[NathanOsullivan]

Long time OW player here.

Smurfs in overwatch (1) were incredibly obvious because

a) each players 'level' - which correlates directly with hours played - was prominently displayed, so new accounts were immediately identifiable; and

b) as a hero-based shooter, there are various macro strategies and hero-specific techniques that genuinely new players simply can't be aware of

Many smurfs would also have unintended "fancy" battle.net tags - think ツ kinda thing - which were only available by initially purchasing account with region set to an Asian country before then changing it to US.

At it's worst, one would simply look at the player names and levels on the loading screen and know which team was going to win before the match had even started.

Combined with relatively long match times and the inability to forfeit in Overwatch; the end result is many, many hours of dead rubber games over the years.