Smurfing prevented me from playing LoL and Dota2, impossible to get into a game when you can't get off the ground, the opposition is made up of smurfs and half or more of your team as well, and you get shit on for trying to learn how to play.

Up timing, but depending on data permissions upon download they may also have things like device fingerprints. Agreed on the service management though. Brilliant work.

Playing in plat / emerald elo feels like each game is a complete landslide in favor of one team. I wonder if banning Smurf accounts would fix this issue and make games more fun

Your comment is really smurfy! I was just thinking, "This type of account should be called a Gargamel account, not a Smurf account. Smurfs are nice. Gargamel is the bad one."

You're an experienced player but create a new account to get matched against noobs. Since the game is free, there's no cost to doing so.

Smurfing is when a player has a secondary account so they can play against/with lower ranked players. Imagine a chess grand master putting on a disguise and going to a beginners chess tournament

Smurfing is when you play Ranked ladder on an alt-account in a much lower skill bracket with the intention to curb stomp lesser-skilled players.

It's a very big issue in any competitive multiplayer game, especially direct competitors of DOTA 2 like League of Legends and SMITE. Valve may just be the first company to start actively banning smurfs.

Basically someone with a high matchmaking rating creates a brand new Steam account and installs the game, pretending to be a new player. They then proceed to stomp on the actual new players and just be generally as toxic as possible. After all, if that account gets banned, they can always make a new one.

Smurfing is knowingly and deliberately playing at the incorrect skill-level/mmr/elo. Most times, people will create or buy a separate account that somehow has a lower mmr/elo attached to it, to do this. You can 'play bad' or 'throw the game' for 50 games in a row and your rating will tank a lot, so that's a bummer to encounter as your new teammate randomly... Then this player can win a lot of games in a row playing as 'themselves' and completely stomp games all the way back to their 'true' mmr. Does that help explain it?

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.

maybe ban the main account for a period? like first offense, 1 month

On top of my head (uneducated guess) :

• multiple accounts regularly logging in through a single IP
• day/time login patterns
• same champion pools
• consistently stomps games
• frequent higher than average KDA
• frequent higher than average CS/min
• higher than rank level winrate
• higher than rank level MMR

These items taken individually don't tell much. But when cross-referenced with other data, I'm pretty sure it becomes clear really fast when someone is smurfing.