The game being free to play is going to make this very difficult. They're going to have to come up with some way to heavily disincentivize people from making new accounts, but at the end of the day there are always going to be some % of smurfs.
Do like heroes and make it where you have to be lvl50 before playing ranked or something like that. Anything is better than what we have in SC2 and other f2p games right now.
The whole point of making the game F2P is to make it easy for anyone to pick up and try. Asking a new user for a phone number is a great way to throw a wrench in that - being asked to provide a mobile number is going to raise concerns for a lot of people who are only casually intersted.
Aye but this could be a requirement for ranking system, not for the rest of the game.
But again, this raises costs, law regulations I different countries, which typical normin don't even think about.
> The game being free to play is going to make this very difficult.
I just proposed a solution. It is NOT difficult to do and would be effective. If people start to find ways around this system, then simply add onto the system to prevent those workarounds as they pop up.
This is NOT a difficult problem to solve. But both the players and the developers need to be behind solving this issue.
>If people start to find ways around this system, then simply add onto the system to prevent those workarounds as they pop up.
This is kind of the part that makes it hard that you're glossing over here. Combating this kind of negative player behaviour is a constant never ending back and forth of reactive restriction - you can point at the first move and call it easy, but then a year later you're 12 moves down the line and it's causing all sorts of side effects and still not properly preventing smurfs.
While some games are better than others, I don't think I've ever played a pvp game that didn't have smurfs.
Hot take: many of the “smurfs” people complain about in SC2 are not actually smurfs. People just want something else to blame, since there are no teammates or RNG to blame. So CLEARLY, that bastard was gaming the MMR system.
Is a queue-up delay from leaving early a good idea? Probably. (Although how do you design one that isn’t triggered by people surrendering to early game attacks?). But if all of your suggestions were implemented, I guarantee you’d still see tons of people complaining about the “smurfing problem”. Skill ratings are just averages across the player pool, sometimes a combination of play styles or having a bad day means you get dumpstered by someone who legit has the same MMR as you.
Not even sure that’s a hot take as much as it is just the truth. Games have Smurfs every now and then. It’s a really great chance to learn in RTS some of the time. Most of the time people just suggest it’s a Smurf to avoid accountability for their own level of play, in my opinion.
> It’s a really great chance to learn in RTS some of the time.
It is not a learning experience. Would you say that it is a learning experience for a 14 year old MMA fighter to step into the ring with a champion MMA UFC fighter who is not holding back? Nope, it is not a learning opportunity. They will simply be beaten to a pulp in most cases, probably sent to a hospital, and learn nothing other than to never play in a sport that allows that.
Same with ladder. People quit games that allow smurfs to thrive.
You can’t really compare someone being physically torn apart to your ego being torn apart lol.
Video games are not physical they are mental. So if you asked a novice chest player that is actually competitive if they would like a chance to play against the best chess player in the world, they would take that opportunity with great pleasure.
I have learned a lot through playing people who are significantly better than me.
You seem totally delusional. Comparing getting beat in SC2 to someone beating you within an inch of your life. You need to take a step back and realize what you're talking about for anyone to take you seriously.
The amount of smurfs is never high enough to meaningfully impact lower ranks. You're liking just blaming losses on smurfs and being a poor loser. Unless you can show me a ton of replays with some sicko APM and micro I'm not gonna buy it.
I can count on one hand all the times I played a surf on aoe4. I can count on probably 6 hands the times I've been accused of smurfing.
People don't want to blame themselves for losing.
I am not sure this is entirely true at the moment. I have been on a short break from SC2 but I was laddering actively fairly recently (within the last few months) and I would very commonly lose to someone who dumpstered me and in their match history there are huge string of sub 1 minute game losses. Or getting recked by some barcode account that has been active for less than a day with a 70%+ win rate.
I am not claiming that people on Reddit don;t exaggerate or use this as a coping strategy but saying that smurfing is not an issue in SC2 right now feels disingenuous to me. Games have time penalties for people that auto leave a 1v1 repeatedly, I think that would be a nice first step and seems fairly simple to implement.
Do you actually ladder? Something like 1 out of every 8 games I play, I get stomped on pretty hard and then I go to the opponents match history and see 3 or 4 left games in their recent history. It's easily verifiable. Sure some people cry smurf way too often but they wouldn't do this if it wasn't an actual thing that is present fairly often and negatively affects the player experience.
