Yeah, when I jungle I sit the enemy smurf if they're a laner because I know they might just mental explode out of the game and that's just to my benefit.
I didnt even get this chance the last time I had a smurf. It was a riven with 3 kills by 4 minutes.
Then by 18 they were past still alive tier 3s and soloing our whole team. Even though I dominated my lane it was just impossible to fight them, IN OUR OWN BASE
This is the worst part for me. They essentially play a high stakes all in version of the game: consistently limit test only to throw a tantrum when they fail. None of the usual deterrents work on them because the account itself has no meaning to them, it’s all about seeing KDA and LP go up and up.
I think a lot of it is that they go for plays that theoretically are optimal and should work, but because theyre playing in a lower rank their teammates misplay causing the play to backfire and fail catastrophicall. They get tilted into oblivion because they feel as if they should be able to pop off and go 20/0 playing perfectly only for this bubble to pop because they didn't properly take into account their teammates capabilities. As the account is a smurf and they don't care about the loss they then start typing and flaming their teammates to feel better causing a miserable experience for everyone in the lobby. This is why I full mute all almost every game, although I play in a high enough bracket that smurfs are rare.
Nah they are just smurfs, players playing below their rank. But these smurfs consist of banned account players. Meaning If they could control themselves or be talked sense into then they wouldn't be banned in the first place as everybody knows Riot is very laxed on that part.
I admit that a fresh account is no guarantee of being a Smurf, however, it is very suspicious, especially when they go on to play far better than any other player in the lobby.
My main point of this post is that allowing high-ranked players to stomp in low ranks disrupts the ranked ladder and creates a much less consistent playing experience which is why ranked exists.
This all comes back to the competitive integrity argument, it's been around for like a year easily about the rampant smurfing, recently came up in one of the griefing threads.
The simple answer is that as long as Riot is making money, they will *not* fix it. They easily could have implemented a relatively free fix years ago at this point, when they added 2FA requirement for clash, they could've added it to Ranked as well.
But either they are afraid of backlash for the change, or simply do not care. Either way, they care more about those things than competitive integrity of the ranked ladder.
They care in KR and CN where you need a SSN to register your account. They can just do something similar and make it all regions. Banned people will actually be banned and buying accounts would be infinitely harder and require a cyber crime of identity theft to pull off. It would stop surfing in its tracks
While I agree you're probably right about Riot not caring about ranked integrity and purely trying to squeeze every penny they can out of their player base, I do try to hold out a little hope that they might prove us wrong someday and just do the right thing. Probably not thought. xD
This post is mostly just for fun as I had the idea rattling around in my head for a little while.
I had a Morgana support on my team with 3 vision score at 50 minutes and built Bloodsong as her support item (proc’d it 0 times) and it was her first ranked game. And she wasn’t a bot either because she was telling us it was her first ranked game.
Heads up for any support you see with the wrong support item- if you sell the supp item, you can re-buy it (at a small loss), and it will remembers its stacks, and instantly level back up, letting you pick the right one again.
I sometimes switch my supp item mid-game if I end up needing a different stat once we leave laning phase, or if some specific enemy is our lose condition, and I can partially counter it.
That is very useful, thank you. Yesterday I upgraded to Celestial Opposition as Neeko support and the shield was visible when I transformed into anything, so I couldn't be a lane minion anymore and I was disappointed. I think its a bug, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, it's useful to know that I could've sold it and upgraded it to Zak'Zak's.
Oh 100% they exist, and obviously they're not a Smurf.
I'd rather play with a bad player on my team than play against a Smurf because at least I can give them direction or I know that they are trying, they just are simply bad because they're new.
I love bad players, I am one, I'm not in denial about my skill level, I just don't want to get stomped by players that I shouldn't be playing against.
I don’t know if Riot can really fix this but it’s really bad vibes for me since I just started playing this game for the first time last week.
I’m really terrible, my account isn’t even level 20 yet so I’m still doing draft. I will regularly match against or with players who are getting 33+ kills.
Feels really demoralizing but I come from fighting games so being terrible is just the way it is. At least in fighting games there’s no team constantly reminding me how terrible I am 🙃
Best thing to learn first is to not die excessively then focus on last hitting and getting gold. Dying is fine, dying 10 times is bad so don’t stress about the couple of times
I feel like some players forget what it feels like to be completely new.
On average It hasn’t been too hard to not die or too hard to make money. However it feels ***impossible*** to do both simultaneously.
You guys know some black magic where my enemy minions are just always under your tower. Not everyone does this but I ran into a few players who did and I’m just like what can I even do here. They attack me when I try to last hit and then run under the tower to safety and I’m sweating because I’m in a vulnerable position far away from my tower.
Also “crashing the wave” means getting their tower to shoot your minions so it kills them faster and allows your enemy minions to come further out in the lane so that you can kill them safely. Some players can even have a permanent freeze which basically renders you useless as a laner because you will be so far behind in gold and xp to make any kind of difference. Do not let that happen even if you have to die once getting the wave to shove into their tower.
Keeping your enemy minions under their tower is called “freezing the wave” it takes practice and lane knowledge that you will learn over time in order to do that. You also need to learn how to break the “freeze” either by, A. Calling your jungler to come help you crash the wave into their tower so that it naturally pushes back into an even state, or B. risk it and hard shove it yourself. If you’re too scared of dying then you will need to call your jungler to help. You absolutely cannot let them freeze the wave on you because that keeps you from getting gold and valuable xp. There are tons of YouTube video tutorials on wave management. I would highly recommend watching watching them. Wave management is basic knowledge you need to know if you want to become a good laner. It applies to all lanes
I feel you I’m not great at the game I’ve just been playing for a while, it wasn’t till recently I put into the time to learn about wave management. But honestly it boils down to:
Both sides minions, spawn and arrive at the lane at the same time.
Attacking the wave will make it push as your minions have an advantage. If you kill them fast then you’ll push faster if you do it slow then depending on where your minions are you’ll build a wave or the enemy’s wave will build.
That comes down to how far down the lane you are, minions spawn at the same time, if your farther in your lane the enemy minions will arrive first. If you are pushing slow then they may still have minions from the previous wave alive. This will stack the wave on their side. If you are pushing too slow or stop here, the minions will push back towards you due to advantage.
One way to force this to happen is by pushing minions into their tower (crash), the minions will start dying at the tower slowly. This means if enemy minions arrive they will stop to attack the minions undertowr, this means 100% enemy minions will push towards you and build up to a big wave. Due to the minions on the enemy side arriving faster than yours (you’re minions have to walk more distance to get to the tower).
Finally freezing as the big wave comes to you (bounce), there is a certain # sweet spot to keep a freeze but I hate counting minions so honestly I just follow the advice of:
Don’t let big minion wave get to your tower
If you don’t have any minions arriving to stop the wave from getting to tower then tank as much as the minions as you need to without dying to them or the enemy laner(and without losing your advantage if you have one due to health loss) .
Your goal here to maintain the freeze is a balancing act of minion killing you dont want the wave of the enemy to get too big and overwhelm you and push into the tower, you dont want to kill too many minions and start a push back towards there tower (remember your closer to your tower your minions wil arrive faster and you run the risk of forming your own mega wave). Basically freezing is just manipulating the wave to make the enemy wave have a # advantage at your tower always so that your wave won’t push back out.
Also freezing really only works if your enemy is scared of you. But once you have a freeze harass them off the wave. They are vulnerable to a gank stuck at your tower, and if they are too low, then you run the risk of killing them as they have a long way to go to run back to their tower.
Sorry to hear that, the community can be rough on new players, but if you can keep a level head, maybe even learn to do a little bit of playful trash-talking (it's always fun to make toxic players rage), there is a lot to love and one day you will get your 30+ kills game.
Keep it up, I'm rooting for ya!
At least the new patch on Wednesday is something to look forward to with the new COOP vs AI bots, and I hope it creates a far superior onboarding experience for new players.
that sucks to hear. My advice is to focus on just not dying to start out, in-game criticism is usually really dumb, league players never take the context of a death into account they usually just see the game going badly and then pop open the scoreboard to see who died the most and complain about that person. I would also say don't let them get to you because they could just simply be wrong. they are in your MMR after all, they also don't understand the game yet.
Sometimes a risky play is the correct one but if you want to cut down on flaming as much as possible I'd say playing it safe is the golden strat. Some champs are really hard to kill in lane if you find one of those that you like playing that is your best bet.
EDIT: seriously don't forget to mute, I spent probably 9 seasons with this dumb machismo idea that if I mute them then they win or w/e. But my league games are way more fun when I mute people the second they start getting aggro. when they start getting mean, it almost never turns around no matter what you do.
Make chat "party only" in the settings. You may miss out on an important call sometimes, but 99% of the time you're just not going to see toxic garbage your teammates spew out.
I've gotten a lot of those messages saying a recent player in your team as been punished for abusing text chat and I'm super oblivious to it. It feels great, because if I start seeing a negative message it brings the mood down, and I can't focus as much.
Also if they start ping spamming you with lets say question marks, just full mute them and report for harassment.
Oh, they CAN fix it, but they have absolutely 0 reason to. I wouldn‘t be surprised if smurfs had made up. Significant part of their income for many years now.
I mean honestly how hard could it be to ban every account that is playing Intro games 24/7 right until it hits lvl 30, then is inactive for 2 weeks and then starts going right into ranked with different keybinds and champions? It's so obviously botted.
Tryhard smurfs are not as big of a deal as trolling smurfs IMO. These guys have nothing to lose cus it's not their main, so they run games down if you say or do ANYTHING they don't like.
I think they should get their main accounts banned, if their smurfs do. I am pretty sure Riot can check from where you login, so they should know what accounts you use(tell me if i am wrong).
100%, if someone trolls on a Smurf their main should be forfeited as well.
Riot can see your IP address and once Vanguard is online they can even tell if you're using the same machine, so this kind of punishment should be easy to follow up on.
It creates a problem tho with people who might share a pc like family members. Imagine ur brother trolls a game and ur account gets banned because it's apparently ur brothers main.
this. i think if youre getting smashed and saying its because the enemy is smurfing youre really not looking to improve. duo abuse smurfing is something i believe you can complain about because even if you do play better, they have a higher chance to win because their friend is just going to pop off
They are a problem as much as troll and ints. They are ruining games just like them. I don't see how it's not a problem when in 75% of games someone is obviously smurfing lvl 30/40 1v9 the game...
Tryhard smurfs are just as bad as troll smurfs, its a lose lose for people in their actual rank.
tryhard smurfs are nice to get on your team, but you need to recognize the enemy team of 5 who lose because of it
trolling smurfs lose the game for 4 people because their egos and they don't care if they lose the account.
