One Account Per Real ID = No Smurfing

[SpiderBrigade]

re: "offracing"

Am I the only one who thinks that maybe someone who can consistently win with all three races should be higher-ranked than someone who completely sucks with 2/3?

I mean, we already know that the game is going to keep copious statistics on games played. So you will be able to see if someone is an unstoppable Terran and Zerg player - but their overall rank will reflect the fact that they are weak with Protoss.

[FrozenArbiter]

re: "offracing"

Am I the only one who thinks that maybe someone who can consistently win with all three races should be higher-ranked than someone who completely sucks with 2/3?

I mean, we already know that the game is going to keep copious statistics on games played. So you will be able to see if someone is an unstoppable Terran and Zerg player - but their overall rank will reflect the fact that they are weak with Protoss.

But that is only going to discourage people from playing other races... At the beginning, maybe you can be a top tier player with all 3 races but look at the history of WC3 and SC - once the game matures, players pick one race, or possibly 1 race + 1 matchup.

Most people are not going to care, but if you are good enough to be competing for the top ladder spots (and thus the end of season finals) you definitely will.

As a thousand people have said before: the main issue with this is offracing. And no, playing custom games to learn a new race is not a viable option because that makes the whole ladder system useless. The whole point of a ladder is to help you improve and see how much you've improved.

I think the simple solution is to have a 1v1 rank for each race P, T, Z, R (and only your top rank even appears on your profile, and the race with which you reached that rank). And to reduce noob bashing even further (ie: an A+ player would destroy you anyday with any race), each player has the option to "copy" his current highest rank to all of his races (say once a week/month). That way you can actually assess how strong you are with your offrace by playing against people with whom you're strategically paired (if you play TvZ with your main race, you'll know what to expect when playing ZvT), but just mechanically inferior (because you're offracing obviously).
If that player has a wide gap between his races, he can allow himself to drop down a few leagues to practice against players of his mechanical skill level, but that's unlikely. A gold player will catch on relatively quickly and won't spend very much time in a silver league with his offrace anyways.

The only issue I have with having 1 rank/race is... how does points won/lost work, relative to your rank?

If I'm ranked #1 on the ladder, and have a really high ELL with my protoss... if I play zerg, with a very low ELL, do I lose a crapton of points? Or do I lose/win the same amount of points regardless of my actual position on the ladder? If it's the latter, then that is ripe for abuse I think, and will lead to a bit of an unfair ladder (the #1 player wouldn't have to play the #2 player ever, by simply off-racing).

Maybe there's a solution somewhere, because I like the idea of having different ELL for each race, but as it stands I think it's better to let people create multiple accounts, but start off at your highest ELL.

[REF]

What's the big deal?

For ladder matches I completely understand about worrying about your record, but nothing is stopping you from practicing a ladder map on a tvb or UMS setting. I hate smurfs because people who are that anal about records tends to disconnect, make a 3v1computer blood bath rush only or use plenty of cheese just to get a win. no thx

1 account per real ID = no problem with me

[Gifted]

Just a small point... Blizzard is basing this off "leagues"

1. When you join a bowling league, you can't reset midway.
2. One of the reasons for "resetting" is to allow for a fresh slate after trying new strategies. This is what "skirmish mode" is for as it won't affect your w/l ratio (Akin to practicing outside of the league)
3. Just like a bowling league, all stats will be reset at the end of the season.
4. By nature of the new division system, we should be able to find people at our skill level to play, from top to bottom. This was (in my opinion) one of the most legit arguments of smurfing was to actually "play the game". In theory, this issue should be resolved

Important disclaimer to my opinion: This is of course under the impression that the new AMM system upon the game going gold is tuned well and fixes many of the issues of the old system. I don't see any productive value in the "what if it's broke" discussion until it's actually broke.

[REF]

interesting comparison to Bowling...

The only flaw I see in that is that with Zerg, Terran and Protoss is like saying Bowling, horseshoe and shit i dunno lawn bowling? (all similiar sports with same mechanics yet different styles) Just because you're a killer bowling player doesn't mean you're a guru at horeseshoe and thus should not be in the same calibre league as if you were bowling.

Maybe there should be some little mathmatical equation which gives your account a skill level by the amount of points you've accumulated and games played.

[Gifted]

Then we shift the league to "martial arts" instead.

While some are very solid with their quick strikes, they may find themselves weaker at throws or weapon assisted fighting. This can be in terms of utilizing or defending.

