I find smurfing funny. I’ve never tried it in overwatch, but in other games with good match making smurfing doesn’t last very long. You rise to the level of incompetence really fast. I think the last time I smurfed in LoL I got about a dozen games before I started to hit a wall, which was like half as long as my previous attempt.

I actually wonder a little if smurfs in a game like overwatch with a steep starting cost are tracked and treated special to keep that revenue stream.

That's why buying low mmr accounts for a couple of bucks is a thing, you get tens if not hundred+ relaxing matches for few cents each

Maybe things have changed, but up until recently Smurf detection usually didn't work all that well

"people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time"

This is why I think PvE is more sustainable for a player base and more conservatively solid as a business plan. WoW for instance.

But then by definition it isn't PvP and isn't going to get the same player base.

Designing a game around PvE is hard though. It's difficult to create an AI challenge that's interesting and can simultaneously challenge extremely good and mediocre players without feeling impossible.

I think the future of PvE games is going to be in AI. If game developers could put a DeepMind-playing-StarCraft level of AI into games without immense cost, then it's going to change games quite a lot. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could have AI offer a challenge to players for longer without feeling unfair. (It's still AI that doesn't learn based on the player though, which means that the players would eventually figure out the puzzle of the AI.)

Better AI is always a good thing in PvE, but as you say, hard to do.

I think the immediate future is asymmetrical roles for humans.

For example, one side is playing FPS for a Kill/death ratio basically, the other side is a single person playing RTS for a win/loss ratio.

IE Mechwarrior team deathmatch. Team of multiple human FPS players against a single human MechCommander-with-basic-AI-team.

It'd give scenarios more flexibility and allow for human intelligence to combat the meta.

And allow the FPS people to get a 2 or 3 to one kill ratio.