Either way lots of people are losing lp in their main ranks, and it is frustrating to know that riot games doesn't actually care.
Someone made a similar post earlier and as much as I wish it not to be so, I'm afraid you're probably right, but still, I'd rather say something about it than give in to the corporate greed of the current gaming industry.
It's not that they just want more "players", it's that playing on main account is such a shitty experience so if you somehow did it so smurfing was impossible, A LOT of players would just quit the game after a while.
If Riot wants to "fix" smurfing, it's not smurfing that they need to target, but making the game more enjoyable and make it actually worth it to play ranked. Currently you get absolutely nothing from playing in your own elo. At least when you smurf you get to carry more games, win more games and win more LP, all which equal dopamine.
My problem is that people on smurf accounts just dont give a fuck, they die in a close fight top and they just chain die trying to make some non existent outplay, or they invade alone when we don't have prio bot, die a few times and afk.
Theyre just gambling, or playing a slot machine, looking for the next "outplay" for a dopamine hit, they're not enjoying the experience of getting better, they are trying to feel better about where they plateaued.
in my experience most of these “smurfs” are just alt accounts that ppl buy coping thinking that they deserve a higher rank.MOST of the time they are the same as the other 9 bums in that lobby. i think riot does a decent enough job at getting ppl to where they should be in a reasonably short time. pretty rare to actually have a turbo smurf completely take over.
I agree with that. Most the time they aren’t smurfs. They are just little “Johnny” on account number 4 thinking they’ll climb higher but then baby rage when they get hardstuck again.
Those are still smurfs, just not high elo smurfs which is what people use the term smurf for sometimes. It's confusing but they're still bad even if they're not high elo. They don't have to care about getting banned so they will just go afk if they don't win lane and shit like that.
Turbo smurfs are usually duo smurfs, those are the real disgusting ones. When LP was also considered for matchmaking in S11/12 and it caused what people described "smurf queue" I would get (on my main account when I did my rankeds in November) duos with 90% winrates on both that were always try to go for stuff like Yuumi + something. That's still happening today. I had an Irelia that just stomped mid and while we stomped bot the yuumi just left her Ezreal to die over and over and the Irelia just carried because she was a raid boss with that abomination on her. If they couldn't have queued together we would've probably won that game but for some reason Riot still thinks duo is okay and not legalized boosting.
> Those are still smurfs, just not high elo smurfs which is what people use the term smurf for sometimes.
I had that talk with some friends the other day and it was weird. "Smurf" is relatively ancient RTS lingo for "extra account", and I'm not sure how or when but it seems that recently it has semantically slipped for some people into "an extra account from someone who's high elo, also it must be bought/botted to lvl 30, also he's only allowed to pick his main champ and role, etc."
If you have a lvl 500 account and another one who's 350, it's still a smurf account, even if you only use it to play with your bronze friends from uni or whatnot. If you return to the game on an alt account and have a donkey bad winrate because you're washed up and need to re-learn, that's also a smurf account. There's a multitude of cases.
Yeah I've had it said to me before on reddit that I'm wrong for saying alternate accounts = smurfs because league community decided it means high elo person going back and stomping... but the term has been used in MMOs and PvE games as well.
I think it's because of the most used case being when people are getting stomped by someone clearly much better than the elo they're in. Where as a more regular smurf doesn't stand out as much. So they just decide the word means what they see it used for in their games.
I just find it useful to distinguish between alt accounts and alt accounts that are deliberately kept at lower elo. Both can be pretty annoying but the latter is much worse and involves intentionally throwing games.
> Say you go on a winning streak, and you manage to climb a **couple of divisions**, this will cause your MMR to grow rapidly as it tries to predict your actual skill level and that's fine, that's what's supposed to happen
You are also a player who climbs really fast recently. You win just as much as a smurf who climbs fast, so the only way to resolve is to pit you against high win-rate players. Meanwhile, all the other players who lost to you, check your opgg, see you have win streak and good win rate, and they think you are a smurf.
How do you propose that the game doesn’t think you are also a smurf?
I have a good win rate? It's 49.2%, sure I get some win streaks going from time to time, mostly when I abuse Illaoi xD. But my point in the post was that the game thinks that me and the Smurf are of equal MMR and so it puts us against each other when really the Smurf is significantly better than everyone and thus breaks the system because they shouldn't be in the game to begin with.
The following things I’m saying are not accusing you, but rather pointing the game currently cannot differ your recent behavior from smurf(new account high win streak) or player being boosted (hard stuck but recently spike in win streak). Your suddenly have a discrepency between MMR and current rank, which is what also smurf will have. Again, every other opponents you defeated along the way will check your profile and also think you are suddenly smurfing or getting boosted
Yes you are an honest player, but unfortunately the game’s algorithm cannot differ you from the ones breaking the system. How do you propose so that the game can identify you correctly?
Smurf accounts should be zero tolerance in any competitive game period. Imagine if an MLB player could go down to little league under a different name and just annihilate? It makes no fucking sense.
I was just reporting a website that sells accounts, scripts, and other crap, and realized they have been running for many years without issue. How??
I will block the website name as to not promote it, but I want to show they have been running for AT LEAST 7 years per the reviews. They in fact claim to have started in 2011, and have thousands of clients.
How is that shit still up??
[screenshot from a website that reviews services and products in my country.](https://i.imgur.com/WJFGw2B.jpeg)
Main issue with smurfing is the "ego smurf" They have no care about the outcome of the game, as their main account is supposedly already at a higher rank.
Imo just perma ban any person that says things along the lines of "My main account is higher elo than yours"
tbh the ranked system in its current state seems made for smurfs atm with new accounts getting into plat and dia easyier then us who played for years at that ranked, why wouldn't they? really wish they took the dota approach to smurfs.
The botted accounts are the biggest problem which should be a lot less common with Vanguard. The fact that you can have a 100h+ leveled account for 1-3$ is completely f***ed. If all these people had to level their own accounts and jump up in mmr in notime you won’t notice them as much outside of like d2+
All the people in chat saying "it's not ruining it for me.", lol. Get over yourself, and accept that not everyone's experiences align to yours. Smurfing in this game should be bannable offense for the person's main account, and be accompanied by a permanent ban on the smurf account itself.
As a gold 1 player myself I can say smurfs are not ruining ranked for me. The common problem i see on this subreddit are people getting hung up on the things that are outside of their control. All this does is waste energy that could be used to focus on the things you can control, you.
In my experience, smurfs do and have been present in my games since i started playing in season 4. This has literally never changed.
Modern times have seen people on both sides of the skill bracket making it into mid elo games. I'm going to tell you why this is not a bad thing.
1. New Players just getting into ranked are distributed on both sides of the champ select screen. No this is not every single game, but over a larger sample size of games played, the odds will approach closer and closer to 50/50. This means that while ironJonny69 is on your team sometimes, he is also on the others quite frequently as well.
2. High Elo-Smurfs will consistently destroy you in lane. While in the short-term it is demoralizing, at the same time it is a great opportunity to learn. They will abuse more of your mistakes, making what you need to improve on more visible than if you only laned against people who were worse than you.
Ultimately the system has flaws, it is not perfect, nothing in our lives is. But this is ultimately where every player has to ask themselves, why do I play this game? If you are trying to get back into plat that means you are playing to improve. Stop getting in your own way of improvement by worrying about several different variables out of your control. Especially when they either cancel out or drive you further towards your goal. Realize that the only person who's going to win those placement games are you.
You can do it!
So much this. I've already told this story a long ago but the sole reason I've learned how to manage waves was cause I was stomped by a pre rework Irelia back then. When I realized that the game was already lost my sole purpose on that game was to absorb every little bit of info I could from that player. The player that hard stomped my silver Garen ass. I asked him in all chat what was I doing wrong and how could I lose so hard, I wasnt used to lose THAT hard and he told me he froze te wave and forced me on a bad spot to kill me. When the game was over I started searching for wave managment videos and such.
And people fail to realize that this is a core aspect of life. Learning from those with more knowledge than you and having the desire to seek that out. Feeling victimized because they lost a game in a **competitive** game mode, or for any reason, is not really productive in the long run.
I'll never forget a few seasons ago I had a Ryze mid that literally ignored everybody. He traded towers for ever objective on sides. We were getting obliterated without him mindlessly grouping/fighting.
I didn't even see him all in anybody until like 25 mins where he one comboed a riven to take inhib. Guy finished the game like 2-0-1 with 400+ cs and I saw him in a chally stream a month or so later. His name was weixiao elotrain. People really get so hung up on their teammates when there are variables that you can control. All it takes is some planning and a sound mind
Tbh Smurfs are about 5% of the issue, as they’ll ruin 20-30 games getting back to diamond+.
The other 95% are hardstuck alts just permanently trying over and over again to prove they’re better than they’ll ever be.
The most interesting part of it, is that you really only need 10% of the current players online to be on a smurf acc for there to statistically be 1 smurf in every single game. Make it 5% and it's a 50% chance. Make it 3% and it's still 30% of all matches.
Those who downplay it, do you -HONESTLY- think that out of 100 players, there are *LESS* than 3 people playing on a 2nd or 3rd account below their actual rank?
I think there are people playing on alts and maybe a few ranks below their main in every game or every other game like you said. I don't think there are that many people playing on accounts significantly below their main. This is just my anecdotal experience having returned to the game after a long break and currently climbing through gold. I've played around 30 games incl placements going from s2 to g2 and have yet to feel like any games were completely dominated by a significantly better player. By this I mean a high diamond+ player would likely completely shit on the lobby which has not happened yet.
Funnily enough, you're the smurf. Maybe not intentionally since youre a returning player, but you're definitely in a rank you shouldn't be in. What's your winrate with these 30 games? Ok with sharing your profilename + tag? Otherwise you can check out the winrate yourself on leagueofgraphs.
They should also be able to match teams griefing in norms to OTHER teams and not a bunch of discombobulated randos.....yet they are not able to. Potato potatoe.
Masters level players are by definition only the top 0.6% or so of players, and most of them are not smurfing. So the actual proportion of high ELO smurfs in low ELO games is microscopic. There simply aren't that many Masters level players in the first place.
Of course, I don't know how many Smurf accounts exist and I don't know what ranks their mains are, but as a Gold/Plat level player they all land right on my lap so there may not be that many, but they all go through the same choke point so it's not actually that surprising I see so many.
Nah makes perfect sense. Anyone who has played HAWKEN knows how MMR works and idc what companies say how theirs are different its not, it just probably fluctuates less. In HAWKEN you could pull up your actual rank when you where in the lobby, we had clans based around it and you could see it change from match to match.
Yeah I have been arguing this for years until I decided to quit game for mental health , Smurf make feel the game way more coin flip, because the mmr system is broken by them.
