[2020] Smurfing is a real problem on Clash. If Clash was restricted to level 60+ accounts it would solve 90% of the problem.

We're going to continue working against smurfs in Clash - we've got some measures in place already, but we definitely can do better! Smurfs in Clash are a major concern for us, but also a pretty rough problem to completely solve.

Increasing the requirements to play Clash are a possibility, but that carries a lot of risk. We've seen this before with the Honor restriction - even though a relatively small percentage of people were below Honor 2, every one of those people we pulled out of the pool potentially killed a team for 4 other eligible people. Game requirements can have the same problem, eliminating potentially normal accounts both through the restriction and through the people who would like to play with them. It's not off the table, but also something we have to be careful employing.

One thing to note is that the Tier system won't really have anything to do with it - Even within a Tier, you're matched based on the weighted average MMR of your team. So Tier I teams from the bottom portion of Tier I will be more likely to play other Tier I teams from the bottom of Tier I, rather than the Challenger/GM teams at the top. Obviously this line gets fuzzier once it gets near the end of the night, but we've found that most brackets are made within a fairly tight band of team skill. It's something we've been watching closely and tuning since the early betas (and will continue doing).

Totally get your concern on matching teams of similar skill together, but we think the benefits of competitive games outweigh the min/max potential. Most of Clash's rewards are just for bragging rights anyway, so shifting rewards around to try and deter smurfing is not going to have as much impact. In the case you're describing, where someone smurfs to pull up their friends, they're not getting any rewards on their main account anyway - so making the rewards they're not getting better or worse probably won't change anything.

Definitely not trying to say smurfing isn't a problem - we have a lot more tools at our disposal that we haven't implemented yet, but this is going to be a continuing fight.

Swiss tournaments are pretty good for large groups, but they are very inefficient time-wise. Since you need to wait for a round to complete entirely before moving to the next, if a game runs long it tends to drag out the whole experience, and it also results in too many game starts happening at once when each round resolves. You also end up with potentially complicated tiebreakers (as someone who's played in plenty of Swiss MtG and Netrunner tournaments, I know the pain of missing the cut on Strength of Schedule).

But personally, the biggest argument against Swiss tournaments is that they don't have a particularly good story - you don't know who you're up against until a round starts, most players can't even say how well they're doing until near the end, and players are often incentivized to intentionally draw in the latter rounds. For what Clash is trying to be (a competitive team event that most players can participate in), Swiss tournaments don't really check all the boxes.

We're still matching you based on MMR rather than your visible rank - so for people operating normally with a limited number of games, you'll usually be rated fairly.