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.
If you can not see how “Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time” literally describes net cafes, then I don’t know anymore.
Bro, if you’re player X with smurfs A,B,C, then playing them all the same time as player X isn’t possible.
In a net cafe player X can play on A, player Y on B, player Z on C at the same time, which means accounts A,B,C will not get banned. Also, the are 2 IPs the public IP and the internal IP on the LAN.
How are you not getting this?
Because just since Player X can play on A and player Y on B, that does not mean it’s guaranteed to happen. There are so many people at net cafes, it’s very easy to have people in there that never played at the same time. By your logic, those must be smurfs - but of course they aren’t, they just randomly never played at the same time. So detecting them as smurfs would be wrong. Ergo it is not as easy as you say it is. Same with the other situations where households don’t have a game-ready PC for every person, that’s very common. They’ll never play at the same time but on the same PC/IP, thus they are smurfs?
I didn’t think I had to say it, but of course there’s more that goes into detecting smurfs. It’s not just those criteria. Win streaks or progression speed, payment modalities used (if any), social networks, reports, number of people on the same IP, and probably more.
If you can not see how “Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time” literally describes net cafes, then I don’t know anymore.
Bro, if you’re player X with smurfs A,B,C, then playing them all the same time as player X isn’t possible.
In a net cafe player X can play on A, player Y on B, player Z on C at the same time, which means accounts A,B,C will not get banned. Also, the are 2 IPs the public IP and the internal IP on the LAN.
How are you not getting this?
Because just since Player X can play on A and player Y on B, that does not mean it’s guaranteed to happen. There are so many people at net cafes, it’s very easy to have people in there that never played at the same time. By your logic, those must be smurfs - but of course they aren’t, they just randomly never played at the same time. So detecting them as smurfs would be wrong. Ergo it is not as easy as you say it is. Same with the other situations where households don’t have a game-ready PC for every person, that’s very common. They’ll never play at the same time but on the same PC/IP, thus they are smurfs?
I didn’t think I had to say it, but of course there’s more that goes into detecting smurfs. It’s not just those criteria. Win streaks or progression speed, payment modalities used (if any), social networks, reports, number of people on the same IP, and probably more.