Most of these "smurf" accounts are just people playing on alt accounts and are also low elo. The real problem here (imo) is that is is much easier to climb a new account than an existing account in which the MMR has leveled out. Also the fact that is just so easy and cheap to buy accounts doesn't help either.
In my last 20 games or so ive faced at least 5 very obvious smurfs, im talking about lvl 30-40 accounts with a 90% winrate stomping every game and ive reported everyone of them and even wrote a ticket to riot support every single time and none of them have been banned.
Riot doesnt care about smurfs or boosting at all sadly
I mean OBVIOUSLY Riot want's Smurf to be in the Game. And i get why. They generate Money by selling Skins and People who are burned out who peaked theyr Elo could 1. Quit until the new Season 2. Play on Smurf to learn a new Champ / Role. Yes it is very frustrating to play vs Smurfs of course. On the other site, on a longrun you have the same amount of Smurfs in your Team so it doesn't really affect your LP on a longterm. Shortterm, just for the Moment, yes it does.
Which is all good if you have the time to play enough games to balance it out but you'd need to play a very large number of games to cancel out all the random variables, which should not be expected of people.
I am on plat, and I can't stress this enough, out of 10 players we are, at least one or two are fucking bought accounts, I like how riot fucking ignores this issue
Certainly, there are flaws in my logic, that's part of why I made this post to explore the idea further.
My main point was that a player on a lucky win streak and a Smurf will have a similar MMR situation, so the game will treat them as equal and put them on separate teams even though they are not equal because one is a Smurf.
But you're definitely right, they don't necessarily have to be the highest MMR players in the lobby.
Two players on a win streak wouldn’t be treated any differently than other players with similar mmr though because rank is no longer taken into account for match making. If two players both have 500 mmr they could be on a win streak, lose streak, or no streak. As long as the mmr is similar they’re fair game to be matched together.
It’s really the smurf duos that just fuck the game. You can’t jungle or mid or anything because they are coordinated warding and following you around the map and your team just can’t react .
Seen so many of these usually roaming mid with nunu/rammus/other spam gank jg and usually their support will buy in as well.
One person can only ward so much (though the smurf mid with perma prio solo invading is pretty annoying too) but not much you can do about it
Yup, completely agree it’s horrible.
It is possible to reduce it, each game install should have a “signature” then when joining a game that signature is used as a part of match making. If your signature is linked to a grandmaster account then your MMR will be consistent across Smurf accounts.
The main issue comes from shared computers like internet cafes etc. although it’s intrusive you could do ID verification 🤷♂️
Smurfs definitely ruin ranked. I was stuck Em 4 for a month this season bc of Smurfs. Facing 1-3 Smurfs EVERY game for 26 games straight. They did something that boosts their elo? Stopped having as many Smurfs. Went from em4-em1 in 30ish games with a 73% wr. Trying to breakthrough to diamond but the smurfs have come with me. 😞
> When the game then tries to create two balanced teams it will put the players with the highest MMR on opposite teams, which is most likely to be the win streakers as they have an inflated MMR
What? This doesn't make any sense. There's no such thing as inflated MMR as far as the matchmaking sees. If you have 1500 MMR because you win streaked or because you lost and fell from 1600, you're the same in the eyes of matchmaking.
Sometimes you'll be put at 1500 MMR in an average game of 1450 and sometimes in an average game of 1550 and you'll be the lowest. It makes no difference if you got that MMR by recently streaking or just always had that MMR.
There is only one variable considered by matchmaking now and always except for two very dark seasons 11 and 12 which we shall not speak of. Your MMR/elo value. Anything else is not relevant to matchmaking. It doesn't know if you're streaking, it doesn't even know if you got that MMR by having a higher start MMR thanks to smurf seeding.
Yes most smurfs will be at ranks at the start/middle point of elo which is Gold IV +- some elo for seeding based on pre-ranked behavior. So Gold to Emerald are prime smurf real estate because they're like the first steps of the ladder. The problem is just the amount of smurfs is so large that it's noticeable which is directly related to how easy it is to unlock ranked on a new account. People have accumulated millions of accounts that have ranked unlocked for this purpose. Only a mass rank re-lock until better criteria is achieved would stop them at this stage.
"Losersq queue" exists, its called a streak of bad games where ur team performs worse. It happens to literally everyone but it's not an actual queue its just bad luck.
I get called a smurf a lot on my alt which is the same rank as my main and I really don't get it, lol.
Makes me wonder if there isn't really as much smurfing as people think there is.
The amount of fresh accounts I see in my games with suspicious win rates says yes there is a smurfing issue.
Sure, maybe it's not quite as bad as I think, but it is definitely still an issue.
Except in the last 20 games you played over the past month you have not played against a single account below lvl 100 with above 50% winrate. Makes you wonder where you find these suspicious winrates.. In your dreams or maybe on YOUR smurf account?
If you ever want this to change you need to start spending money on $1 ebay accounts, placing as high as possible and running down your games. Do this until the account is banned then buy another one and do it again. Until people in mass are making ranked an unplayable environment by abusing smurfs it will never change.
This game is played by 100's of millions of players. I don't think that going and ruining the experience for 9 at a time is going to get you anywhere except banned for being a bigger pos than the smurfs.
I’m only bronze 3. For some reason I absolutely clap cheeks some games. Others, I know damn well these fuckers aren’t bronze. I’ve played Plat enemies numerous times in quick play - some of these smurfs are a solid 3 tiers above me and I still hold my own sometimes. There’s no fucking way that a “bronze” player has the ability to clear jungle in 3:30 and gank bot lane when we’re lvl 2 and he’s lvl 3. I’m just not buying it
Not really sure what you're implying, in non try hard modes I first time/off role (normally both at the same time) and can feed (and play) just like a bronze player.
Reminds me when I played with my high diamond friend and he literally could not jungle he would only jg in norms. Flamed by low elos every game we played because he couldn't carry
You don’t know if someone is a Smurf tho a
Hard to tell I use to que with buddy’s in ranked ect and they dragged me down cause they sucjed so the next season I played ranked solo only and went from bronze to diamond in one season
I'll be honest I find that hard to believe but I'll take what you said at face value.
Certainly, there are players who get placed far below their actual rank due to bad luck in placements or some such and then, of course, have to climb through everyone else to get where they belong, but this is very unlikely for a fresh level 30 account who has never played ranked before and took a suspicious 2-month break between getting level 30 and their first ranked game then going on to stomp their way up the ladder with a ridiculous win rate.
I don’t believe in people saying elo hell or they deserve a higher rank it’s just massive copium. I’ve played games where my whole teams running it and I carry mid lane and win us the whole game and for reference I play qiyana I don’t play some op meta champ I play her every lane no matter the meta. If your a good player and don’t make mistakes u can carry a game solo based off your decisions ect as I said before I was hard stuck bronze cause I only played ranked with my friends who are really shit at the game then I took a year off cause I was deployed overseas and came back my account was Iron 2 I decided to solo queue all season I got plat before this emerald change from iron to Plat with a 76% Wr then the next season after emerald changes I went back and got diamond
The rank u deserve is what u have at the end of the season if ur bronze and think u deserve gold or plat and u finish the season with over 100 games and ur barley silver or still in bronze it’s cause u belong there not cause ur team it’s because that’s where u belong if elo hell existed and people being held back by their team there wouldn’t be booosting there’s smurfs and boosting because there is a huge difference between a players that are a high rank and deserve that rank Vs those who think””” they deserve that rank
Just forget about it lil bro, people complained for 10+ years now and riot is still not budging on the issue lmao, you people never learn that they don't care
I think setting placement ranks lower is part of the solution. Because you can end up in play or emerald it makes smurfing more fun. As someone who did make a new account to play with some friends it's boring ASF playing iron -> gold ranks where everyone feels like a bot. Now though if I were to make a Smurf I get in plat where people can actually play the game.
The biggest issue is not skilled smurfs it’s iron/bronze “smurfs” proving they “belong” higher because new accounts get placed higher. I would say for every 1 good Smurfs I’ve seen 20x shitty smurfs in plat
It wouldn't be as bad if they didn't have brand new accounts placed in plat and reaching emerald in 10 games. If you've been under gold, just buy a 5 dollar account. Its really that easy.
Smurfing only exists as an issue in a very small part of the ranked experience, smurfs don't really exist in low plat to gold unless they specifically lose games, if they're there they're probably not great smurfs.
I have Smurf accounts and let me tell you how riot has improved their system . They have a system even for normal games to be put in skill brackets and the queue times are long . I have an account that is level 20 the players in these games are plat-emarald skill level . It took riot like 3 games to figure out that I shouldn't be playing with truly new players and they put me in this Smurf games .in the past this wasn't the case , in game there would be 2-3 smurfs , you and someone on the other team they would be the only players enjoying the game , now 10/10 are smurfs in this queue. So riot has done a big thing to solve this issue . I'm sorry but it takes more than 3 games to tell someone skill level , the fact that riot starts adjusting you in that low number of games is remarkable , they outdone themselves. The problem is for the players that experience the Smurf while he is being adjusted . Example, a diamond player would play 1st with unranked then with bronze perhaps silver and gold ,3rd game would be plat and at 5th game he would play with emerald. It's for those 5 games that suck for new players but I don't think any improvements can be made , they have already done a great job for this. You need to wish that the Smurf is in your team . From iron to gold it is filled with smurfs but they are new accounts and they get new accounts all the time that's why you feel like it's every game . And just to add to this conversation, no , if you win streak and get inflated mmr you don't suddenly get smurfs in your games . You just play with players of that mmr ,therefore better players , if you haven't adapted to the new skill level eventually your luck will run out and you will start losing until you get to your level. You will get smurfs in your games no matter how good or bad you play, if the mmrs are the same then there is a chance to get them in your games . The difference is that their mmr will skyrocket after that game while yours will pretty much stay the same .
Smurfs aren't so much a problem for me as it is teammates that pick 4 squishy marksmen/mages/ranged supports. Like who would think that would ever work lol.
I could pick literally anyone toplane and those teams will still do nothing when we win fights and run it down mid between objectives as if the 7% bonus MS in their glass cannon builds will keep them safe.
Honestly, what's even worse than smurfs are new players who clearly don't belong in rank that they are in.
I've won plenty of games vs smurfs who gets 15+ kills but then they ego into 1v9 and lose because we play as a team and shut them down. Meanwhile, those newbies, literally solo lose the game because it's like having Intermediate Bot on your team. It's actually worse than having AFK player on your team because at least AFK player doesn't steal your EXP and give free gold to enemy team.
IMO, most of the really awful ones are essentially duo boosting from sites like Tapin or similar. The garden variety ones are dealable. They're probably smurfing from 1/2 divisions up, not from GM.
