Hmm this discussion got me thinking what developers could do to counteract smurfing, but they all seem to have large drawbacks.
If they tied your account to IPs (assuming IPv4) in some capacity, it would cause other people on your network to not be able to play or ranked what they shouldn't. Also ISP's can change your address if you aren't on some buisness plan.
If they tied your account to your motherboard like how Windows activates, it gets into the problem that upgrading becomes a hassle for non-smurfs and actual smurfs could still just use another laptop/pc.
If you tried some kind of analytics approach similar to how insurance companies and banks try to detect fraud, that kind of undertaking is immensly costly and could ban non-smurfs until the model is trained. Also high level playstyles in competitive games become similar that it would probably mistake users.
The only three ways I can think of that could pretty reliably identify smurfing would be:
Tying your user account to some physical form of ID, like your goverment ID card how apparently South Korea wants/has had internet cafe's do. LINK The privacy concerns and identifiy theft associated with something like that, is unthinkable to me.
Tying you as a person to some external device like a TAN generator could work, but would make signing up to these games as fun as opening a bank account. Also would not still not stop people from signing up a S.O or sibling to that and using their account.
Since IPv6 is a 128bit long compared to the IPv4 32bit allowing for quote:
"
So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future
"
You could envison using an IPv6 address to link to a user account. However this kind of static assignment even if technically possible is another huge privacy concern.
There could be a more crowdsourced solution of people reporting others of smurfing, though in competitive games with rumoured "toxic" communities, the abuse of that would again outweigh the benefit.
So yeah, smurfing is an interesting game specific consequence of the ease of signup in games, for which existing stricter user authentification mecanisms would make those games incrediby user unfriendly.
Log in to comment