3 months ago Valve said “Smurfing is not welcome in Dota” but its already like nothing has ever changed. The update that was supposed to reduce toxicity has also changed absolutely nothing.
Why is Valve even wasting its time with these things if none of them provide permanent solutions?
I think everyone’s MMR should be reset to 0 at the start of every season. 20 placement matches, and you get placed literally based on how many of those 20 matches you won.
If you do want to keep MMR as a number, they need to find a way to measure individual performance within a team and as a result every player gets a different amount of mmr based on their performance. I think k/d/a with ward consideration would work sufficiently, with 2 assists being worth 1 kill, 2 de-wards being worth 1 kill, and any kills made within range of an observer ward result in an assist for the owner of said ward. At the end of the match, within a team, each player is ranked according to their k/d/a/w and the best performing player on the losing team loses minimal mmr while the worst performing takes the biggest hit.
if you can measure individual performance in relation to the team - you can much better identify smurfs as in their thrown games they’ll come up as the worst player on their team while their winning games they are the best. If that happens even semi-regularly, it would throw a flag for investigation. Sure, some clever and skilled people could probably disguise their smurfing even in such an environment - but it will be hard and would most certainly reduce the number of smurfs while also improving the matchmaking accuracy