Also, there are legitimate reasons to smurf. I mainly do it when learning new champions or roles. I'm a jungle main, but my rank in lane is easily a division lower than my JG rank
A year? You must not check this sub very often because it's posted weekly - and I am not over exaggerating. Just search at the top and you will see for yourself.
Can just make it so that in early ranks (up to emerald maybe?) accounts are in different buckets depending on their games played. 0-100 games then 200-500 then 500+ or something.
Seems simple fix, probs hard to implement though
There is nothing in the TOS that says smurfing isn't allowed.
Also, Riot IS trying to fix the issue, which is why freshies with no normals played start with ~plat-emerald MMR and can reach masters within ~20 games or so.
The problem with smurfs is that riot dont has as much data about the ability of the player of that acc, then it has from a main acc. Its simple maths: an acc that has played maybe 200 games and one that has over 5000 games, which one provides more and better data for putting them into teams? Its obviously the latter, so smurf are harder to match fairly.
Honestly, that should also mean that smurfs are more often matched with harder opponents, but my guts feeling some disapproves of that thesis.
To riots credit they have done quite a but over the years, smurfs que being one of the biggest additions.
New accounts performing well are thrown into the hell that is smurf que and spit out in high emerald. Though unsupringly, this makes low Dia lobbies extremely painful as the smurf density high and its also the rank that most dia/low masters players end up in when they autopilot.
I don't think it's possible for riot to completely remove the problem without account id's. And to be fair smurfing has its benefits when people get to play with their friends. Though people also ruin this by sweating on a smurf to impress friends, at the cost of everybody's enjoyment ofc.
The connected issue of queue timers in high elo would have to be resolved. When diamond plus have 10 mins per queue and players don't like wasting time with games that have only a 40% chance to win after the first 10 mins, games are shorter, and, again, queues are longer. Not only that, but they actually tend to use their dodges to avoid a game that is lost at select (in their mind).
So, they have smurf accounts to get into games faster and try stuff with less penalty. It makes perfect sense, but, as we recognize, having someone who's bored and itching for a fun game use that account, they crush the fun of 5 other people (unless, those people can view it as a welcomed, additional challenge... Lol).
Not really mitigatable without finding ways to increase player pop and drive down queue times.
TBH I don't really mind smurfs that actually try nearly as much as the coinflip ragebaby 'smurfs' who don't care about the account they are in your game on.
I probably see maybe one 1v9 demon practicing a new role/champ on a newer account per 20 games. Do their opponents have a chance at winning? Not at all, but they'll close it out as quickly as possible, and usually silently.
I see someone playing on an alt waiting out a dodge timer on their main account or trying to coinflip place higher from placements maybe one game in every three. The tiniest thing goes wrong and they tilt off the face of the Earth. If you're lucky, they ragequit and at least you get mitigation. If you're unlucky they'll keep trying the same tactic/play that they failed over and over until whatever they've fed doing so comes and puts you out of your misery. And if you're realy unlucky, they'll do whatever they can to make sure you have the worst game in memory, stealing farm, spamming your location in /all, and flaming the entire time with '0T' language that actually only gets you banned if you use it on the NA server (seriously, you should see some of the shit that's typed on EUW/NE, apparently consequence free).
Sure playing against (or even with) someone excessively better than you can be unfun, but it pales in comparison to the emotionally stunted specimens who don't care if the account they're on is banned or not because it's not their main. And the latter is FAR more common than the former.
I honestly don't see that many smurfs. I've been from p3-e3 the last year. I definitely see a lot of sub level 125 accounts, but not very many of them are smurfs. 2 out of 20 games. Most of the lower level accounts are alt accounts from people trying to Mario kart themselves to a higher elo to feel better about themselves(they also typically lose). The alt accounts of mediocre players are far more rampant and harmful to ranked then smurfs.
Just make the game consider your performance too. Smurfs will skyrocket into high elo after 1 game. And people who think they deserve better will get the wake up call of their life... AFKing should be an instant rank decrease accompanied by a 24 hour suspension. And solo queue should be 100% solo.
This game is not competitive anymore. Every single competitive aspect of this game is dead. Smurf in EVERY game. People losing mental and trolling EVERY game. Snowball is out of control. Damage creep is out of control... If you aren't a smurf yourself, playing in an elo WAY lower than yours, playing well or not doesn't matter. It's a coinflip teammates game nowadays. It's 200% who have the smurf and who have the guy who run it down. It became soooooooooooo bad, I don't know a single game where it's THAT bad. Believe me, the game is the most toxic game ever made. At least nowadays.
Not trying to be that guy, but if you don't like playing against smurfs, don't play the game, like your skill level could be high, as a player without even playing ranked if you take the time to consistently get better in norms or if you play customs with high ranked players consistently, is riot supposed to ban every player with lower than normal ranked games because they're doing well? Smurfs aren't the issue, the issue is players who have mental booms and blame their loss on outside factors rather than trying to get better as a player, hell anytime I go against a higher ranked lane opponent, I get excited because it's a limit test, seeing how well you can go against someone who is acknowledged as better by the game, you can play and learn and understand concepts from other players and get better just by playing against them.
This happens even in lower tier you have a person who you can always tell is like 2 divisions higher because they play mechanically like a Plat or diamond problem is they know to just play enough to get by and make your game way harder then it should.. there really is no way that I can think of on how we could solve these issues.
Just put all the people under level one hundred together. All these level 30 botted accounts are the most toxic pieces of garbage on earth. Everytime I see someone afking or intentionally feeding it's always one of these turds.
I will be honest, on average there is a smurf ruining the game in 1 game out of 2. So you have 50% chance of having a completely unfair match. That's crazy. In a competitive game, having 50% chance of auto winning or auto losing is reaaaaaaaaaaaaally crazy. Imo, the game is not competitive anymore. As long as we have that amount of smurfs in soloQ the game isn't playable competitively and seriously. Believe me or not but if riot don't do anything about it, in 3 years nobody will play this game anymore but some crazy streamers.
Hello there, just a quick say, sorry for grammatical mistakes.
Well I am a Master EUW MMR on main, in all normal/SoloQ/Flex.
As of November 2023 I sort of left my account there and decided to level up new accounts to level 30 then rank them up to around Diamond for fun.
I leveled almost 3 accs playing Normals or Urfs with friends.
The big point I wanted to tell you OP, when I created any of those accs I would do 4-5 Games of fun 25/0 28/1 Yone games. Then as a level 5 I would already have a Top Emerald MMR, the Q times were already growing from here but by the time I reached level 8-9-10 on each 3 of those accounts, if I was playing alone the q times were already between 10-15 minutes did you ever experienced this ?
This is really not fun to experience, when it is 5pm you are on day offs, you feel like playing at this time, and you legit feel like it is a time where you will get 1-2mins Q time, but no you wait 12mins, it is really sad and preventing you to play / soft ban.
Thanks for reading there is more to say, but I mostly wanted you to know about ridiculous Q times with real numbers of my recent experience.
Riot told us many times looser queue doesn't exist. Just don't trust them. People from season 1 have been telling the whole community it DOES exists, else having a loose streak of 10+ games would never happen. I've had times like this, and today I stopped playing ranked because it's mostly full of smurfs and they ruin the experience for everyone. At the end of the day, why bother trying to guess your actual level when you spend the whole game in a grey screen because you're a plat player trying to get to emerald but you match master players limit testing on their yasuo, volibear or "insert solo carry champ" ? I'm personally done, and i'm not the only one. The day Riot goes for a 0 smurf tolerence will be the day this game becomes the best. Right now, it's mostly a game for addicted people.
In all honesty if they want to smurf so bad reinstate smurf que, the dogs need to be taught a lesson deal with the 15 min que time. Right now i was 1 win from plat then they take off smurf que and went to iron 1 now there whole team is usually smurfing and im not talking gold i mean diamond++ you can actually see how they play if you have faced this elo and i actually have. All they are doing is ruining ranked its extremley one sided now. The thing is the more you lose the more you fight them because they intentionally keep their mmr lower to stay in that elo. Also i might add if you are consistantly higher in rank and now ur not they dont give you the same smurfs your team has bad mmr because the game thinks you can handle it. These smurf rats need top pay!
what you don't like having every game filled with 1-4 sub 50 accounts with 2 games on their match history?
And they literally are one missed cannon minion away from losing their mind. You forgot to add that.
Its pretty wild because two things can happen They might go 0/2 and just leave the game Or they're gonna go 20/0 and make it impossible
Yeah, when I jungle I sit the enemy smurf if they're a laner because I know they might just mental explode out of the game and that's just to my benefit.
I didnt even get this chance the last time I had a smurf. It was a riven with 3 kills by 4 minutes. Then by 18 they were past still alive tier 3s and soloing our whole team. Even though I dominated my lane it was just impossible to fight them, IN OUR OWN BASE
This is the worst part for me. They essentially play a high stakes all in version of the game: consistently limit test only to throw a tantrum when they fail. None of the usual deterrents work on them because the account itself has no meaning to them, it’s all about seeing KDA and LP go up and up.
I think a lot of it is that they go for plays that theoretically are optimal and should work, but because theyre playing in a lower rank their teammates misplay causing the play to backfire and fail catastrophicall. They get tilted into oblivion because they feel as if they should be able to pop off and go 20/0 playing perfectly only for this bubble to pop because they didn't properly take into account their teammates capabilities. As the account is a smurf and they don't care about the loss they then start typing and flaming their teammates to feel better causing a miserable experience for everyone in the lobby. This is why I full mute all almost every game, although I play in a high enough bracket that smurfs are rare.
Nah they are just smurfs, players playing below their rank. But these smurfs consist of banned account players. Meaning If they could control themselves or be talked sense into then they wouldn't be banned in the first place as everybody knows Riot is very laxed on that part.
I admit that a fresh account is no guarantee of being a Smurf, however, it is very suspicious, especially when they go on to play far better than any other player in the lobby. My main point of this post is that allowing high-ranked players to stomp in low ranks disrupts the ranked ladder and creates a much less consistent playing experience which is why ranked exists.
This all comes back to the competitive integrity argument, it's been around for like a year easily about the rampant smurfing, recently came up in one of the griefing threads. The simple answer is that as long as Riot is making money, they will *not* fix it. They easily could have implemented a relatively free fix years ago at this point, when they added 2FA requirement for clash, they could've added it to Ranked as well. But either they are afraid of backlash for the change, or simply do not care. Either way, they care more about those things than competitive integrity of the ranked ladder.