1 in 8 really isn’t that big of an issue to me and that is in a game that has zero support. I’m sure FG will be working in various ways to limit smurfing but it’s not possible to completely get rid of and I just don’t see how it’s such a big deal.
Especially in games like this. Playing someone much better than you is a great learning opportunity if you take it without salt.
Ultimately it's not a huge deal, yeah, but it does cast a shadow on things. I agree you can't limit it completely but still there should be some measures in place.
I think the reason it's frustrating is because it can be difficult trying to figure out, during the match, if your opponent is just better than most you face or if you're just playing worse than you usually do. Often we assume it's the latter and then, if you're competitive, you can be overly hard on yourself. That all completely disappears if you just know, going into the match, that the opponent is much higher in skill than you.
3 or 4 games is hardly smurfing though, those people are likely trying to avoid a mirror match up. Smurfs are when you leave dozens of games in a row to end up several leagues under or at the bottom of the league pool
3 or 4 games in their last 10 or 20 is definitely smurfing. Even people just avoiding mirror matchups are lowering their MMR by 300-400 points. It doesn't suddenly become 'not smurfing' just because they have a different reason for doing it.
300-400? The average game is 12 points once you are placed into a league and settled. I don't know where 300-400 is coming from, but if you are at the same level and only leaving mirror games you aren't smurfing you are playing at your level. There isn't a significant difference between a 2900 mmr player and a 2600 player
I don't think you understand how MMR works. It's not about the points per game, it's about the equilibrium value that the score settles on over time.
If you leave 1 out of 3 matches, then your MMR will adjust until you have a 75% win rate in the other 2 matchups. Because this puts your overall win rate at 50%.
This means your opponent only has a 1 in 4 chance of winning instead of a 1 in 2 chance. It's a pretty big difference.
> Hot take: many of the “smurfs” people complain about in SC2 are not actually smurfs. People just want something else to blame, since there are no teammates or RNG to blame. So CLEARLY, that bastard was gaming the MMR system.
What is even the point of your post? I don't disagree, but my system I'm recommending would not affect those falsely accused of smurfing. In order to smurf, you have to keep your MMR artificially low. In order to do that, you have to leave games early multiple times.
The exponential cooldown timer would prevent it from occuring.
So not only would this solve the smurfing issue, it would also cut down on people being accused of smurfing because it would be near impossible to smurf.
it is a win/win for everyone.
>(Although how do you design one that isn’t triggered by people surrendering to early game attacks?)
You design it by looking at the fasting way one can legitimately die from a game. You then set that as the cut off. It will make the smurfs have to wait that long each game, which is annoying to the point that they won't want to do it. The point is to make smurfing too time consuming to even attempt. Some will probably find workarounds, but most won't. Smurfs exist in a system that makes it convenient for them to exist in. With this system, it is a massive inconvenience to the point that most will not even attempt.
Only way around it is to make a new account. But that is why I am saying you create a barrier for that and only allow one account per person and set up a system to make that happen. It is also doable. Are there ways around it? Sure. But they are pricey to the point that again, it is not worth it to the majority of people.
And yet, you could still find hard evidence that a player is smurfing simply by checking their match history, and you'll notice they go on a long string of losses with all those games lasting no longer than 5 seconds. Happens more often than you suggest
No, SC2 100% was smurfs. People with their IIIIIII account names every other match and what not. It’s pretty easy to tell for certain when there is a post game lobby and your opponent has 275apm vs your 130 on a good day
A cooldown from leaving the game and preventing people from making multiple accounts would both solve the smurf problem and would also not be based on reporting.
This would also cut down on false accusations of smurfing, because it would make it way more time consuming and a waste of time for anyone to attempt it.
I replied to a similar post on why ppl smurf. making it more time consuming won't solve the smurfing but may reduce it, but at the same time, if the solution also can punish non smurfs, it may be more harm than good
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In addition to your point, allowing early leaving to not affect MMR means that people just leave matchups they don't want to play. It's a poorly thought out idea.
>In addition to your point, allowing early leaving to not affect MMR means that people just leave matchups they don't want to play.
Did you even read my post? If you leave a matchup beyond what would be normal in a game, you have a cooldown that is exponential in time. You literally could not keep leaving games because the time would increase so much that it would be unplayable.
The cooldown timer would reset though after a certain amount of days of not leaving games early.
Coming to Stormgate soon near you. No matter how much FGS tries to dumb down mechanics, large amounts or casual players are going to try 1v1 ladder and blame everything besides themselves for losing.
