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League of Legends requires a phone number to create an account on the korean server, and there's reasonably widespread belief that that rule is a huge part of why the korean server is regarded as the best in the world. In 10 player competitive games being held hostage by a bad actor sucks. On other servers players who get banned just make a new account which leads to the game not even banning anyone since "oh they'll just make a new account." But in Korea if you get banned 3 times you're totally cut off, so people behave better.

> League of Legends requires a phone number to create an account on the korean server, and there's reasonably widespread belief that that rule is a huge part of why the korean server is regarded as the best in the world.

I'd attribute their gaming culture over their dystopian digital surveillance tbh.

I would not, and I think characterizing it as "dystopian digital surveillance" is disingenuous. Operators of free to play games only have so many mechanisms to make bans matter, and people behave differently if they know there are negative consequences. Overwatch has a significant toxicity problem as-is.

> I would not,

None of the games I play have this problem. So you're wrong. I'm not claiming that this proves the problem is culture specific, just knocking down your counter claim.

> None of the games I play have this problem.

ooh! if you know of popular free to play games with no toxicity, im absolutely in! which games are these?

I humbly disagree. The problem is that a single can grief, smurf, boost, and otherwise ruin the game for 9 other players, and then immediately create another account.

It is a huge problem in League of Legends especially at the lower ranks. I’ve almost quit several times due to it. They’d have a much larger player base if implemented worldwide.

similarly japanese servers in mmos have typically been regarded as being high quality despite having no entry barrier other than language.

But it takes less than a minute to get a new phone number is that really enough of a barrier?

They only except certain providers, so no Google phone, prepaid, etc.

> No prepaid

Great, so I will never play your game.

It's amazing how many oblivious, ultra consumer, pro- getting scammed, pro-monopoly, pro- proprietary protocol, people are on this so-called hacker forum. The policy you are asking for is literally one of the highest things I've ever seen that go against the hacker ethos. If you pay more than $10/mo for a smart phone in the US (prime audience of this site), you are getting scammed, no even then it's a scam as you're getting something only worth 0.001 cents.

Being able to play competitive video games is not the hacker ethos. If you don’t want to comply with their rules that’s fine.

I guess because what I wrote seemingly doesn’t agree with your viewpoint I am all of those things.

Not sure what the cell phone bit is about.

I thought the (all games) Korean servers required actual citizen ID, not just a phone number (though the two could be linked, I'm not familiar).

My understanding is that your phone number is linked to your ID somehow.

> Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame.

But of course. After all, we can’t risk giving certain cohorts of people too much self-determination before they’re fully indoctrinated into The Economy: http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019-11/06/content_5449157.htm

(Google Translate disclaimer)

“Implement the real-name registration system for online game accounts — To this end, the "Notice" requires strict real-name registration, and all online game users must use valid identity information to register for game accounts.”

Strictly control the length of time for minors to use online games — It is stipulated that no game service shall be provided for minors from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day, and the daily period of statutory holidays shall not exceed 3 hours, and other hours shall not exceed 1.5 hours per day.”

It's not clear why having to log in to a company's servers makes something not a "game". Are MMORPGs not games?

The comment about broad appeal is also a bit confusing to me. Why do things stop being games because they're designed to be accessible to many people?

It's not logging into a server (MMORPG-like) that kills it for me, it's the push to link the in-game identity with a real-life identifier. It's not (in an almost literal sense!) a game anymore at that point.

For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.

taking notes for Metaverse apps here

> It's not (in an almost literal sense!) a game anymore at that point

I’m curious what your definition of a game is?

I’m not sure what definition of game you’re using, where having to validate your account with a real life identifier (which feels vague, since basically every multiplayer platform already has accounts tied to email addresses, because of course they do) makes something “not a game anymore”. But that’s not the definition that I’m aware of in use anywhere else.

Email addresses aren't real-life identifiers, although they could be used that way. And on the inverse, I can buy a burner phone with cash and defeat Blizzard's requirement easily.