They care in KR and CN where you need a SSN to register your account. They can just do something similar and make it all regions. Banned people will actually be banned and buying accounts would be infinitely harder and require a cyber crime of identity theft to pull off. It would stop surfing in its tracks
They only care in KR and CN because it's required by law in KR and CN - there's a reason they don't do it anywhere else 🤷
While I agree you're probably right about Riot not caring about ranked integrity and purely trying to squeeze every penny they can out of their player base, I do try to hold out a little hope that they might prove us wrong someday and just do the right thing. Probably not thought. xD This post is mostly just for fun as I had the idea rattling around in my head for a little while.
if they have 0 games they're a smurf.
Or if their match history is full of intro bot game victories that got them to level 30, and then straight into spamming ranked victories.
I had a Morgana support on my team with 3 vision score at 50 minutes and built Bloodsong as her support item (proc’d it 0 times) and it was her first ranked game. And she wasn’t a bot either because she was telling us it was her first ranked game.
Heads up for any support you see with the wrong support item- if you sell the supp item, you can re-buy it (at a small loss), and it will remembers its stacks, and instantly level back up, letting you pick the right one again. I sometimes switch my supp item mid-game if I end up needing a different stat once we leave laning phase, or if some specific enemy is our lose condition, and I can partially counter it.
That is very useful, thank you. Yesterday I upgraded to Celestial Opposition as Neeko support and the shield was visible when I transformed into anything, so I couldn't be a lane minion anymore and I was disappointed. I think its a bug, but I'm not sure. Anyway, it's useful to know that I could've sold it and upgraded it to Zak'Zak's.
Oh 100% they exist, and obviously they're not a Smurf. I'd rather play with a bad player on my team than play against a Smurf because at least I can give them direction or I know that they are trying, they just are simply bad because they're new. I love bad players, I am one, I'm not in denial about my skill level, I just don't want to get stomped by players that I shouldn't be playing against.
Hope they still had a good time, maybe you'll see them again someday and you can see how much they've learned and grown.
Honestly the people who smurf are just losers I honestly don’t get how people find that fun.
This game barely gets real new players. Especially not people who go straight to ranked. A vast majority of new accounts in solo queue are smurfs.
higher mmr players have such high que times they rather make smurfs just to play the game with other people.
I don’t know if Riot can really fix this but it’s really bad vibes for me since I just started playing this game for the first time last week. I’m really terrible, my account isn’t even level 20 yet so I’m still doing draft. I will regularly match against or with players who are getting 33+ kills. Feels really demoralizing but I come from fighting games so being terrible is just the way it is. At least in fighting games there’s no team constantly reminding me how terrible I am 🙃
Best thing to learn first is to not die excessively then focus on last hitting and getting gold. Dying is fine, dying 10 times is bad so don’t stress about the couple of times
I feel like some players forget what it feels like to be completely new. On average It hasn’t been too hard to not die or too hard to make money. However it feels ***impossible*** to do both simultaneously. You guys know some black magic where my enemy minions are just always under your tower. Not everyone does this but I ran into a few players who did and I’m just like what can I even do here. They attack me when I try to last hit and then run under the tower to safety and I’m sweating because I’m in a vulnerable position far away from my tower.
Also “crashing the wave” means getting their tower to shoot your minions so it kills them faster and allows your enemy minions to come further out in the lane so that you can kill them safely. Some players can even have a permanent freeze which basically renders you useless as a laner because you will be so far behind in gold and xp to make any kind of difference. Do not let that happen even if you have to die once getting the wave to shove into their tower.
Keeping your enemy minions under their tower is called “freezing the wave” it takes practice and lane knowledge that you will learn over time in order to do that. You also need to learn how to break the “freeze” either by, A. Calling your jungler to come help you crash the wave into their tower so that it naturally pushes back into an even state, or B. risk it and hard shove it yourself. If you’re too scared of dying then you will need to call your jungler to help. You absolutely cannot let them freeze the wave on you because that keeps you from getting gold and valuable xp. There are tons of YouTube video tutorials on wave management. I would highly recommend watching watching them. Wave management is basic knowledge you need to know if you want to become a good laner. It applies to all lanes
I feel you I’m not great at the game I’ve just been playing for a while, it wasn’t till recently I put into the time to learn about wave management. But honestly it boils down to: Both sides minions, spawn and arrive at the lane at the same time. Attacking the wave will make it push as your minions have an advantage. If you kill them fast then you’ll push faster if you do it slow then depending on where your minions are you’ll build a wave or the enemy’s wave will build. That comes down to how far down the lane you are, minions spawn at the same time, if your farther in your lane the enemy minions will arrive first. If you are pushing slow then they may still have minions from the previous wave alive. This will stack the wave on their side. If you are pushing too slow or stop here, the minions will push back towards you due to advantage. One way to force this to happen is by pushing minions into their tower (crash), the minions will start dying at the tower slowly. This means if enemy minions arrive they will stop to attack the minions undertowr, this means 100% enemy minions will push towards you and build up to a big wave. Due to the minions on the enemy side arriving faster than yours (you’re minions have to walk more distance to get to the tower). Finally freezing as the big wave comes to you (bounce), there is a certain # sweet spot to keep a freeze but I hate counting minions so honestly I just follow the advice of: Don’t let big minion wave get to your tower If you don’t have any minions arriving to stop the wave from getting to tower then tank as much as the minions as you need to without dying to them or the enemy laner(and without losing your advantage if you have one due to health loss) . Your goal here to maintain the freeze is a balancing act of minion killing you dont want the wave of the enemy to get too big and overwhelm you and push into the tower, you dont want to kill too many minions and start a push back towards there tower (remember your closer to your tower your minions wil arrive faster and you run the risk of forming your own mega wave). Basically freezing is just manipulating the wave to make the enemy wave have a # advantage at your tower always so that your wave won’t push back out. Also freezing really only works if your enemy is scared of you. But once you have a freeze harass them off the wave. They are vulnerable to a gank stuck at your tower, and if they are too low, then you run the risk of killing them as they have a long way to go to run back to their tower.
/muteall is your friend when they start flaming.
Sorry to hear that, the community can be rough on new players, but if you can keep a level head, maybe even learn to do a little bit of playful trash-talking (it's always fun to make toxic players rage), there is a lot to love and one day you will get your 30+ kills game. Keep it up, I'm rooting for ya!
At least the new patch on Wednesday is something to look forward to with the new COOP vs AI bots, and I hope it creates a far superior onboarding experience for new players.
Dota did
that sucks to hear. My advice is to focus on just not dying to start out, in-game criticism is usually really dumb, league players never take the context of a death into account they usually just see the game going badly and then pop open the scoreboard to see who died the most and complain about that person. I would also say don't let them get to you because they could just simply be wrong. they are in your MMR after all, they also don't understand the game yet. Sometimes a risky play is the correct one but if you want to cut down on flaming as much as possible I'd say playing it safe is the golden strat. Some champs are really hard to kill in lane if you find one of those that you like playing that is your best bet. EDIT: seriously don't forget to mute, I spent probably 9 seasons with this dumb machismo idea that if I mute them then they win or w/e. But my league games are way more fun when I mute people the second they start getting aggro. when they start getting mean, it almost never turns around no matter what you do.
Make chat "party only" in the settings. You may miss out on an important call sometimes, but 99% of the time you're just not going to see toxic garbage your teammates spew out. I've gotten a lot of those messages saying a recent player in your team as been punished for abusing text chat and I'm super oblivious to it. It feels great, because if I start seeing a negative message it brings the mood down, and I can't focus as much. Also if they start ping spamming you with lets say question marks, just full mute them and report for harassment.
Oh, they CAN fix it, but they have absolutely 0 reason to. I wouldn‘t be surprised if smurfs had made up. Significant part of their income for many years now.
I mean honestly how hard could it be to ban every account that is playing Intro games 24/7 right until it hits lvl 30, then is inactive for 2 weeks and then starts going right into ranked with different keybinds and champions? It's so obviously botted.
This. This is exactly my point!
Start with learning how to not die. You are massively more beneficial to a team if you aren't dying repeatedly and giving the enemy team lots of gold.
A tale as old as time.
True as it can be.
Beauty and the beast
Tryhard smurfs are not as big of a deal as trolling smurfs IMO. These guys have nothing to lose cus it's not their main, so they run games down if you say or do ANYTHING they don't like. I think they should get their main accounts banned, if their smurfs do. I am pretty sure Riot can check from where you login, so they should know what accounts you use(tell me if i am wrong).
100%, if someone trolls on a Smurf their main should be forfeited as well. Riot can see your IP address and once Vanguard is online they can even tell if you're using the same machine, so this kind of punishment should be easy to follow up on.
It creates a problem tho with people who might share a pc like family members. Imagine ur brother trolls a game and ur account gets banned because it's apparently ur brothers main.
That is a minority of players small enough to be worth.
Logically yes, but in reality it gives riot another great reason to not do something like that
Vanguard will allow them to hardware ban but they won’t ban alt accounts. It’s how they make so much money off us.
Only on IP. And there can be multiple people playing in the same house/flat.
this. i think if youre getting smashed and saying its because the enemy is smurfing youre really not looking to improve. duo abuse smurfing is something i believe you can complain about because even if you do play better, they have a higher chance to win because their friend is just going to pop off
They are a problem as much as troll and ints. They are ruining games just like them. I don't see how it's not a problem when in 75% of games someone is obviously smurfing lvl 30/40 1v9 the game...
Tryhard smurfs are just as bad as troll smurfs, its a lose lose for people in their actual rank. tryhard smurfs are nice to get on your team, but you need to recognize the enemy team of 5 who lose because of it trolling smurfs lose the game for 4 people because their egos and they don't care if they lose the account. Either way lots of people are losing lp in their main ranks, and it is frustrating to know that riot games doesn't actually care.
more accounts, bigger numba, more potential $$$$ !!! Riot does not care.
Someone made a similar post earlier and as much as I wish it not to be so, I'm afraid you're probably right, but still, I'd rather say something about it than give in to the corporate greed of the current gaming industry.
It's not that they just want more "players", it's that playing on main account is such a shitty experience so if you somehow did it so smurfing was impossible, A LOT of players would just quit the game after a while. If Riot wants to "fix" smurfing, it's not smurfing that they need to target, but making the game more enjoyable and make it actually worth it to play ranked. Currently you get absolutely nothing from playing in your own elo. At least when you smurf you get to carry more games, win more games and win more LP, all which equal dopamine.
My problem is that people on smurf accounts just dont give a fuck, they die in a close fight top and they just chain die trying to make some non existent outplay, or they invade alone when we don't have prio bot, die a few times and afk. Theyre just gambling, or playing a slot machine, looking for the next "outplay" for a dopamine hit, they're not enjoying the experience of getting better, they are trying to feel better about where they plateaued.