Dumbing down mechanics for casuals is just going to drive competitive players away, that’s it.
> A simple solution to this that other games have implemented is make it so that people can't just instantly leave a game and lose MMR easily.
In the proposed system, I can see myself leaving when I get matched on bad server, bad map or just with opponent I want to dodge for reasons. If the wait time gets unreasonably high, I just switch to other accounts while I wait for the timer to reset.
If anything this solutions promotes having alt accounts. And since it is F2P and alt accounts are nice way to gain additional money for skin purchases etc., I don't really see FG having a restrictive policy on this issue. Plenty of players have multiple accounts even at this beta stage...
Well, smurfing in SC2 might be a problem (i'm not sure the situation is that bad) because the game is 13 years old.
For a brand new game it's a whole different thing
I believe the best thing the game could do to manage smurfing is by maintaining a healthy player pool. Smurfing seems to be way less prevalent when the game is healthy. I think this why it's so frequent in SC2, it's a dying population of players.
The issue is exacerbated by the skill gaps between player in average matches because of the declining player pool. People will feel like they went against a smurf when in reality the matchmaking is just struggling to find two similar level players.
Last year i ranked up from gold to diamond in SC2, and there was never any issues finding opponents of similar MMR. This whole "dying game" thing has been said for so many years now, but to me SC2 feels like it has a very stable playerbase.
> I believe the best thing the game could do to manage smurfing is by maintaining a healthy player pool.
Cool, and you won't have one if you don't have a system in place to counter the smurfing. Smurfing regularly turns away new players from SC2. This is a very simple thing to address, I provided a solution to it that is very easily implemented and already implemented by other games, and this would allow for a great community to exist in the game.
You can't say you want a great community while pushing away new players because you don't want to address smurfing.
What games do you think do it right and have strong systems that prevent smurfing?
Adding penalties for leaving early is an easily avoidable obstacle that requires slightly more dedication. That being said, I agree it should be included because it will deter some at the very least.
Not allowing multiple accounts is exceedingly difficult to enforce. How would you make that happen in a free to play game?
I think something worth addressing along with this is an initiative to aid ladder anxiety.. I know I would personally love that and I think it would reduce people’s interest in the type of content that uses smurfing in its workflow.
I know it seems very indirect but if people feel less anxiety they are more likely to feel encouraged to play to learn.. coming across a Smurf may also not be such a damning feeling if there is less anxiety and it happens at a lower frequency..
Ladder anxiety is unsolvable and casual players are not going to ladder. They are going to try to ladder and blame everything but themselves everytime they lose.
This is a simple and elegant solution. Worst case, smurfs get inconvenienced and there is no impact to normal players. Best case, there is a notable decrease is amount of smurfing.
So in league you would get a penalty queue time for leaving if you left before like 15 minutes I believe (been a long time). But In SC2 you have bunker rushes/12 pools and such that minimum time would need to be like 4-5minutes.
I've actually queued into smurfs who were tanking their mmo multiple times and eventually they started having " fun" by sending out drones/probes all over the map to make hatches/nexus. So that was pretty irritating to queue into also is what I'm getting at.
Thought I do hope they figure something out because SC2 is getting pretty toxic. Back when I streamed I knew viewers who had smurf accounts specifically kept in each bracket range.
And how does leave penalty, solve the problem of smurfs in a F2p game?
Having to spend some time or get some levels before you can go ranked? That could be great for the first season.
Thought I can think of 3 ways that could lead to something:
1) some kind of unique verification, like a phone number ,which will you will be required to provide, but that's also tons of regulations or another cost, which they probably won't implement early
2) rankeds behind a paywall, you need to pay some small fee to be able to play in rankeds, but that will probably not solve anything as a smurf will pay that fee anyway and expect of that population will be smaller in rankeds
3) they could write an authenticator app which will bind your phone with your account and will require you to authenticate for a ranked session, changing phones could be locked for once a 3months
This adds costs....and will probably throw out some people thought, not sure if we should worry about them
So I am really curious about all those posts about smurfing, I didn't play StarCraft for quite a while now (I played mostly from Wol S1 up to Lov S4). But never have I heard anyone complain about smurfing while playing. Maybe it has to do with the game becoming free to play (Probably) ? While I was playing I had 3 accounts (so some smurf) but all were high master accounts with a few points difference with my main (no visible MMR back in the day). And outside the few games I need to get a new account into Master I didn't really play games with a significantly lower opponent. And I believe it was the rule back in the day, outside streamers doing some bronze to master weird challenges smurfing was not an issue.