But it's pretty clear what Blizzard is going for here, since we know their platform is competitive and thus harsher on individuals viewed as bad actors. Blizzard knows full well that most people signing up to play only have one phone number, which is most certainly a real-life identifier for those players.

My point is that if players feel compelled to self-censor their interactions online for fear of repercussions[0], then they are not playing a game. They are instead representing themselves as individuals on a social network with competitive/gamified attributes. Requiring phone numbers to play is just a method to gently reinforce this.

To each their own - this might be exactly the type of game you like to play. But it departs pretty strongly from the classical definition of "video game" that I grew up with.

[0] For example, your primary phone number being disallowed access to all Blizzard services. Maybe they go even further and request that 3rd party services ban you for off-platform violations. Moved this down to a footnote so as not to spread FUD, I'm sure they don't currently do this, nor do I expect them to. But cross-referencing phone numbers would make it very easy to start.

Overwatch’s only social features are in-game voice/text chat, whose purpose is primarily coordinating with your team.

If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.

Putting something in a footnote doesn’t make it it FUD, for what it’s worth.

> If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.

Why not let stupid people shout stupid things ...

Because it’s disruptive to the rest of us trying to play the game?

Come on: also in real life stupid people say stupid things all the time.

Yes. Is that relevant here?

In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.

> In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.

Do you seriously claim that "not preventing" already means "supporting"?!

To be hopefully crystal clear: Overwatch voice chat is a privately hosted service that’s built to be used by players during overwatch games. Blizzard moderates the content of that chat to remove disruptive content, where disruptive means “chat that makes people not enjoy playing overwatch”. In general, that’s people shouting slurs at their teammates or rambling about nonsense. Changes like the phone number requirement are part of their approach to expand the preemptive blocking of this activity. And I am fully in favor of them doing this, because it improves the quality of the game.

I mean the real-world social aspect of the game - from eSports tournaments to casual/competitive play. Even the conversation we're having now. How others interpret gaming as a whole. A social system is created where only certain kinds of behavior is acceptable, and disputes are arbitrated by the platform-holder. When those disputes are won or lost, the platform-holder presumably will attempt to take action against individuals - not IP addresses, emails, or usernames.

We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.

Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)

> that seems like a win for gaming to me

Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.

This doesn’t seem coherent. The team voice chat is used by players coordinating to play the game. If somebody is shouting nonsense into their mic, they’re interfering with people playing the game, which makes the game less fun. If they’re shouting slurs at other players, they’re making the game less fun for those people. And blizzard wants the game to be fun, as do I.

Why are you arguing like a lawyer instead of coming up with a valid point for me to rebuke? Obviously I was referring to just the general notion of people saying racist stuff in chat. It's no the end of the world when that happens.

Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.

The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.

My point feels pretty clear: Blizzard is doing this to raise the effort required for people to evade bans by making new accounts. People get banned for cheating, for being disruptive in chat, or for throwing games on purpose. I support this decision by Blizzard, because those things make the game less fun to play.

No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.

Well congratulations, you prevented 0.01% of "bad things". I've been gaming for 20 years on competitive FPS. Cheating is a tiny issue. 99% of cheating reports are bogus.

not true. cheating is a HUGE issue in competitive games. call of duty also requires you to validate your phone number and they have a kernel-level anti-cheat called ricochet. games like tarkov are swarmed with chinese cheat accounts and undetectable radar cheats. there are monthly cheat subscription services where you pay hundreds of dollars for access to sophisticated aimbots, etc. counter-strike employs sophisticated frame-by-frame anti-cheat heuristics analyzing shot and input patterns, they have a system in place where good actors can review cases of alleged cheating (called overwatch) AND they ALSO require you to validate your phone number if you want to play comp matches. games like r6 siege and apex legend employ similar systems. stop pretending “cheating is a tiny issue”. either you don’t play competitive games as you claim or you have no idea what you are talking about.

