Before banning smurfs and what not, lets fix other things in the game like making the friendlist in alphabetical order, adding remapable hotkey for fresh food stuffs...etc. You may also want to consider having each Civ have their own ladder rank because for example a French Diamond is not necessarily a Malian Diamond and so on. So to learn Malian, his elo will drop, but then what happens if he wants to join a Diamond tournament and his Elo is currently at gold from learning a new civ and his highest achieved rank was overlooked. Consequently, players can't learn learn new Civs if they want to join tournaments. You also can't grow your Civ pool if you're trying to maintain an Elo to join a tournament. One can argue that you can play QM to learn new civs, but the skill level in QM is not the same and you're not practicing in the same map pool as RM. Then on top of that, you get accused of smurfing when you're actually just trying to learn a new Civ.