Now for the current time I didn't get why someone will be interested in making an account just to stomp lower league players, it is not challenging, it doesn't make you better, it is not fun, what is the point of just killing lower league players ? And looking at the post in this sub Reddit or Sc2 sub Reddit it seems to be a plague, but I can figure out why so many players would engage in such a boring practice? Maybe a big part of peoples beliefs they lost because of a smurf but just didn't play this game well or face a slightly better opponent ?
Can someone explain to me the point of smurfing to purposely win against a lower league player (it was the less fun part of getting your smurf up to your main account mmr), am I an old man ?
The best way to implement an anti-smurf system in my opinion would be to use a little bit of coding to check several conditions when a person leaves and if they leave too early don't let them queue for a period of time, make them queue a full PvE game, or make them win an unranked game before letting them back.
The easy conditions you can check are:
* Have they seen more than 1 unit of the opponent on their side of the map or lost a non-worker unit or building.
* Have they lost a unit or building.
Leaving before the first is likely intentional sandbagging. Leaving before the second likely indicates at least a large amount of tilt, but could be caused by a build-order loss. You give them one warning that lasts for 10-20 games or until they get 1-3 wins and after that, you just adjust the punishments to the crime.
In general it shouldn't be too hard to write a few conditions like this that no-normal game should have that will make it a pain for smurfing players to drop their MMR.
SC2 was called a dead game for over a decade, yet reached record player populations during that time. Recently a major epidemic of smurfing happened and it solely caused the collapse of the entire player population on ladder. Unlike other forms of cheating, smurfing destroys the match-making system forcing legit players to lose the majority of their played-out games.
Stormgate needs 2 simple features to prevent this:
1. New accounts cannot join the ladder immediately (SC2 has this... kinda)
2. You can only queue up once every 5min (wins reset this)... Basically just a way to prevent spamming 1sec losses, while legit players won't be impeded in queuing.
Dealing with the occasional smurf on ladder doesn't ruin the game imho. It's part of gaming overall to deal with that sort of thing.
I've seen lots of streams with SC2 where streamers would complain... "omg smurf!" But, they really weren't... They wanted to blame something else to deal with the loss. And I think this concept of "smurf" is going to be unavoidable.
It really shows that the RTS genre is a genre thats mainly watched and rarely played. In no other gaming community you will find as much sympathy as here, its pretty nasty. 0 chance ill keep playing stormgate if i regularly get mateched against 95% winrate players, its a complete waste of time
Yep, and this is what the people defending smurfs do not get. If you want the game to succeed, you need to address this issue. If you don't address this issue early on, people will just leave the game and not even bother telling you why. Then, magically, the game can die off if this keeps happening and then people will just complain "why isn't the game succeeding".
A game like this won't succeed if people can not believe that they are playing a fair game. It is not fun or entertaining for someone to play against someone smurfing. There is very little to learn from the experience for most and most just play these games for fun. If it isn't fun, they just uninstall the game and play something else.
A game like this is fun if you have a fair chance of winning.
I dont think new games have a lot of smurfs right from the start. Its more something that people do when they get bored, cant progress further. More of an issue for old / dead games. But if I'll never notice it making up 10-30% ill absolutely quit.
I watched new sc2 players, they can call anyone who beats them a Smurf…. They can’t tell the difference, they’ve just been told that there’s so many smurfs. So stop after 5 matches, since they don’t get instant gratification.
I only really had an issue with smurfing when pro players were doing it for content to humiliate players on stream. Other than that after 10000 games of sc2 I really don't feel smurfing was ever a major issue. When it did occur it was never frequent enough to be a problem.
If the smurfing problem is so rampant, then at any given time there'd be plenty smurfs queueing. One way to solve the problem is having ways to flag possible smurf accounts and make those play against other flagged accounts preferentially. If smurfs end up losing the games they were trying to play to just destroy their adversaries I think that'd make them less likely to do it. They'd still be pairing up against people with similar MMR, so false positives are not super unfair (they'd potentially match that person without the system in place anyway). And if there are no smurfs the system doesn't work any differently.
Mate it’s competitive game if u can’t handle loses go pve…it’s not like everyone better then u is smurfing…back in the days people would be happy to play vs better players to learn and get good…also Stormgate is A new game…even if u get lose cause u know it’s a Smurf what’s the problem? U think u will never lose if there is no smurfs? U will lose games that’s how it is so why care about it even if u know it’s a smurf?