Cheating is a tiny issue as in, its still rare. It's more rare than bugs in your typical shoddy post-2000 game. Any competent gamedev can deter it easily. Since they are deterring it, its rare for you to encounter a cheater. Remember, we're primarily concerned about general games here, not specific high ranked matches. Those are the _only_ place that any sort of extra validation would even start to be acceptable.

All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.

Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.

Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.

How is that not a game anymore?

It is certainly not a FUN game (cough Apex) when beset by cheaters constantly. I’ll gladly give up anonymity to make the game fun again.

In the case of Apex Legends, I think the experientially high incidence of cheaters and persistently active cheat manufacturers (as well as almost-cheats like using mouse and keyboard on consoles for superior aim assist) are both a compliment to the game and a side effect of battle royales. Larger lobbies and survival of the fittest equates to a higher likelihood of encountering the cheaters that exist. Even if less than 1% of players cheat, it is quite possible to encounter one during an evening of play. And it sometimes seems like the cheating comes in waves, where a new one will be wildly popular for a while before the team in charge of it catches on.

All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.

I'm sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me. Doubly so when, in this case, the goal is to identify you as a person by the platform holder who needs to validate to the best of their ability that you're not a ban-evading cheater ruining other people's games. You are not personally identifying yourself to other players.

No, you have it exactly right. I posit that a service run by a platform-holder who has a legitimate need to validate players' identity in this manner, for these reasons, is not quite the same as the video games (even the multiplayer ones) which have existed up until now. They have built something very different. And it's great! I just think it's also important to discuss what it really is, why, and the current+future implications.

I feel there should be a new term to describe this type of game. Up until now "eSports" has been used but that seems passe. Metagame perhaps? Might have sounded dumb a few years ago, but there's strong precedent now :P

How about we just call it a game? It’s not clear why we’d need to find a new term because you have a nostalgia for games based on their login requirements.

> Are MMORPGs not games?

Yes. I've never played one, but from what I can tell it's like a forum where you go on with an identity and form clubs with people and chat about stuff, then you play some wonky subgame for 1 minute in that 3 hour session, then you go press a bunch of buttons to gamble for virtual prizes, etc.

Do… you know what an MMORPG is?

Some hints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online...

Yeah, the subgame is the PVP. But that's rare and requires players to play for thousands of hours to get to whatever level and probably is like an RPG but with worse mechanics because the devs spend most of their time adding new items and currencies and other things peripheral to the game

But thanks for the downvote, you really got me there.

I upvoted you and here's why.

I've played lots of MMOs when I was younger and it's always the same: the "game" doesnt really start until you hit the "endgame" (usually near max level with decent gear).

Until that point, you are often grinding and doing daily events, like a job.

And we often joke that once we get there: "Finally, I get to play the game".

Then there's fear of missing out with seasonal or other limited-time awards etc. which " forces" you to play when you don't want to.

Jonathan Blow has written about why this isn't fun game design.

And those are some reasons why despite having played a lot of these, I agree with the pithy comment that they aren't games.

Yeah I was excited about the idea of MMO back in 2000 when my friends told me about one they played. Then realized they're all scams (and do not even have any MMO element; You can't actually have a bunch of players fighting and when you do it just lags and bugs) and dodged that bullet.

It is still just a game though. For fun. Just because they want to posit their toy as a sport doesn't mean it is.

Luckily there's plenty of competitive games out there that are actually fun. The meatgrinder of matchmaking isn't actually the elite competitive environment these gamers think it is.

Real competitive video games are played IRL. Your online eSport PC game of the month does not compare to a real tournament at your local arcade/community college/bar/netcafe.

If your game doesn't have those, then it's probably a skinner box posing as a ladder with different colored badges as prizes.

I don't understand these games. With all the hoops you have to jump through just to start playing and then all the grinding to level up it seems almost like applying for and then working a job. Except you're the one paying, not getting paid. Is this actually fun or am I missing something?

