difficult it is to prevent smurfing altogether? Doesn't seem like it'd be easy at all.

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For Korea and China, probably quite easy.

Both regions require you to register for the game using a residential ID due to strict internet laws in those regions. China's are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you'd see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.

As for the West, the only companies from my experience that genuinely ask for personal details beyond a username, email address and password are those that host shoddy Korean MMO's and have notoriously bad internet security. Valve have tried to address smurfing in the past by requiring accounts to register phone numbers before they can play Ranked, but this can easily be bypassed with cheap burner phones and other services.