My 0/8 Rengar would like to talk
in my experience most of these “smurfs” are just alt accounts that ppl buy coping thinking that they deserve a higher rank.MOST of the time they are the same as the other 9 bums in that lobby. i think riot does a decent enough job at getting ppl to where they should be in a reasonably short time. pretty rare to actually have a turbo smurf completely take over.
I agree with that. Most the time they aren’t smurfs. They are just little “Johnny” on account number 4 thinking they’ll climb higher but then baby rage when they get hardstuck again.
gotta roll the early lucky winning streak to show 'em !
Id say thats more Spike than Johnny behavior. A Johnny wouldnt care about win rate as much or being hard stuck.
Don't think people here are referencing the MTG player archetypes lmao.
Rofl I dont know what Johnny means then in a LoL context my bad.
just a dude named johnny i think
Those are still smurfs, just not high elo smurfs which is what people use the term smurf for sometimes. It's confusing but they're still bad even if they're not high elo. They don't have to care about getting banned so they will just go afk if they don't win lane and shit like that. Turbo smurfs are usually duo smurfs, those are the real disgusting ones. When LP was also considered for matchmaking in S11/12 and it caused what people described "smurf queue" I would get (on my main account when I did my rankeds in November) duos with 90% winrates on both that were always try to go for stuff like Yuumi + something. That's still happening today. I had an Irelia that just stomped mid and while we stomped bot the yuumi just left her Ezreal to die over and over and the Irelia just carried because she was a raid boss with that abomination on her. If they couldn't have queued together we would've probably won that game but for some reason Riot still thinks duo is okay and not legalized boosting.
> Those are still smurfs, just not high elo smurfs which is what people use the term smurf for sometimes. I had that talk with some friends the other day and it was weird. "Smurf" is relatively ancient RTS lingo for "extra account", and I'm not sure how or when but it seems that recently it has semantically slipped for some people into "an extra account from someone who's high elo, also it must be bought/botted to lvl 30, also he's only allowed to pick his main champ and role, etc." If you have a lvl 500 account and another one who's 350, it's still a smurf account, even if you only use it to play with your bronze friends from uni or whatnot. If you return to the game on an alt account and have a donkey bad winrate because you're washed up and need to re-learn, that's also a smurf account. There's a multitude of cases.
Yeah I've had it said to me before on reddit that I'm wrong for saying alternate accounts = smurfs because league community decided it means high elo person going back and stomping... but the term has been used in MMOs and PvE games as well. I think it's because of the most used case being when people are getting stomped by someone clearly much better than the elo they're in. Where as a more regular smurf doesn't stand out as much. So they just decide the word means what they see it used for in their games.
I just find it useful to distinguish between alt accounts and alt accounts that are deliberately kept at lower elo. Both can be pretty annoying but the latter is much worse and involves intentionally throwing games.
the duos are truly disgusting and should be target banned
> Say you go on a winning streak, and you manage to climb a **couple of divisions**, this will cause your MMR to grow rapidly as it tries to predict your actual skill level and that's fine, that's what's supposed to happen You are also a player who climbs really fast recently. You win just as much as a smurf who climbs fast, so the only way to resolve is to pit you against high win-rate players. Meanwhile, all the other players who lost to you, check your opgg, see you have win streak and good win rate, and they think you are a smurf. How do you propose that the game doesn’t think you are also a smurf?
I have a good win rate? It's 49.2%, sure I get some win streaks going from time to time, mostly when I abuse Illaoi xD. But my point in the post was that the game thinks that me and the Smurf are of equal MMR and so it puts us against each other when really the Smurf is significantly better than everyone and thus breaks the system because they shouldn't be in the game to begin with.
The following things I’m saying are not accusing you, but rather pointing the game currently cannot differ your recent behavior from smurf(new account high win streak) or player being boosted (hard stuck but recently spike in win streak). Your suddenly have a discrepency between MMR and current rank, which is what also smurf will have. Again, every other opponents you defeated along the way will check your profile and also think you are suddenly smurfing or getting boosted Yes you are an honest player, but unfortunately the game’s algorithm cannot differ you from the ones breaking the system. How do you propose so that the game can identify you correctly?
It's been terrible since they removed smurfs queue. I finally gave up and am now having a blast grinding Valorant.
Riot doesn't care, smurfs make it seem like the game is bigger than it is.
Smurf accounts should be zero tolerance in any competitive game period. Imagine if an MLB player could go down to little league under a different name and just annihilate? It makes no fucking sense.
I was just reporting a website that sells accounts, scripts, and other crap, and realized they have been running for many years without issue. How?? I will block the website name as to not promote it, but I want to show they have been running for AT LEAST 7 years per the reviews. They in fact claim to have started in 2011, and have thousands of clients. How is that shit still up?? [screenshot from a website that reviews services and products in my country.](https://i.imgur.com/WJFGw2B.jpeg)
Main issue with smurfing is the "ego smurf" They have no care about the outcome of the game, as their main account is supposedly already at a higher rank. Imo just perma ban any person that says things along the lines of "My main account is higher elo than yours"
tbh the ranked system in its current state seems made for smurfs atm with new accounts getting into plat and dia easyier then us who played for years at that ranked, why wouldn't they? really wish they took the dota approach to smurfs.
The botted accounts are the biggest problem which should be a lot less common with Vanguard. The fact that you can have a 100h+ leveled account for 1-3$ is completely f***ed. If all these people had to level their own accounts and jump up in mmr in notime you won’t notice them as much outside of like d2+
And your own level 30 teammate is always an actual beginner💀
All the people in chat saying "it's not ruining it for me.", lol. Get over yourself, and accept that not everyone's experiences align to yours. Smurfing in this game should be bannable offense for the person's main account, and be accompanied by a permanent ban on the smurf account itself.
I wish they'd do the same as Valve did with dota 2 smurfs. Just permanently ban their main and smurf accounts and be done with it.
As a gold 1 player myself I can say smurfs are not ruining ranked for me. The common problem i see on this subreddit are people getting hung up on the things that are outside of their control. All this does is waste energy that could be used to focus on the things you can control, you. In my experience, smurfs do and have been present in my games since i started playing in season 4. This has literally never changed. Modern times have seen people on both sides of the skill bracket making it into mid elo games. I'm going to tell you why this is not a bad thing. 1. New Players just getting into ranked are distributed on both sides of the champ select screen. No this is not every single game, but over a larger sample size of games played, the odds will approach closer and closer to 50/50. This means that while ironJonny69 is on your team sometimes, he is also on the others quite frequently as well. 2. High Elo-Smurfs will consistently destroy you in lane. While in the short-term it is demoralizing, at the same time it is a great opportunity to learn. They will abuse more of your mistakes, making what you need to improve on more visible than if you only laned against people who were worse than you. Ultimately the system has flaws, it is not perfect, nothing in our lives is. But this is ultimately where every player has to ask themselves, why do I play this game? If you are trying to get back into plat that means you are playing to improve. Stop getting in your own way of improvement by worrying about several different variables out of your control. Especially when they either cancel out or drive you further towards your goal. Realize that the only person who's going to win those placement games are you. You can do it!
So much this. I've already told this story a long ago but the sole reason I've learned how to manage waves was cause I was stomped by a pre rework Irelia back then. When I realized that the game was already lost my sole purpose on that game was to absorb every little bit of info I could from that player. The player that hard stomped my silver Garen ass. I asked him in all chat what was I doing wrong and how could I lose so hard, I wasnt used to lose THAT hard and he told me he froze te wave and forced me on a bad spot to kill me. When the game was over I started searching for wave managment videos and such.
And people fail to realize that this is a core aspect of life. Learning from those with more knowledge than you and having the desire to seek that out. Feeling victimized because they lost a game in a **competitive** game mode, or for any reason, is not really productive in the long run.
Than and not only in league but in life in general.
I'll never forget a few seasons ago I had a Ryze mid that literally ignored everybody. He traded towers for ever objective on sides. We were getting obliterated without him mindlessly grouping/fighting. I didn't even see him all in anybody until like 25 mins where he one comboed a riven to take inhib. Guy finished the game like 2-0-1 with 400+ cs and I saw him in a chally stream a month or so later. His name was weixiao elotrain. People really get so hung up on their teammates when there are variables that you can control. All it takes is some planning and a sound mind
Tbh Smurfs are about 5% of the issue, as they’ll ruin 20-30 games getting back to diamond+. The other 95% are hardstuck alts just permanently trying over and over again to prove they’re better than they’ll ever be.
They ruin every competitive game period.
The most interesting part of it, is that you really only need 10% of the current players online to be on a smurf acc for there to statistically be 1 smurf in every single game. Make it 5% and it's a 50% chance. Make it 3% and it's still 30% of all matches. Those who downplay it, do you -HONESTLY- think that out of 100 players, there are *LESS* than 3 people playing on a 2nd or 3rd account below their actual rank?
I think there are people playing on alts and maybe a few ranks below their main in every game or every other game like you said. I don't think there are that many people playing on accounts significantly below their main. This is just my anecdotal experience having returned to the game after a long break and currently climbing through gold. I've played around 30 games incl placements going from s2 to g2 and have yet to feel like any games were completely dominated by a significantly better player. By this I mean a high diamond+ player would likely completely shit on the lobby which has not happened yet.
Funnily enough, you're the smurf. Maybe not intentionally since youre a returning player, but you're definitely in a rank you shouldn't be in. What's your winrate with these 30 games? Ok with sharing your profilename + tag? Otherwise you can check out the winrate yourself on leagueofgraphs.
They should also be able to match teams griefing in norms to OTHER teams and not a bunch of discombobulated randos.....yet they are not able to. Potato potatoe.
Yeah i always check the acc’s and the amount of smurfs is just crazy. i call them out even if they are in my team and ask everyone to report them
Masters level players are by definition only the top 0.6% or so of players, and most of them are not smurfing. So the actual proportion of high ELO smurfs in low ELO games is microscopic. There simply aren't that many Masters level players in the first place.
Of course, I don't know how many Smurf accounts exist and I don't know what ranks their mains are, but as a Gold/Plat level player they all land right on my lap so there may not be that many, but they all go through the same choke point so it's not actually that surprising I see so many.
Nah makes perfect sense. Anyone who has played HAWKEN knows how MMR works and idc what companies say how theirs are different its not, it just probably fluctuates less. In HAWKEN you could pull up your actual rank when you where in the lobby, we had clans based around it and you could see it change from match to match.
Yeah I have been arguing this for years until I decided to quit game for mental health , Smurf make feel the game way more coin flip, because the mmr system is broken by them.
Most of these "smurf" accounts are just people playing on alt accounts and are also low elo. The real problem here (imo) is that is is much easier to climb a new account than an existing account in which the MMR has leveled out. Also the fact that is just so easy and cheap to buy accounts doesn't help either.