It's a nice day outside, think I'll take my dog for a walk.

What about Chess? By your definition, since have to work really hard to level up the elo, and for some professional individuals it is how they survive. Do we suddenly consider Chess no longer a game?

You know, some people can really feel and obsess to thee enjoyment when they learn, progress and eventually beat worthy opponents, such enjoyment dog walking will never endow.

So if I walk into an arcade, and the owner stops and says “hey, we’ve had some incidents recently and you need to write down your name and phone number on this sheet of paper before you can play anything”, all the arcade cabinets suddenly stop being video games? That doesn’t really make any sense.

If you’re trying to argue by analogy, your opponent will always find a way to disagree over the irrelevant aspects of the analogy

If you’re arguing with someone who is making an analogy, you’re wasting your time because it's so easy to ignore their point.

Analogies only work between people cooperating to understand something, so just ignore ‘em if youre not working together

And if you're a console player you also get to pay monthly for the privilege of playing online. I miss when game companies didn't host their own games and you could just download the server portion and host it yourself (or rent a server). You can't even play a lot of the single player games/modes without a connection now.

> heavily policed speech.

I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.

>I miss when game companies didn't host their own games and you could just download the server portion and host it yourself (or rent a server)

I have hosted several servers for several games over the years but they have huge disadvantages too. One of them being that server admins can see IP addresses of players, and that leads to DDoS. Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason, had a popular server(which turned into the only server as the game got old) where the admin would kick women if they didn't respond positively to his creepy flirting.

And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.

> Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason,

This also describes the behaviour of common game providers. The difference is: you can switch to a different server if you are annoyed by this, but cannot get rid of the game provider/publisher.

> And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.

This could in principle be implemented.

I’m nostalgic for the clubhouse feel of private servers but I played CounterStrike 1.6 in the early 2000s and also remember nightly encounters with aimbots, wall hacks, porn sprays, toxic voice chat and uneven teams because there was no centralized matchmaking.

Todays system certainly has trade offs but the competitive experience is so much better.

> And if you're a console player you also get to pay monthly for the privilege of playing online. I miss when game companies didn't host their own games

Just to be clear, you aren't paying for game server hosting, only for the console's lobby/matchmaking services. The game servers are still paid out of pocket by the devs.

This is why many games try to get away with player-hosted servers (which gamers misname P2P), where a player is assigned a host role by the matchmaking service and the rest connect to it for the duration of the match. Which means one other player can see your IP and if the server disconnects the match is interrupted.

I think self-hosted servers are one of those things that do not scale as playerbases grow, as casual players get added who have zero interest in hosting servers. Look at Minecraft which takes advantage of this by offering Realms, a paid server to host servers. There isn't even a public realm option, I believe, it is all friends only.

With multiplayer versus games that do not have a persistent world that players feel is their own, there's even less incentive for a player to want to host their own server. Minecraft is still an example of this: even without any Mojang hosted servers, the majority of players aren't joining random servers from a server list. They're joining the well-known and popular server networks, like Hypixel or Mineplex.

Of course they scale well. Each server gives space for N players.

As you say, these are social networks, and your ability to connect with other people playing the game opens all kinds of avenues for attacks and harassment as social networks. No one wants to put up with misanthropes just to play their favorite video game.

You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.

> You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.

In these former days where people behaved differently on the internet, the internet was an insanely weird and wild place where the people did and posted things that are typically not considered acceptable behaviour anymore.

To get just a glimpse on this topic, see, for example, the following linked article and its dicussion on Hacker News:

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025477

Games are games.

The 0.1% of cheaters ruin those games so much for the masses that it requires actions like this. Unaddressed cheating will literally destroy a game and bankrupt a company.

It's sad that we have come to needing this kind of measures to prevent cheating, but the companies aren't the ones to blame for it.

This goes hand in hand with cheating, but I imagine this would also help reduce smurfing, which can be just as frustrating as dealing with straight up wall hack types of cheating.