This can maybe help explain my personal views... I don't view it as 3-9 minigames, but rather different skillsets within the "core game". Football can share that mentality in their running game vs passing game vs defensive playstyle, basketball in passing vs shooting vs dunking vs defense. The list goes on when you compare SC2 races as qualities of the game instead of portions of it.

[FrozenArbiter]

I was talking to Daigomi from TL earlier, and he convinced me that you can have different rankings for each of your races without any problems.

The way he'd have it work is this:

For the purposes of this example, let's use ELO numbers in place of ELL.

Let's say I am ELO 2000 protoss, ELO 1500 Terran and ELO 1000 Zerg. Losing games as zerg, would not affect my ladder rankings - only my highest ranked race would. If I were to increase my ELO with Terran to 2010, now that would be my ranked race.

There are a couple of problems with this:

- What if someone wants to play every race? They are going to climb a lot slower even if they are equally skilled with all races.

- What if someone wants to play specific matchups (that is, you play vs every possible race, but you don't want to play, say ZvZ so you play TvZ instead, but Zerg vs P, T and Random).

Anyway, it might work.

However, you should STILL be allowed to create multiple accounts, they should just all be tied to your master account, and thus start at a higher ELL than 0.
Why?

- This is a reason that the accountants at blizzard probably could not care less about, but... A family should not have to buy separate copies of the game to have their own accounts.
Yeah, they can't play against or with eachother without buying more accounts, that's fine, but they should be able to create their own profile.

It's like if you could only have one profile on Windows - ridiculous, no?

- Privacy. If you are someone good you might want to be able to play in private/secret, not being bothered by "user jimraynor99 has added you to friends list" or "HIHIH I LOVE YOU, WANT TO PLAY?". But just because you don't want to be hassled by random strangers does not mean you don't want to meet new people!!


For the people suggesting you should just play custom games if you don't want to play your main race or just want to goof around - that's stupid. First of all, public games are going to be rare - AMM is just too good. Second, finding public games that are EVEN, is a pain in the ass.
Just because I'm going to play my 3rd best race or play stupid strategies does not mean I want the games to be super easy/impossible to win :/

[Hammy]

The only issue I have with having 1 rank/race is... how does points won/lost work, relative to your rank?

If I'm ranked #1 on the ladder, and have a really high ELL with my protoss... if I play zerg, with a very low ELL, do I lose a crapton of points? Or do I lose/win the same amount of points regardless of my actual position on the ladder? If it's the latter, then that is ripe for abuse I think, and will lead to a bit of an unfair ladder (the #1 player wouldn't have to play the #2 player ever, by simply off-racing).

Maybe there's a solution somewhere, because I like the idea of having different ELL for each race, but as it stands I think it's better to let people create multiple accounts, but start off at your highest ELL.

Well anyways we'll most likely have some pretty thorough statistics concerning the win ratios for each matchup. Imo, if the rank is seperate, the ELL is seperate too (the rank should also somewhat represent the ELL right?).
That way, in the example you give, if you want to play a few games at your zerg skill level, you can do that without affecting your protoss rank (#1). However, if you offrace too much you won't be bringing any new games to your #1 rank as protoss, so the standard decay that they'll surely implement will knock you off of your rank.

If I had to pick between the two, I'd prefer this to the "One unique rank for your one account". I agree that just letting us create new avatars for our account and having each new account start out at our current highest ELL makes sense, even if in essence it's the same thing.

@Blade555: I have no idea what you're trying to say...

[Hammy]

- What if someone wants to play specific matchups (that is, you play vs every possible race, but you don't want to play, say ZvZ so you play TvZ instead, but Zerg vs P, T and Random).

I also thought that might be a problem, but doesn't race picking die with AMM anyways? :s

I really like the system you suggest though, and concerning:
[QUOTE]- What if someone wants to play every race? They are going to climb a lot slower even if they are equally skilled with all races./QUOTE]
I guess they could also add a "uniformize ELOs" button on the profile, that would make all of your ELOs the same as your highest so you could climb at a regular pace even if you change races every couple of games.

A down side is that I'd probably like to see how good I am with my offraces too so at least your ELO would have show up somewhere. In which case... you might as well just have three seperate ranks right?

That being said, for the sake of simplicity, I prefer what you suggested mainly because it prevents one player from appearing multiple times on the same ladder (so it makes ladders that much more reliable...).

[RamiZ]

Are you sure that only one account per CD-key wont be like WoW? I mean you have one account but you can make as many nicknames as you want. That is the only thing I can came up with, otherwise it would be pure bullshit.