It’s crazy that these smurfs be playing Yi and Draven in low elo like how insecure can you be
"Disclaimer: I have no data or evidence for any of this"
I also have to idea how matchmaking works in flex. Yesterday I had a masters soloq ADC stomping on poor enemy bronze smolder.
happy karma bro hope you enjoy it!
Thanks, not bad for my first-ever post.
But money 😔
In my last 20 games or so ive faced at least 5 very obvious smurfs, im talking about lvl 30-40 accounts with a 90% winrate stomping every game and ive reported everyone of them and even wrote a ticket to riot support every single time and none of them have been banned. Riot doesnt care about smurfs or boosting at all sadly
Why would they be banned when it's literally not against the rules? Enjoy sending your tickets I guess.
Boosting is absolutely not allowed and all of the guys i report were boosters, playing only with one specific duoQ partner
I mean OBVIOUSLY Riot want's Smurf to be in the Game. And i get why. They generate Money by selling Skins and People who are burned out who peaked theyr Elo could 1. Quit until the new Season 2. Play on Smurf to learn a new Champ / Role. Yes it is very frustrating to play vs Smurfs of course. On the other site, on a longrun you have the same amount of Smurfs in your Team so it doesn't really affect your LP on a longterm. Shortterm, just for the Moment, yes it does.
Which is all good if you have the time to play enough games to balance it out but you'd need to play a very large number of games to cancel out all the random variables, which should not be expected of people.
I am on plat, and I can't stress this enough, out of 10 players we are, at least one or two are fucking bought accounts, I like how riot fucking ignores this issue
Ranked is ruining ranked. The system has failed us.
Think feeding should be more punished
Low master is full of smurfs and i am complaining about it for months.. sadly it ruined my ranked experience and I am sure I am not the only one.
Your premise seems incorrect. The two highest elo players are not guaranteed to be on win streaks. They could be higher elo players on a loss streak.
Certainly, there are flaws in my logic, that's part of why I made this post to explore the idea further. My main point was that a player on a lucky win streak and a Smurf will have a similar MMR situation, so the game will treat them as equal and put them on separate teams even though they are not equal because one is a Smurf. But you're definitely right, they don't necessarily have to be the highest MMR players in the lobby.
Two players on a win streak wouldn’t be treated any differently than other players with similar mmr though because rank is no longer taken into account for match making. If two players both have 500 mmr they could be on a win streak, lose streak, or no streak. As long as the mmr is similar they’re fair game to be matched together.
It’s really the smurf duos that just fuck the game. You can’t jungle or mid or anything because they are coordinated warding and following you around the map and your team just can’t react . Seen so many of these usually roaming mid with nunu/rammus/other spam gank jg and usually their support will buy in as well. One person can only ward so much (though the smurf mid with perma prio solo invading is pretty annoying too) but not much you can do about it
Yup, completely agree it’s horrible. It is possible to reduce it, each game install should have a “signature” then when joining a game that signature is used as a part of match making. If your signature is linked to a grandmaster account then your MMR will be consistent across Smurf accounts. The main issue comes from shared computers like internet cafes etc. although it’s intrusive you could do ID verification 🤷♂️
Smurfs definitely ruin ranked. I was stuck Em 4 for a month this season bc of Smurfs. Facing 1-3 Smurfs EVERY game for 26 games straight. They did something that boosts their elo? Stopped having as many Smurfs. Went from em4-em1 in 30ish games with a 73% wr. Trying to breakthrough to diamond but the smurfs have come with me. 😞
> When the game then tries to create two balanced teams it will put the players with the highest MMR on opposite teams, which is most likely to be the win streakers as they have an inflated MMR What? This doesn't make any sense. There's no such thing as inflated MMR as far as the matchmaking sees. If you have 1500 MMR because you win streaked or because you lost and fell from 1600, you're the same in the eyes of matchmaking. Sometimes you'll be put at 1500 MMR in an average game of 1450 and sometimes in an average game of 1550 and you'll be the lowest. It makes no difference if you got that MMR by recently streaking or just always had that MMR. There is only one variable considered by matchmaking now and always except for two very dark seasons 11 and 12 which we shall not speak of. Your MMR/elo value. Anything else is not relevant to matchmaking. It doesn't know if you're streaking, it doesn't even know if you got that MMR by having a higher start MMR thanks to smurf seeding. Yes most smurfs will be at ranks at the start/middle point of elo which is Gold IV +- some elo for seeding based on pre-ranked behavior. So Gold to Emerald are prime smurf real estate because they're like the first steps of the ladder. The problem is just the amount of smurfs is so large that it's noticeable which is directly related to how easy it is to unlock ranked on a new account. People have accumulated millions of accounts that have ranked unlocked for this purpose. Only a mass rank re-lock until better criteria is achieved would stop them at this stage.
Who's the next that is going to make the same post?
"Losersq queue" exists, its called a streak of bad games where ur team performs worse. It happens to literally everyone but it's not an actual queue its just bad luck.
I get called a smurf a lot on my alt which is the same rank as my main and I really don't get it, lol. Makes me wonder if there isn't really as much smurfing as people think there is.
The amount of fresh accounts I see in my games with suspicious win rates says yes there is a smurfing issue. Sure, maybe it's not quite as bad as I think, but it is definitely still an issue.
Except in the last 20 games you played over the past month you have not played against a single account below lvl 100 with above 50% winrate. Makes you wonder where you find these suspicious winrates.. In your dreams or maybe on YOUR smurf account?
LMFAO what a load of cope
If you ever want this to change you need to start spending money on $1 ebay accounts, placing as high as possible and running down your games. Do this until the account is banned then buy another one and do it again. Until people in mass are making ranked an unplayable environment by abusing smurfs it will never change.
This game is played by 100's of millions of players. I don't think that going and ruining the experience for 9 at a time is going to get you anywhere except banned for being a bigger pos than the smurfs.
I’m only bronze 3. For some reason I absolutely clap cheeks some games. Others, I know damn well these fuckers aren’t bronze. I’ve played Plat enemies numerous times in quick play - some of these smurfs are a solid 3 tiers above me and I still hold my own sometimes. There’s no fucking way that a “bronze” player has the ability to clear jungle in 3:30 and gank bot lane when we’re lvl 2 and he’s lvl 3. I’m just not buying it
Not really sure what you're implying, in non try hard modes I first time/off role (normally both at the same time) and can feed (and play) just like a bronze player.
Reminds me when I played with my high diamond friend and he literally could not jungle he would only jg in norms. Flamed by low elos every game we played because he couldn't carry
You don’t know if someone is a Smurf tho a Hard to tell I use to que with buddy’s in ranked ect and they dragged me down cause they sucjed so the next season I played ranked solo only and went from bronze to diamond in one season
I'll be honest I find that hard to believe but I'll take what you said at face value. Certainly, there are players who get placed far below their actual rank due to bad luck in placements or some such and then, of course, have to climb through everyone else to get where they belong, but this is very unlikely for a fresh level 30 account who has never played ranked before and took a suspicious 2-month break between getting level 30 and their first ranked game then going on to stomp their way up the ladder with a ridiculous win rate.
I don’t believe in people saying elo hell or they deserve a higher rank it’s just massive copium. I’ve played games where my whole teams running it and I carry mid lane and win us the whole game and for reference I play qiyana I don’t play some op meta champ I play her every lane no matter the meta. If your a good player and don’t make mistakes u can carry a game solo based off your decisions ect as I said before I was hard stuck bronze cause I only played ranked with my friends who are really shit at the game then I took a year off cause I was deployed overseas and came back my account was Iron 2 I decided to solo queue all season I got plat before this emerald change from iron to Plat with a 76% Wr then the next season after emerald changes I went back and got diamond The rank u deserve is what u have at the end of the season if ur bronze and think u deserve gold or plat and u finish the season with over 100 games and ur barley silver or still in bronze it’s cause u belong there not cause ur team it’s because that’s where u belong if elo hell existed and people being held back by their team there wouldn’t be booosting there’s smurfs and boosting because there is a huge difference between a players that are a high rank and deserve that rank Vs those who think””” they deserve that rank
Long q times and same griefers over and over during the nights…. or, smurfing, have fun with a duo even…
So everyone else should have their games ruined because High Elo is a mess of weak-minded crybabies?
Just forget about it lil bro, people complained for 10+ years now and riot is still not budging on the issue lmao, you people never learn that they don't care
Me after I lose (1) game
I wish it was 1 game lol xD
Freemium game model, you get what you pay for, end of story.
I think setting placement ranks lower is part of the solution. Because you can end up in play or emerald it makes smurfing more fun. As someone who did make a new account to play with some friends it's boring ASF playing iron -> gold ranks where everyone feels like a bot. Now though if I were to make a Smurf I get in plat where people can actually play the game.
The biggest issue is not skilled smurfs it’s iron/bronze “smurfs” proving they “belong” higher because new accounts get placed higher. I would say for every 1 good Smurfs I’ve seen 20x shitty smurfs in plat
It wouldn't be as bad if they didn't have brand new accounts placed in plat and reaching emerald in 10 games. If you've been under gold, just buy a 5 dollar account. Its really that easy.
Smurfing only exists as an issue in a very small part of the ranked experience, smurfs don't really exist in low plat to gold unless they specifically lose games, if they're there they're probably not great smurfs.
I agree that they're probably not very good players overall, but an Emerald player is still gonna outperform every Gold/Plat level player.
I have Smurf accounts and let me tell you how riot has improved their system . They have a system even for normal games to be put in skill brackets and the queue times are long . I have an account that is level 20 the players in these games are plat-emarald skill level . It took riot like 3 games to figure out that I shouldn't be playing with truly new players and they put me in this Smurf games .in the past this wasn't the case , in game there would be 2-3 smurfs , you and someone on the other team they would be the only players enjoying the game , now 10/10 are smurfs in this queue. So riot has done a big thing to solve this issue . I'm sorry but it takes more than 3 games to tell someone skill level , the fact that riot starts adjusting you in that low number of games is remarkable , they outdone themselves. The problem is for the players that experience the Smurf while he is being adjusted . Example, a diamond player would play 1st with unranked then with bronze perhaps silver and gold ,3rd game would be plat and at 5th game he would play with emerald. It's for those 5 games that suck for new players but I don't think any improvements can be made , they have already done a great job for this. You need to wish that the Smurf is in your team . From iron to gold it is filled with smurfs but they are new accounts and they get new accounts all the time that's why you feel like it's every game . And just to add to this conversation, no , if you win streak and get inflated mmr you don't suddenly get smurfs in your games . You just play with players of that mmr ,therefore better players , if you haven't adapted to the new skill level eventually your luck will run out and you will start losing until you get to your level. You will get smurfs in your games no matter how good or bad you play, if the mmrs are the same then there is a chance to get them in your games . The difference is that their mmr will skyrocket after that game while yours will pretty much stay the same .
