Ban the Alts | Voters

Ban the Alts

Figsy_Games

Only allow 1 account per player in Ranked mode. Geoguessr is one of the only ranked games that has the top of the leaderboards full of Alt accounts.

Other games have solved this issue by banning Alts, Only allowing 1 account Per player in Ranked mode

November 26, 2024

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Figsy_Games

Marcus Is there any thing happening with this post? it's been almost 5 months, the post has a ton of support (over 350 up votes) Yet we still have silence from the devs. A response would be apricated

Marcus

Merged in a post:

A reporting option for obvious smurfing

ActionFish

1300+ rated players in "Gold", 99% winrates with less than 100 classic games played...these kind of accounts absolutely ruin the game for everyone else. Even if we can't ban the alts, there should at least be a way to report and nullify games where the opponent has been found smurfing. Nobody should be losing their day's progress because of pro players who are too scared to play against opponents their own level.

March 24, 2025

GeoSynxzy

This NEEDS to happen, when i either play ranked i come across way to many alts, also when i watch youtube (wookGG is a great example for this) i also see them coming across alts an awful lot.

Riandur

A way to reduce the number of alts in ranked would be to, rather than ban it outright, discourage it by convincing geoguessr to instead add an unranked mode. That way, top players who don't want to risk rating on their main account could just queue unranked instead of creating an alt - reducing the risk of having to play an alt or cheater for everyone else.

Edit: Just in case, maybe not mention this side benefit on those suggestions though.

Hide_陳

just put elo cap on lvl of an account or how long since the acc was created

Rockmelon

I think this is never happening because it makes them money and they don't care about the ranked experience.

Palmitas

Please please please let this happen. I like to play Moving, but its unplayable. As a 1000 rating player, 1 in every 5 games is just a Japanese username in Silver III with a 20 win streak. Its not fun at all.

speedlemur

I hate alts as much as the next person, but I think realistically this is too hard to implement.
Multiple flatmates or family members can easily share the same IP Address.
Hardware identifiers like MAC address are typically not available to the browser.
There are other ways to attempt to uniquely identify individuals, but they are too privacy invasive.
My solution is to make alts get to their real ranking as fast as possible.
In overwatch, you do 5 placement matches before reaching your real rank. You also gain more elo when on win streaks. These things combined mean alts get to their real rating within a few hours of playtime.
For this to work the requirement of ranking up maximum one division per week would need to be dropped.

[GOB] Treemendous

speedlemur problem with this is cheaters, we dont want a bunch of cheaters at 2,2k elo constantly

Juliette

speedlemur I agree - all of our family play and I don't think there is any way you could distinguish our set-up from alt accounts (we even use the same computer sometimes!) 
There seems to be a tension between detecting cheaters before they annoy higher-ranked players too much and allowing alt accounts to reach their true level as quickly as possible. I also wonder if they are trying to avoid having higher levels players level up other people's accounts for them by making it rather tedious? 
I also suspect it would be a major overhaul of their codebase to change the current ranked system drastically so any solution ideally needs to be a fairly simple one. It depends whether geoguessr want to encourage or discourage alt accounts.  If they are happy with alt accounts it would be good if they made alt accounts official (but perhaps private so you can't see the account it is associated with) in some way. 
Geoguessr is interesting because unlike say chess it's pretty impossible to reach a certain level without playing a certain number of games on the site (whereas chess is a real-life game too), but people will still have different amounts of 'offline' knowledge that they come with.

Shadow

[GOB] Treemendous they just need to implement a system where accounts like these get flagged as alt accounts and place them in a separate queue where they only face similar accounts. problem solved

TTV CLD_Pika

That is a good idea, adding a level restriction for comp, like level 60 or something would be easy to preventing alts

Figsy_Games

TTV CLD_Pika This is not a bad idea, make it for only Master and Champions so people can still play ranked Bronze, Silver and Gold but can't alt the top ranks

Juliette

TTV CLD_Pika I like this idea. All our family play, sometimes on the same computers (especially if we e.g. are on holiday and don't want to lose our daily challenge streaks!). And I have no idea how you would distinguish us from alt accounts.

But having had to invest enough time in an account is a good way of capping progress somehow, which can be measured by the level. I like the fact that it isn't just about duels but than you can have played other modes/formats. I think it would be enough of a deterrent to make not creating alt accounts worthwhile.

Okki

All for it but as other's said, it is kinda hard to implement and 1v1 casual duels could remove some alts. Though, many alts seem to be higher ranked than their real persons...

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