I think it’s tempting to look at policies like this and associate them with other trends that are broadly concerning. Minecraft comes to mind. But this seems like a very different situation, with legitimate arguments for why this may be a good thing.

Smurfing being seen as something to be reduced/eliminated is also a very new concept to me. When I played MMORPGs, having a smurf (or "alt") account was VERY commonplace, it was simply an alternative way to play the game.

Now, increasingly, the context seems to be that it's unacceptable/unfair for some reason. This feels wrong to me.

If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.

It must be because encountering alt accounts in an open-world MMO is very different than being paired with smurf accounts in a competitive matchmaking system.

This I can understand, but I hope the anti-smurf thing doesn't go _too_ far. Alt accounts are the only way to re-experience the bottom of the ladder/beginning of the story in certain types of games.

People complain about smurfing because mediocre players don't want to be matched against good players (but they will always complain that someone who wins is a smurf).

It's only because matchmaking has gotten so good that it's even a problem. In the old days you matched with whoever was available and that was that.

Smurfs are also different from alts in my mind at least, an alt is something like a low level WoW character when you have a main that is max level; a smurf is more like Carlsen signing up for a chess.com account under an assumed name to gleefully squish people until his rating gets high enough, then starting another account. It only really works in games where each "match" starts off fresh for both players.

Playing a Smurf vs playing someone at your skill level in competitive is a completely different experience. An enemy widow sniping your entire team over-and-over again is not the same as going overtime and nearly drawing a payload nap.

I’m wondering if you even play overwatch?

I'm agreeing that Smurfs are a problem, I'm willing to help develop an AI to detect unexpected above average skill and boot those players, we'll call it Gargamel.

MMOs (the current mainstream variety) are completely different games. That's why alts in MMOs are not called smurfs. This should be blindingly clear.

Smurfs in competitive shooters suck because the only reason you make a Smurf is to play in ranked lobbies of much lower skill level, ruining the experience for those who are actually playing around their rank level.

> Now, increasingly, the context seems to be that it's unacceptable/unfair for some reason. This feels wrong to me.

The context in which "smurf" is used these days is very different. But if you try to look at it from the original MMO definition of that term, that would explain why it might feel wrong to you.

In an MMO, people refer to using many characters on one account as smurfing. That's not the case with competitive multiplayer games, where it refers specifically to using a separate account to get (initially) put in a matchmaking pool with lower-skill people, in order to "have fun" obliterating them. As opposed to playing with people of your skill on your regular account with a calibrated MMR.

In an MMO, having a smurf doesn't ruin anything for anyone else. It is just a way to play a different character class, how else is a person supposed to do it? Asking users to restrict themselves to playing only one character class (e.g., mage) forever out of many available in the game is just strange. You still have to level up that smurf character, collect appropriate gear, etc.

In a competitive multiplayer game, like CSGO/League of Legends/Overwatch, etc., none of this is the case. You can play any character on one account. You aren't expected to play one character forever, that would make zero sense in a game like League. What smurfing refers to here is existing players with high MMR creating a separate fresh account, and tearing through new players (because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players). It is basically an equivalent of Mike Tyson disguising himself perfectly to look like a newbie, and then going to a local boxing gym and just beating everyone there within an inch of death in the ring.

This is the context in which smurfing is being discussed these days as a negative, and I agree with this stance. Your example of smurfing in an MMO, however, is perfectly valid and causes no harm, so it is totally fine.

> What smurfing refers to here is existing players with high MMR creating a separate fresh account, and tearing through new players (because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players).

Considering the example that you just gave, the word "rightfully" in "because new accounts, rightfully, get placed in a lower MMR matchmaking pool, along with other new players" is exactly the bug in the game code that enables smurfing.

If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast (and if they are not that good, get thus "picked apart"), smurfing "to have fun killing some low-level players" would be impeded by a lot.

> is exactly the bug in the game code that enables smurfing.

Not really.