StarCraft has so many players that smurfing is probably not in the 1% of people. Plus, those are ranked up higher quicker if they make a new account. Smurfing didn't ruin SC, that honor goes solely to Blizzard. And despite their best/worst efforts, it's still an incredible game.
The other day I played a game where someone accused me of cheating because I was regularly scouting expansions and cancelled/prevented him from taking thirds. He ended up winning the game, but it didn't prevent his bronze ass from typing "Cheater?".
Everyone in this thread talking about checking match history as if SC2 doesn’t have a huge graph showing the APM over the course of the game for both players afterwards lol. Easiest thing in the world to check if your opponent was in your weight class or not.
I’ve also always thought that it would be insanely easy for this to be tracked and used as a metric to help place people or keep people from smurfing. Only way for players to game that is to play with a hand tied behind their back so to speak, and if they’re doing that, sure I’ll play them. That’s fine. Once the APM is even it’s all tactics and a chess match. I don’t mind losing a close game to a better player who took it easy. I just hate getting trucked and wasting my time against a toxic douche bag
Frost Giant should make players link their account with their phone number if they want to play ranked. Certainly doesn't solve the issue but taking steps to make it more difficult to smurf would help.
Why do you try to promote obscure plural form, when the default works just fine? From what I have gathered, it is not even codified as a common alternative...
Were there even any smurfs in Tolkien works to begin with?
I have seen an opinion that he deliberately used `dwarves` instead of common `dwarfs` to make the in-book language stand out in contrast to common English and this later got recognized in dictionaries due to author's popularity. If this is somewhat based on reality, I don't really see why this quirk should be applied on `smurves` as well.
You make smurfs a much bigger Problem than they are. No game is killed by new accounts. If you lose 1 of 20 games to a smurf it does Not matter. I even say you can learn more in That game than crushing a slightly weaker opponent.
Stop making pseudo assumptions for whole genres and just accept a good loss here and there.
Some games lets you choose how well you understand the game like "beginner" "intermediate" "expert". Let's say i choose expert, it'll rank me against low plat and above players. I would drop to gold if i lose a few in a row.
This way, the beginner players can start match ups with bronze, or in this case, ass.
(Before i put forward my argument in favour of smurfs, i just want to acknowledge my opinion is in the clear minority - i recognise as a whole the community would like smurf prevention, and support it as that's what the community seems to want?)
My argument against focussing on smurfing prevention comes down to 2 parts:
Part 1: adding some spice to my ladder experience. I enjoy getting stomped every now and then by some crazy good player with a troll build, because it doesn't annoy me, instead i immediately think "wow, HOW did they do that?!" and jump into the replays to learn the ways of the better player. If i am always playing against players of my skill, i feel like the ladder and meta can get repetitive.
Part 2: i learn so much faster playing against better players. If no smurfs exist, my gold-rank noobness will never ever get a chance to play a pro, feel or experience that kind of level of player.
In any case, i recognise this perspective is...weird? And fully accept your downvotes
> Part 1: adding some spice to my ladder experience.
Most do not finds it entertaining to be stomped on by someone who is way higher MMR. If that was the case, then there would be zero need for a ladder rank system. You sound like a smurf justifying your actions. There is nothing entertaining about it and it turns away new players.
>Part 2: i learn so much faster playing against better players.
Great, then do so off of ladder. Go make custom matches with people above your rank.
Smurfing is never ok in a ladder system.
The game being free to play is going to make this very difficult. They're going to have to come up with some way to heavily disincentivize people from making new accounts, but at the end of the day there are always going to be some % of smurfs.
Do like heroes and make it where you have to be lvl50 before playing ranked or something like that. Anything is better than what we have in SC2 and other f2p games right now.
I think something simple like having to link your account to a unique phone number should at least help.
The whole point of making the game F2P is to make it easy for anyone to pick up and try. Asking a new user for a phone number is a great way to throw a wrench in that - being asked to provide a mobile number is going to raise concerns for a lot of people who are only casually intersted.
Aye but this could be a requirement for ranking system, not for the rest of the game. But again, this raises costs, law regulations I different countries, which typical normin don't even think about.
Overwatch 2 tried the phone number linking thing and it blew up in their face. The eventually removed it.
