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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I am struggling to figure out the vision / roadmap that the Blizzard executive team is looking at. Clearly, none of this is about having fun anymore. These principled approaches where you ban a logical human from your product for all eternity don't really work out in practice.

If someone is willing to spend hours and days setting up virtualized hacks via exotic PCIe memory snooping interfaces, I don't think they will experience an SMS requirement as even a speed bump on their journey. In fact, for many types in this space, it would serve as a form of encouragement.

The real answers to this involve blended statistical approaches, community ran instances, pre-game lobbies, et. al. You can still have a highly-competitive ranking / ELO system in place without top-down tyranny. It just looks a little bit different and requires some lateral thinking.

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It seems clear this was always about data harvesting. The scuttlebutt about cheating was just the excuse.

I was under the impression that this was more to deal with smurfs, which are always a problem with f2p ranked games, and were even an issue in overwatch 1 that was paid. Hacking was never an issue in ow1, at least not a widespread one at all.

Yeah it was. I play OW with my friends to stay in touch now that I live in another country. Smurfs (high level players creating new accounts to dunk on low level players) are a really big problem in the game.

But yeah this has been handled poorly by Blizzard, with pre-pay users having problems and my wife not being able to play as they don't let you change country without sending in a photo of your ID.

Do you know if they ever released data on the prevalence of smurfs as they detect them?

I'm curious because in playing some other games that have detailed 3rd party stat trackers, a lot of users I thought were for sure smurfs actually weren't.

Like someone in the match would have a 50% headshot rate, but their career or season average was like 7%. It looked like they were just having a really lucky game. With 10 or 12 players, it doesn't seem crazy that a good portion of games have 1 player who's just playing a better game than they normally do.

Long time OW player here.

Smurfs in overwatch (1) were incredibly obvious because

a) each players 'level' - which correlates directly with hours played - was prominently displayed, so new accounts were immediately identifiable; and

b) as a hero-based shooter, there are various macro strategies and hero-specific techniques that genuinely new players simply can't be aware of

Many smurfs would also have unintended "fancy" battle.net tags - think ツ kinda thing - which were only available by initially purchasing account with region set to an Asian country before then changing it to US.

At it's worst, one would simply look at the player names and levels on the loading screen and know which team was going to win before the match had even started.

Combined with relatively long match times and the inability to forfeit in Overwatch; the end result is many, many hours of dead rubber games over the years.

> These principled approaches where you ban a logical human from your product for all eternity don't really work out in practice.

works in korea

Doesn't SK use their equivalent of a social security number for website signups? I don't think that would fly in the US

for most games yes, this is how they enforce bans on cheaters and are able to throw professional gamers in jail for cheating https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4041362/Video-gamer...

and limit how much time school kids are playing games (they ended this now) https://www.pcgamer.com/south-korea-is-getting-rid-of-its-co...

I agree that social security number and jail time probably wouldn't fly in the USA but I think if you had something like Valve prime but instead use driver licenses instead of phone numbers then it would be a good way to curb cheating. And if you choose not to be verified then you can play in the pool of potential public cheaters, or go sign up for some games with anti-cheat (Valorant / ESEA / Faceit) that practically install spyware on your computer.

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