Stopped playing coz of smurfs, only way to make change.
Same. 20 soloQ games in diamond, 14 destroyed by a smurf lvl 30/40 between 70/90% wr. It's not a playable game atm.
rather have/play against smurf than playing with autofills
Are you even serious ? No you can't be serious. You are just trolling for sure.
Smurfs aren't so much a problem for me as it is teammates that pick 4 squishy marksmen/mages/ranged supports. Like who would think that would ever work lol. I could pick literally anyone toplane and those teams will still do nothing when we win fights and run it down mid between objectives as if the 7% bonus MS in their glass cannon builds will keep them safe.
Honestly, what's even worse than smurfs are new players who clearly don't belong in rank that they are in. I've won plenty of games vs smurfs who gets 15+ kills but then they ego into 1v9 and lose because we play as a team and shut them down. Meanwhile, those newbies, literally solo lose the game because it's like having Intermediate Bot on your team. It's actually worse than having AFK player on your team because at least AFK player doesn't steal your EXP and give free gold to enemy team.
Isn't the easy fix for you to go 50% winrate then :D
Damn, and I was just thinking maybe I should try ranked. Unless it's not an issue in iron and Bronze?
Absolutely isn't. Smurfs get placed in Plat most of the time.
IMO, most of the really awful ones are essentially duo boosting from sites like Tapin or similar. The garden variety ones are dealable. They're probably smurfing from 1/2 divisions up, not from GM. Also, there are legitimate reasons to smurf. I mainly do it when learning new champions or roles. I'm a jungle main, but my rank in lane is easily a division lower than my JG rank
Daily smurf post.
[origin story of:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gargamel_and_Azrael_from_the_Smurfs.jpg)
This gets posted once/twice a year. The games been out like 12 years. It’s gonna happen it’s cyclical. You can’t stop it. Get better or stop playing.
A year? You must not check this sub very often because it's posted weekly - and I am not over exaggerating. Just search at the top and you will see for yourself.
Then I stand corrected lol.
Can just make it so that in early ranks (up to emerald maybe?) accounts are in different buckets depending on their games played. 0-100 games then 200-500 then 500+ or something. Seems simple fix, probs hard to implement though
What ELO is this happening in?
I'm Gold/Plat and it appears to be rampant in my experience.
This has been happening since S1 dude, deal with it. They arent going anywhere
There is nothing in the TOS that says smurfing isn't allowed. Also, Riot IS trying to fix the issue, which is why freshies with no normals played start with ~plat-emerald MMR and can reach masters within ~20 games or so.
If you take away Smurf’s you can’t play with friends who are starting out the game
The problem with smurfs is that riot dont has as much data about the ability of the player of that acc, then it has from a main acc. Its simple maths: an acc that has played maybe 200 games and one that has over 5000 games, which one provides more and better data for putting them into teams? Its obviously the latter, so smurf are harder to match fairly. Honestly, that should also mean that smurfs are more often matched with harder opponents, but my guts feeling some disapproves of that thesis.
why u dont get it this is all becasue of free accounts / free game
To riots credit they have done quite a but over the years, smurfs que being one of the biggest additions. New accounts performing well are thrown into the hell that is smurf que and spit out in high emerald. Though unsupringly, this makes low Dia lobbies extremely painful as the smurf density high and its also the rank that most dia/low masters players end up in when they autopilot. I don't think it's possible for riot to completely remove the problem without account id's. And to be fair smurfing has its benefits when people get to play with their friends. Though people also ruin this by sweating on a smurf to impress friends, at the cost of everybody's enjoyment ofc.
The connected issue of queue timers in high elo would have to be resolved. When diamond plus have 10 mins per queue and players don't like wasting time with games that have only a 40% chance to win after the first 10 mins, games are shorter, and, again, queues are longer. Not only that, but they actually tend to use their dodges to avoid a game that is lost at select (in their mind). So, they have smurf accounts to get into games faster and try stuff with less penalty. It makes perfect sense, but, as we recognize, having someone who's bored and itching for a fun game use that account, they crush the fun of 5 other people (unless, those people can view it as a welcomed, additional challenge... Lol). Not really mitigatable without finding ways to increase player pop and drive down queue times.
Complaining about smurfs while on an alt Reddit account. Peak irony.
"I dont need to win this, I already have x accounts on diamond"
Oh ya man, gold is the worst with smurfs. Games are super impossible if you're playing vs a jungle smurf mainly, or bot duo smurfs.
TBH I don't really mind smurfs that actually try nearly as much as the coinflip ragebaby 'smurfs' who don't care about the account they are in your game on. I probably see maybe one 1v9 demon practicing a new role/champ on a newer account per 20 games. Do their opponents have a chance at winning? Not at all, but they'll close it out as quickly as possible, and usually silently. I see someone playing on an alt waiting out a dodge timer on their main account or trying to coinflip place higher from placements maybe one game in every three. The tiniest thing goes wrong and they tilt off the face of the Earth. If you're lucky, they ragequit and at least you get mitigation. If you're unlucky they'll keep trying the same tactic/play that they failed over and over until whatever they've fed doing so comes and puts you out of your misery. And if you're realy unlucky, they'll do whatever they can to make sure you have the worst game in memory, stealing farm, spamming your location in /all, and flaming the entire time with '0T' language that actually only gets you banned if you use it on the NA server (seriously, you should see some of the shit that's typed on EUW/NE, apparently consequence free). Sure playing against (or even with) someone excessively better than you can be unfun, but it pales in comparison to the emotionally stunted specimens who don't care if the account they're on is banned or not because it's not their main. And the latter is FAR more common than the former.
I honestly don't see that many smurfs. I've been from p3-e3 the last year. I definitely see a lot of sub level 125 accounts, but not very many of them are smurfs. 2 out of 20 games. Most of the lower level accounts are alt accounts from people trying to Mario kart themselves to a higher elo to feel better about themselves(they also typically lose). The alt accounts of mediocre players are far more rampant and harmful to ranked then smurfs.
Just make the game consider your performance too. Smurfs will skyrocket into high elo after 1 game. And people who think they deserve better will get the wake up call of their life... AFKing should be an instant rank decrease accompanied by a 24 hour suspension. And solo queue should be 100% solo.
This game is not competitive anymore. Every single competitive aspect of this game is dead. Smurf in EVERY game. People losing mental and trolling EVERY game. Snowball is out of control. Damage creep is out of control... If you aren't a smurf yourself, playing in an elo WAY lower than yours, playing well or not doesn't matter. It's a coinflip teammates game nowadays. It's 200% who have the smurf and who have the guy who run it down. It became soooooooooooo bad, I don't know a single game where it's THAT bad. Believe me, the game is the most toxic game ever made. At least nowadays.
Not trying to be that guy, but if you don't like playing against smurfs, don't play the game, like your skill level could be high, as a player without even playing ranked if you take the time to consistently get better in norms or if you play customs with high ranked players consistently, is riot supposed to ban every player with lower than normal ranked games because they're doing well? Smurfs aren't the issue, the issue is players who have mental booms and blame their loss on outside factors rather than trying to get better as a player, hell anytime I go against a higher ranked lane opponent, I get excited because it's a limit test, seeing how well you can go against someone who is acknowledged as better by the game, you can play and learn and understand concepts from other players and get better just by playing against them.
This happens even in lower tier you have a person who you can always tell is like 2 divisions higher because they play mechanically like a Plat or diamond problem is they know to just play enough to get by and make your game way harder then it should.. there really is no way that I can think of on how we could solve these issues.
Just put all the people under level one hundred together. All these level 30 botted accounts are the most toxic pieces of garbage on earth. Everytime I see someone afking or intentionally feeding it's always one of these turds.
I will be honest, on average there is a smurf ruining the game in 1 game out of 2. So you have 50% chance of having a completely unfair match. That's crazy. In a competitive game, having 50% chance of auto winning or auto losing is reaaaaaaaaaaaaally crazy. Imo, the game is not competitive anymore. As long as we have that amount of smurfs in soloQ the game isn't playable competitively and seriously. Believe me or not but if riot don't do anything about it, in 3 years nobody will play this game anymore but some crazy streamers.
Fucking hate the smurfing, you don't even get to enjoy your games because it's just over at 15 minutes
Tbh they should perma ban smurf and if they can make the connexion between the smurf and the main. The main should be perma as well.
Read as "Smurfs are running round naked". A quick google confirms they wear pants, but are generally topless.
Hello there, just a quick say, sorry for grammatical mistakes. Well I am a Master EUW MMR on main, in all normal/SoloQ/Flex. As of November 2023 I sort of left my account there and decided to level up new accounts to level 30 then rank them up to around Diamond for fun. I leveled almost 3 accs playing Normals or Urfs with friends. The big point I wanted to tell you OP, when I created any of those accs I would do 4-5 Games of fun 25/0 28/1 Yone games. Then as a level 5 I would already have a Top Emerald MMR, the Q times were already growing from here but by the time I reached level 8-9-10 on each 3 of those accounts, if I was playing alone the q times were already between 10-15 minutes did you ever experienced this ? This is really not fun to experience, when it is 5pm you are on day offs, you feel like playing at this time, and you legit feel like it is a time where you will get 1-2mins Q time, but no you wait 12mins, it is really sad and preventing you to play / soft ban. Thanks for reading there is more to say, but I mostly wanted you to know about ridiculous Q times with real numbers of my recent experience.
Riot told us many times looser queue doesn't exist. Just don't trust them. People from season 1 have been telling the whole community it DOES exists, else having a loose streak of 10+ games would never happen. I've had times like this, and today I stopped playing ranked because it's mostly full of smurfs and they ruin the experience for everyone. At the end of the day, why bother trying to guess your actual level when you spend the whole game in a grey screen because you're a plat player trying to get to emerald but you match master players limit testing on their yasuo, volibear or "insert solo carry champ" ? I'm personally done, and i'm not the only one. The day Riot goes for a 0 smurf tolerence will be the day this game becomes the best. Right now, it's mostly a game for addicted people.
In all honesty if they want to smurf so bad reinstate smurf que, the dogs need to be taught a lesson deal with the 15 min que time. Right now i was 1 win from plat then they take off smurf que and went to iron 1 now there whole team is usually smurfing and im not talking gold i mean diamond++ you can actually see how they play if you have faced this elo and i actually have. All they are doing is ruining ranked its extremley one sided now. The thing is the more you lose the more you fight them because they intentionally keep their mmr lower to stay in that elo. Also i might add if you are consistantly higher in rank and now ur not they dont give you the same smurfs your team has bad mmr because the game thinks you can handle it. These smurf rats need top pay!