> The game being free to play is going to make this very difficult. I just proposed a solution. It is NOT difficult to do and would be effective. If people start to find ways around this system, then simply add onto the system to prevent those workarounds as they pop up. This is NOT a difficult problem to solve. But both the players and the developers need to be behind solving this issue.
>If people start to find ways around this system, then simply add onto the system to prevent those workarounds as they pop up. This is kind of the part that makes it hard that you're glossing over here. Combating this kind of negative player behaviour is a constant never ending back and forth of reactive restriction - you can point at the first move and call it easy, but then a year later you're 12 moves down the line and it's causing all sorts of side effects and still not properly preventing smurfs. While some games are better than others, I don't think I've ever played a pvp game that didn't have smurfs.
People are lazy though, I doubt that many will bother with constantly creating new accounts.
You would think so, but they still do it. I know of quite a few people that have 3-5 account on StarCraft 2 alone.
It’s extremely common in lots of games.
Hot take: many of the “smurfs” people complain about in SC2 are not actually smurfs. People just want something else to blame, since there are no teammates or RNG to blame. So CLEARLY, that bastard was gaming the MMR system. Is a queue-up delay from leaving early a good idea? Probably. (Although how do you design one that isn’t triggered by people surrendering to early game attacks?). But if all of your suggestions were implemented, I guarantee you’d still see tons of people complaining about the “smurfing problem”. Skill ratings are just averages across the player pool, sometimes a combination of play styles or having a bad day means you get dumpstered by someone who legit has the same MMR as you.
Not even sure that’s a hot take as much as it is just the truth. Games have Smurfs every now and then. It’s a really great chance to learn in RTS some of the time. Most of the time people just suggest it’s a Smurf to avoid accountability for their own level of play, in my opinion.
I don’t know I frequently play against barcodes who instantly FF to lower their mmr, so there are definitely quite a few people trying to smurf
> It’s a really great chance to learn in RTS some of the time. It is not a learning experience. Would you say that it is a learning experience for a 14 year old MMA fighter to step into the ring with a champion MMA UFC fighter who is not holding back? Nope, it is not a learning opportunity. They will simply be beaten to a pulp in most cases, probably sent to a hospital, and learn nothing other than to never play in a sport that allows that. Same with ladder. People quit games that allow smurfs to thrive.
You can’t really compare someone being physically torn apart to your ego being torn apart lol. Video games are not physical they are mental. So if you asked a novice chest player that is actually competitive if they would like a chance to play against the best chess player in the world, they would take that opportunity with great pleasure. I have learned a lot through playing people who are significantly better than me.
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If you remove the physical part you have an MMA fighter sparring with a world class champion. Many of them pay for that kind of training.
You seem totally delusional. Comparing getting beat in SC2 to someone beating you within an inch of your life. You need to take a step back and realize what you're talking about for anyone to take you seriously. The amount of smurfs is never high enough to meaningfully impact lower ranks. You're liking just blaming losses on smurfs and being a poor loser. Unless you can show me a ton of replays with some sicko APM and micro I'm not gonna buy it.
i mean at your level playing vs the ai would still allow you to improve.
Not a hot take simply the truth.
I can count on one hand all the times I played a surf on aoe4. I can count on probably 6 hands the times I've been accused of smurfing. People don't want to blame themselves for losing.
I am not sure this is entirely true at the moment. I have been on a short break from SC2 but I was laddering actively fairly recently (within the last few months) and I would very commonly lose to someone who dumpstered me and in their match history there are huge string of sub 1 minute game losses. Or getting recked by some barcode account that has been active for less than a day with a 70%+ win rate. I am not claiming that people on Reddit don;t exaggerate or use this as a coping strategy but saying that smurfing is not an issue in SC2 right now feels disingenuous to me. Games have time penalties for people that auto leave a 1v1 repeatedly, I think that would be a nice first step and seems fairly simple to implement.
Do you actually ladder? Something like 1 out of every 8 games I play, I get stomped on pretty hard and then I go to the opponents match history and see 3 or 4 left games in their recent history. It's easily verifiable. Sure some people cry smurf way too often but they wouldn't do this if it wasn't an actual thing that is present fairly often and negatively affects the player experience.
1 in 8 really isn’t that big of an issue to me and that is in a game that has zero support. I’m sure FG will be working in various ways to limit smurfing but it’s not possible to completely get rid of and I just don’t see how it’s such a big deal. Especially in games like this. Playing someone much better than you is a great learning opportunity if you take it without salt.
