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External link →That was part of the rest of his post. This specific quote is stating that they high rank players are smurfs, and they don’t want to piss them off cause they’re engaged and spend more money in Valorant.
I get that people who are determined will find ways around the system. However, simple deterrents are proven to be effective in both the virtual and physical world. He and Rito are just posturing.
I never took the stance of "Not wanting to piss off high ranked players" because they spend more money. If you work in games you will learn very quickly that your highest engaged players spend money on your game, this is true of every game I've ever worked on.
High rank players are often high rank because they are high engaged, which usually means they probably invest into your title as well. It also means statistically they are more likely to invest money into your game. This means that high rank players, who are the smurfs, are also more likely to buy accounts because:
I've said it in other comments, but we have done a smurf investigation(which we haven't done a good job of communicating the results of this but we are still finishing this up). The amount of smurfs is very small, it doesn't make the issue not important but it's so small that trying to think there is a positive revenue impact isn't even something we looked for in the data.
We don't care if there is an increase in revenue from "allowing smurfing", in fact most of the design decisions around ranked this year have been to combat smurfs. Also alot of the design decisions yet to come for ranked are also combating smurfs. Lastly I don't work on revenue, or worry about it. I don't think about revenue at all when making design decisions and I haven't been in a meeting where we've made a revenue based decisions for ranked in Valorant.
If there is anything to take away from my comment it's that "We are trying". We are investigating lots of ways to combat smurfs, and it's not a straight forward answer. On top of having multiple ways we could combat smurfs, we want to make sure we are solving the reasons why players smurf and actually using our time wisely. Is it worth having 3+ engineers work on SMS verification for 6 months, or have 3+ engineers be able to improve match making, roll out 3 features that reduce smurfs, as well as work on our upcoming tournament mode? The answer to that question requires us to figure out how impactful a change may be in reducing smurfs.
I didn't see the comment to this post, because it was removed but I want to say; Every decision we make for competitive Valorant includes the thought "How does this effect smurfing". There has been no effort to ignore it, or to allow it, because it is against our primary goal of ranked. I'm sorry if you've run into smurfs, but I believe we've done a pretty good job combating them over the past year and we have more coming in the future. Yes we could always do better, but we aren't done and will continue to try and improve ranked for everyone.
(If you want an example of things we do to combat smurfs that aren't directly smurf related, look at the last change to 5 stacks. One of the primary goals of this change was to make it so people could play with their friends regardless of rank, not having to make a smurf. There are changes like this for the past year that aren't directly combating smurfs, but a side effect of them is to reduce the amount of smurfs or reasons players feel the need to smurf)