Lately I’ve seen numerous complaints all directed, seemingly, at emerald, centered around the topic of smurfing/new accounts/botted accounts.

The thing that’s worse than any of that, and never gets talked about is sharing accounts. You have people on twitch doing this every day of their lives, making their source of income to ruin the game.

This is far worse for the ladder than smurfing/new accounts. The shared account is usually where it should rank wise with a decent sample size. The player is stuck but a high elo player will charge $xp to duo with them on a shared account Each of those games is ruined for nine people, but then the inverse happens. When the owner of the account plays again they are in too high of an elo for their skill as they didn’t climb there. No matchmaking can fix this. It’s against the TOS, but these players don’t care if they erode the very game that makes them their income, as their accounts aren’t low/mid elo so it does not affect them.

This then feeds the ecosystem as the player needs to pay $100 to duo with shared accounts in emerald/plat/gold to get back to that rank that they can’t maintain themselves. Again, ruining games on the way up and the way down. This should be talked about more as it’s an underrated contributor to why the games can be so lopsided.