Is this legit?

(K1X455) #1

I just came across this following from Wintergreen’s post regarding achievement boosting.

Does @Maisy mean using alt-accounts in DB is legit? I thought it was frowned upon… cause I do know prominent people here use them.

I didn’t know until now.

#2

There’s technically nothing to stop you from using “alt” accounts or multiple accounts. In Wintergreen’s case, I wouldn’t call that making “alt accounts”, but rather, taking advantage of privacy tools to delete your game account and “reset to zero”. Why you’d want to lose all of your items and progression, is your business. Personally, I’d like to keep my First Gen loadouts!

The only way this would be unfair is if, as an experienced player, you started to queue up for ranked matches, as you’d be playing at a far higher skill level than the game would matchmake you for. As the majority of Dirty Bomb’s players join games via Quick Join or the Server Browser, this shouldn’t be much of an issue. But in other games that rely on MMR to put people into matches, “Smurfing” can worsen the experience for newer or less mechanically-skilled players.

Multiple accounts can become a big can of worms. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple accounts by itself, but it does pave the way to more nefarious scenarios, including:

There may be other scenarios that I have missed, but you probably get the idea. All that aside, if you’re trying to use multiple Steam accounts, or you try to use the account website to skirt or circumvent a game ban, that’s not allowed. It also won’t work, because you’ll still be banned.

Hope this helps!

#3

I didn’t know they’d wipe out your account progress either, thus making the appeal to make a new account pretty useless. As I said in that old thread, I’m not and never have been into ‘smurfing’ or ‘pubstomps’, but YES I have had two DB accounts. I respected this game too much to do anything questionable like that. Anyway, I ended up using one for solo ranked queues by the time season 2 rolled around while I kept my original one for queuing up with 2 of my buddies. My case has always been a matter of OCD or boredom, though. I got tired of duplicate cards not being sorted, special editions being untradable, and my original account was cluttered. The thread you saw was created after I had pretty much attained and collected everything I wanted to do/have in DB and my love for the game started to fade. Needed a fresh start to give me something to work towards again.

Funny enough, in hindsight, I now regret requesting that account wipe because shortly after it went through, they announced they were stopping development and Steam trading FINALLY became available. So here I am, back on the game trying to unlock my final 4 achievements remaining before 100%. Then I can wave goodbye to DB feeling like I really did absorb everything it had to offer. :smiley:

Edit: But yeah seriously, anyone wanna meet up to complete Five Point Palm? Haha.

(K1X455) #4

[quote=“Maisy, post:2, topic:233810”] The only way this would be unfair is if, as an experienced player, you started to queue up for ranked matches, as you’d be playing at a far higher skill level than the game would matchmake you for.

But in other games that rely on MMR to put people into matches, “Smurfing” can worsen the experience for newer or less mechanically-skilled players.
[/quote]

I think you widely missed the part about the more able players hopelessly going up against more organised levelled players; I don’t know what portion of the playing public sank with the same situation in that sort of thing and added to the bad game experience SD is trying to avoid altogether (talk about double whammy). Further, you’re saying is that SD has no method to empirically detect an alt-account being used for ranked purposes(?) and it is just accepted that it is an inevitable possibility or consequence; conclusively, it taints official Dirty Bomb’s Ranked matches and results, and any or every data that is ever derived, whether official match or not.

This confirms my suspicion that leads to my frustration as a true supporter of the game in solo queuing ranked. It also affirms what we suspected regarding the capability of the EAC regarding fair play; which appears it’s just curtailed by the UE3 engine and the game design itself and I feel so naive to go along SD’s approach of game balancing by looking at the data they gather, the community sentiment being aired and SD’s intuition regarding the matter.