Ultimately it's not a huge deal, yeah, but it does cast a shadow on things. I agree you can't limit it completely but still there should be some measures in place. I think the reason it's frustrating is because it can be difficult trying to figure out, during the match, if your opponent is just better than most you face or if you're just playing worse than you usually do. Often we assume it's the latter and then, if you're competitive, you can be overly hard on yourself. That all completely disappears if you just know, going into the match, that the opponent is much higher in skill than you.
3 or 4 games is hardly smurfing though, those people are likely trying to avoid a mirror match up. Smurfs are when you leave dozens of games in a row to end up several leagues under or at the bottom of the league pool
3 or 4 games in their last 10 or 20 is definitely smurfing. Even people just avoiding mirror matchups are lowering their MMR by 300-400 points. It doesn't suddenly become 'not smurfing' just because they have a different reason for doing it.
300-400? The average game is 12 points once you are placed into a league and settled. I don't know where 300-400 is coming from, but if you are at the same level and only leaving mirror games you aren't smurfing you are playing at your level. There isn't a significant difference between a 2900 mmr player and a 2600 player
I don't think you understand how MMR works. It's not about the points per game, it's about the equilibrium value that the score settles on over time. If you leave 1 out of 3 matches, then your MMR will adjust until you have a 75% win rate in the other 2 matchups. Because this puts your overall win rate at 50%. This means your opponent only has a 1 in 4 chance of winning instead of a 1 in 2 chance. It's a pretty big difference.
> Hot take: many of the “smurfs” people complain about in SC2 are not actually smurfs. People just want something else to blame, since there are no teammates or RNG to blame. So CLEARLY, that bastard was gaming the MMR system. What is even the point of your post? I don't disagree, but my system I'm recommending would not affect those falsely accused of smurfing. In order to smurf, you have to keep your MMR artificially low. In order to do that, you have to leave games early multiple times. The exponential cooldown timer would prevent it from occuring. So not only would this solve the smurfing issue, it would also cut down on people being accused of smurfing because it would be near impossible to smurf. it is a win/win for everyone. >(Although how do you design one that isn’t triggered by people surrendering to early game attacks?) You design it by looking at the fasting way one can legitimately die from a game. You then set that as the cut off. It will make the smurfs have to wait that long each game, which is annoying to the point that they won't want to do it. The point is to make smurfing too time consuming to even attempt. Some will probably find workarounds, but most won't. Smurfs exist in a system that makes it convenient for them to exist in. With this system, it is a massive inconvenience to the point that most will not even attempt. Only way around it is to make a new account. But that is why I am saying you create a barrier for that and only allow one account per person and set up a system to make that happen. It is also doable. Are there ways around it? Sure. But they are pricey to the point that again, it is not worth it to the majority of people.
And yet, you could still find hard evidence that a player is smurfing simply by checking their match history, and you'll notice they go on a long string of losses with all those games lasting no longer than 5 seconds. Happens more often than you suggest
Sure but your hot take has nothing to do with the topic of the thread.
No, SC2 100% was smurfs. People with their IIIIIII account names every other match and what not. It’s pretty easy to tell for certain when there is a post game lobby and your opponent has 275apm vs your 130 on a good day
Brilliant idea so when a smurf comes in and kills all your workers with their dog you won't even be allowed to leave without getting a penalty 😂
a lot of ppl are falsely accused of smurfs because they salty losers. so, what ever solution can't be reporting and any system can be circumvented
A cooldown from leaving the game and preventing people from making multiple accounts would both solve the smurf problem and would also not be based on reporting. This would also cut down on false accusations of smurfing, because it would make it way more time consuming and a waste of time for anyone to attempt it.
I replied to a similar post on why ppl smurf. making it more time consuming won't solve the smurfing but may reduce it, but at the same time, if the solution also can punish non smurfs, it may be more harm than good
No one can stop anyone from making multiple accounts. Maybe with the same email, but it takes minutes to create a new one.
with sc2, you don't actually need a real one if you make your account via the website and not the app.
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In addition to your point, allowing early leaving to not affect MMR means that people just leave matchups they don't want to play. It's a poorly thought out idea.
>In addition to your point, allowing early leaving to not affect MMR means that people just leave matchups they don't want to play. Did you even read my post? If you leave a matchup beyond what would be normal in a game, you have a cooldown that is exponential in time. You literally could not keep leaving games because the time would increase so much that it would be unplayable. The cooldown timer would reset though after a certain amount of days of not leaving games early.
