The developers of "Overwatch 2" explained in today's stream (opens in new tab) the constant battle that must be fought for fair matchmaking, and said that one of the most difficult problems to solve is players who smurf (opens in new tab).

"To be clear, don't do that," Lead Meta Designer Scott Mercer said, referring to players who create new accounts to see how fast they can climb the matchmaking ladder (opens in new tab) or dunk on new players, aka He spoke about smurfing.

Mercer and Senior Software Engineer Morgan Madden said that smurfing ruins matchmaking for new players because the system is designed for gradual skill improvement. Overwatch 2's switch to free-to-play from its predecessor brought a massive influx of new accounts, and the new matchmaking system was carefully constructed to accommodate them.

"The situation we don't want is something like, 'Hello, I'm a new Overwatch player,' where we completely mis-assess your skills and you lose a bunch of matches because you think you're much better than you actually are," Mercer said.

Teams are not the only ones who are doing this.

The team had to build a system that would accommodate new players, returning players, and players who just wanted to stomp people who were worse than they were. New accounts have less information, so matchmakers have to predict your ability as soon as possible, but smurfs can make that go haywire.

"One of my pet peeves is when people GM outside the ranks, like creating a new account and playing as a GM," says Madren.

In the later stages of Overwatch 1, the "Unranked to GM (Grandmaster, the highest rank in the game)" challenge became popular among influencers, which carried over into the sequel. Some do it for educational purposes, while others do it for fun to eliminate low-skilled players.

According to the developers, both approaches upset a rather fragile system. When smurfs wreck the game, all the other new players have their invisible skill ratings (MMR) thrown out of whack. Not only is it a miserable experience to lose to someone who is much better than you, but the matchmaker must essentially readjust the match by chance.

Maddren said that they have "significantly reduced" the number of matches to adjust for new players to deal with smurfs, but said that unfair games still occur before that happens.

Like Valorant (open in new tab), the developers of "Overwatch 2" probably cannot say exactly how they are fighting smurfing to avoid players gaming the system. It's a problem that has plagued competitive games for as long as the ranked warfare mode has existed. It's why "Overwatch 2" requires new accounts to register their phone numbers (opens in new tab) and requires players to win 50 unranked games before entering ranked matches. But it is also why there is a black market for buying Overwatch 2 accounts that are ready for ranked games.

The fight against smurfs continues because there is only so much Blizzard can do without adding too many barriers to real new players.