A smurf who doesn’t lose will quickly rise to their appropriate rank and stop being a “problem”.

> If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast

This is generally exactly what happens. But unfortunately it doesn’t prevent smurfing and is trivial to get around by simply losing placement matches and throwing just enough games to keep the winrate low enough to stay in the given rank the smurf wants to play in.

They screw over the other team when they’re playing to win. They screw over their own team when they need to lose. The only people having fun in these scenarios are the smurfs, and maybe their followers.

The only truly effective tool right now is a ban. And this is why measures to prevent ban evasion (like requiring a phone number) are on the table.

I don’t know what the ideal solution is, but do know that Blizzard has been trying to address this in various ways for awhile, with somewhat limited success.

> If such new players with win streaks far above than what is to be expected by their level ranked up very fast (and if they are not that good, get thus "picked apart"), smurfing "to have fun killing some low-level players" would be impeded by a lot.

That just tells me you haven't had much experience with this. You are correct, if they keep going on those massive win streaks, they will grow out of that new player MMR soon enough.

You know what's the simplest and most common workaround to this? Just tank a few games in a row intentionally by doing nothing or playing poorly on purpose.

It is even more annoying to deal with than with someone who is tearing through low MMR on a massive winstreak, because you can at least theoretically (but unlikely) beat those players. Cannot really win a game when your teammate plays poorly on purpose or doesn't do anything at all.

Because in a MMO you would start a new character from scratch and most of "power" is tied to the character's items.

Games like Overwatch is skill based and have a skill-based matchmaking, a new player will play with other beginners, and as they get better the game will put them in matches with better opponents. A smurf in this context is someone that is already really good in the game, but because they just created a new account, they are put in matches with beginners just so they can steamroll them. And takes a good while for their account to reach the same rank as their main account.

While in MMOs there's still some skill involved, but it's much harder to compete with someone is better items, compare to Overwatch where two players with the same character have the same everything it all comes down to the player skill.

>If I can't play the game the way _I_ want to play, what use is it as a recreational activity? It's supposed to be a "game" after all so I don't understand where are all the rules and revisions are coming from.

I would argue that competitive games are less about recreation and more about getting good, which can be fun, but that seems to be secondary.

Have to agree with the sibling that smurf != alt.

I have and use alt accounts. I have two Overwatch accounts, but they’re around the same rank. I don’t intentionally go and play against players far below my rank for the sole purpose of being a troll and destroying the game for others.

Smurfs are another thing entirely. Some games like Rocket League have become borderline unplayable since going F2P because smurfs are everywhere in competitive. I once went on a 15 game losing streak with every one of those losses involving an obvious smurf. And I’m not talking about “they were just a better team” kind of matches - these were players that come in and 1v3 the entire other team, and who clearly are playing with game mechanics only found at the highest levels of the game - and I am not one of those pro level players.

And these aren’t just people with an alt account. They’re people on their 20th account (because the others have been rightly banned), and it ruins the game.

Smurfs existed when the game still cost money, but skyrocketed as soon as it didn’t.

Having an alt should should still be fairly easy. Getting a 2nd phone number isn’t hard with various VOIP options.

Consider a BR game.

100 players per game.

0.1% being cheaters means 0.01 players per game are cheating. If you play 100 games, then maybe a cheater will be in your game. In fact I have played 10K games in one BR and 2K in another, and these stats seem about accurate.

I have had far more games ruined by bugs due to irrational people being the developers.

I also beat most of these cheaters since they don't know how to play the game and they can just be outplayed.

Congratulations on proving how your outrage is over nothing. And your intrusive "fixes" are over nothing.

downvote why? out of arguments?

I think you can still play unranked without a phone number, though. So, people who don't want to take the game seriously don't have to. It's a nice compromise, between that and fighting hordes of cheaters/smurfs/whatnits

"Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp."

Is this a bad think? F2P games are more lottery than video games. There would be statistics how many kids play it. In the best case scenario this would result in regulation of those practices.