A congruent phenomenon is observable right now and a round of nerfs are being done on another game because a certain group of the playing population have discovered a “meta” for both offence and defence team play and the push for play diversity is seriously challenged. I guess the mentality of imbalance to sway play styles is some paradox developers are hopelessly trying figure out to sustain end

(DarkangelUK) #5

Ranked smurfing was very common. In solo when skilled players got very high ranks they’d struggle to find a match within their skill bracket, and sometimes queue for over an hour with no match found, so they’d resort to using a smurf just to get games which skewed the lower level experience. With duo high skilled players would use a smurf to play with friends which would end up boosting them to a higher rank than they should be, when that player then played solo without their carry they’d be out of their depth and ruin the higher level play for their fellow team mates.

(K1X455) #6

Well, you found the solution to the problem.

EDIT: But that was 1st Quarter of 2016…

It’s also a pretty bad experience to run over new players in R6:S… and R6:S has significantly a lot more player base than DB so saying that “the game has low pop” doesn’t hold ground.

But what’s fair in R6:S is that 1:5 can still hold a balance unlike DB’s 1v2.

(Teflon Love) #7

Back in the day there was this Christmas event where you got all kinds of outfits and weapon skins just for logging and clicking on the Christmas tree. So I wrote a few scripts that created 1000 DB accounts and collected all the presents from the Christmas tree for each of them. Thank you, Python and Mouse Recorder..

Once trading was available I could sell those on some shady sites and now I don’t have to go to work for the foreseeable future.

Ok, seriously, I didn’t write such a script but I’d be surprised if no one else did.

(K1X455) #8

Can you fix DB’s netcode? Please UDP to server… TCP to client…

(Teflon Love) #9

Nobody can fix DB’s netcode (or the EV bug). You’d have to reimplement it from scratch with a sound architecture. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Jokes aside, writing a script to exploit an existing software, developing a web based multi layered business application or implementing a hardware banging computer game each take very different skills (even though there is a certain common basis) so just because you can do one of them does not automatically mean you can do the others.

#10

We do have the means to detect whether people have more than one account. We mostly use this to prevent players from evading bans, but this capability can also be used to investigate other problems. I won’t go into the specifics on how this works, but you can draw your own conclusions on how we might do so.

If you make a new account and start playing at a higher skill level than where the matchmaker has initially placed you, then it wouldn’t take very long for the matchmaker to adjust your MMR so you start being matched into the correct games. You’ll get a few matches where a high-skilled player is playing alongside lower-skilled players. It’s not perfect, but there aren’t really any automated solutions that could reliably mitigate this.

Back when we were still running DB Ranked Matchmaking, it wasn’t unheard of to have individuals or parties intentionally throw matches for the purpose of de-ranking. This is something that we wouldn’t knowingly permit - we would apply matchmaking suspensions if they were found to be damaging the experience for other players and we could increase those penalties if they were found to be skirting the suspension via alt accounts.

(K1X455) #11

A shared terminal with multiple STEAM log-ins will skew your data. I’m sure of that.

EDIT: @teflonlove I guess I got my hopes up too high :grin:

#12

Playing the devil’s advocate here because I don’t believe this to be the case in my experience. Playerbase was already small enough during weekdays that there’d be imbalances or unranked players at times regardless. Anyway, suppose you’re ranked high gold to mid cobalt as a solo and you have a hard time getting matches, what exactly is the point of making a smurf account? To feed your ego? Those are called pubstompers, and they stick to public matches. In my experience because I’ve been a solo mid cobalt, the people at those brackets actually care about ranking up and getting points for season loadouts. Steam trading was not available at the time so I do not believe an argument could be made for easy wins against lower skilled opponents just for the sake of farming ranked cards. And as @Maisy said:

This is what placement matches are for, and in the scenario where its algorithm fails, it would not take long before you gained separation. You could go 5-5 in your preseason matches and be a mid to high gold within 10-15 matches if you played well.

However, I did occasionally see this. I wouldn’t say it was common or problematic, but definitely more noticeable. To this day I still feel like I was playing a different game than a lot of people on these boards. Ranked had its fair share of issues, mostly attributable to a low playerbase, but it was not broken or poorly implemented. It did what it was supposed to do to within the limitations of its environment. Ranked was awesome. I hate how much people hated it.