Should Smurfing Be Against The Rules?

Content creators for miles just gasped!

For as long as time people, some of the bigger streamers/creators of the fog, including some Fog Whisperers have a vibrant history of purposefully dying at the end of a match to keep their rank down and continue to play at lower rank for content.

You'd be surprised at the activity in the past of some of the popular among us. Popularity in DBD makes people look the other way on behavior, one even being popular streamers who have history of N word, or even other slurs. They just say "oh I have changed" and fans simply forget it.

This is already a reportable offense. AFKing is against the rules.

You can get reported for being afk many games in a row already. But who would report that? Especially when the report system is what it is in this game?

Killers that have played for years and have not smurfed as far as we can tell get survivors with less than a 100 hours in the game. Now I'll be the first one to admit that time =/= skill, but there's no way anyone can get good enough in 100 hours to be a fair challenge to a 6k+ Nurse main.

You could argue that everyone, who runs a meme build or tries something new would be smurfing because they consciously decide to not use every tool available and risk to lower their MMR. I have thrown entire matches just to get one nice hit with Hillbilly's chainsaw when I started playing him. There have been days when I lost like 80% of my games because I tried something or I was paired with a strong SWF and didn't tunnel. What is with survivors who kill themselves to show respect for the killer, or killers, who let survivors escape through the gate because they had a good time? That would all be problematic. Basically the only way not to smurf is to either never change the killer or perks you're using because you could lose without them or bring the strongest stuff to give you an extra boost. The problem in my opinion is not "smurfing" but SBMM itself.

It is.

It's also different to the DC penalty system, as there is no auto punishment for it. The only reason the Devs will ignore any individual reports for DCing is, because there is an automatic punishment system for those in place already - which does not apply to AFKing.

That said, it is very unlikely you get banned for AFKing, simply due to how incredibly complex and inconvienient our current report system functions. In order to get banned for AFKing you need to:

1. Get reported ingame for it
2. Have someone record the match you play
3. Have said person go over to DbDs support page and fill out all the needed information (so they waste a bunch of time grabbing your SteamID64 and other details) as well as provide their recording as proof.
4. Repeat this process multiple times in a certain time span, because you will not receive punishment for AFKing once or twice (for the same reason why you don't get harshly punished for DCing once or twice)

Needless to say all of this takes longer than the actual game, meaning very few people will want to waste such a large amount of time on it.

In short, it's not because this wasn't a punishable offense already, but because of how bad our report system is.

See I don't need to play Trapper because I pesudo Smurf. When I play my games as Killer I play to have fun not to win. I'll play around with the Survivors like shake my head no at a pallet and when they nod and point at me I act like I'm sighing and bend my head down and walk to the pallet to get smacked or carry a survivor to the door and open it for them and let them jump off. Since I played this way stress is almost gone (few bully squads still want to bully) but I win enough to stay within that sweet spot of MMR

AFK'ing is already reportable, however no one bothers to do it because the report system is atrocious

Afking repeatedly should be punished yes. Apart from that I'm not sure how anything else would be enforceable.

Like if someone decides to play a bunch of games as perkless addonless trapper with an eyrie offering, who knows, maybe they want to challenge themselves. Maybe they hate themselves. It'd be a strange thing to be able to report anyway.

Another possibility is the killer two hooking everyone and letting them all go which I'll probably do during the event in games with lots of BP offerings in them, although I don't do that with smurfing in mind.

I always thought smurfing meant creating a new account from scratch to bully low skilled survivors.

I guess I could have technically been guilty of this in a way due to playing a lot on PS4/5, then buying it on Xbox just because I love levelling (not quite to the current extent of the game though). Then I bought it on Switch to play portable, quickly gave up though since the game ran awfully. Now I have started building up my PC account, that I gave up on after my second game years ago as someone was calling me the worst teammate ever and even went to my profile and left the comment there. Didn't want to deal with that kind of thing so that's when I moved to PS4.

As to AFKing. I played around with it a bit in the past. It was to see if I could get a 4k with blood warden once all gens were done or used wraith and played Hex protector, survivors can't see a lit hex and walk away lol. I downed whoever tried to destroy it. Just little things to break up the monotony and stress killer games bring.

As to deliberately dropping levels, when the old rank system was in I had no hope in red ranks so do admit to doing it there to low purple but never back to newbie levels. Don't do it now though as my mmr never gets high enough to suffer too much, still get some back to back games of much higher skilled players but at least it gives me manageable games eventually.