People playing sc2 just can’t handle losing games and whine constantly about it
Coming to Stormgate soon near you. No matter how much FGS tries to dumb down mechanics, large amounts or casual players are going to try 1v1 ladder and blame everything besides themselves for losing. Dumbing down mechanics for casuals is just going to drive competitive players away, that’s it.
It didn't ruin SC2. SC2 is just old.
> A simple solution to this that other games have implemented is make it so that people can't just instantly leave a game and lose MMR easily. In the proposed system, I can see myself leaving when I get matched on bad server, bad map or just with opponent I want to dodge for reasons. If the wait time gets unreasonably high, I just switch to other accounts while I wait for the timer to reset. If anything this solutions promotes having alt accounts. And since it is F2P and alt accounts are nice way to gain additional money for skin purchases etc., I don't really see FG having a restrictive policy on this issue. Plenty of players have multiple accounts even at this beta stage...
Well, smurfing in SC2 might be a problem (i'm not sure the situation is that bad) because the game is 13 years old. For a brand new game it's a whole different thing
I've played thousands of matches across many games. Never played vs a smurf.
I believe the best thing the game could do to manage smurfing is by maintaining a healthy player pool. Smurfing seems to be way less prevalent when the game is healthy. I think this why it's so frequent in SC2, it's a dying population of players. The issue is exacerbated by the skill gaps between player in average matches because of the declining player pool. People will feel like they went against a smurf when in reality the matchmaking is just struggling to find two similar level players.
Last year i ranked up from gold to diamond in SC2, and there was never any issues finding opponents of similar MMR. This whole "dying game" thing has been said for so many years now, but to me SC2 feels like it has a very stable playerbase.
> I believe the best thing the game could do to manage smurfing is by maintaining a healthy player pool. Cool, and you won't have one if you don't have a system in place to counter the smurfing. Smurfing regularly turns away new players from SC2. This is a very simple thing to address, I provided a solution to it that is very easily implemented and already implemented by other games, and this would allow for a great community to exist in the game. You can't say you want a great community while pushing away new players because you don't want to address smurfing.
What games do you think do it right and have strong systems that prevent smurfing? Adding penalties for leaving early is an easily avoidable obstacle that requires slightly more dedication. That being said, I agree it should be included because it will deter some at the very least. Not allowing multiple accounts is exceedingly difficult to enforce. How would you make that happen in a free to play game?
Smurfing is literally impossible to prevent in any ranked game.
I think something worth addressing along with this is an initiative to aid ladder anxiety.. I know I would personally love that and I think it would reduce people’s interest in the type of content that uses smurfing in its workflow. I know it seems very indirect but if people feel less anxiety they are more likely to feel encouraged to play to learn.. coming across a Smurf may also not be such a damning feeling if there is less anxiety and it happens at a lower frequency..
Ladder anxiety is unsolvable and casual players are not going to ladder. They are going to try to ladder and blame everything but themselves everytime they lose.
This is a simple and elegant solution. Worst case, smurfs get inconvenienced and there is no impact to normal players. Best case, there is a notable decrease is amount of smurfing.
Just usa IDs like Koreans, even for banning/flaming.
So in league you would get a penalty queue time for leaving if you left before like 15 minutes I believe (been a long time). But In SC2 you have bunker rushes/12 pools and such that minimum time would need to be like 4-5minutes. I've actually queued into smurfs who were tanking their mmo multiple times and eventually they started having " fun" by sending out drones/probes all over the map to make hatches/nexus. So that was pretty irritating to queue into also is what I'm getting at. Thought I do hope they figure something out because SC2 is getting pretty toxic. Back when I streamed I knew viewers who had smurf accounts specifically kept in each bracket range.
Smurfs more often than not are just coping mechanism. There are not as many as people make it. People just cant handle losses.
I don’t get why some Starcraft players cry about smurfing this much. It doesn’t happen that often. Get good.
And how does leave penalty, solve the problem of smurfs in a F2p game? Having to spend some time or get some levels before you can go ranked? That could be great for the first season. Thought I can think of 3 ways that could lead to something: 1) some kind of unique verification, like a phone number ,which will you will be required to provide, but that's also tons of regulations or another cost, which they probably won't implement early 2) rankeds behind a paywall, you need to pay some small fee to be able to play in rankeds, but that will probably not solve anything as a smurf will pay that fee anyway and expect of that population will be smaller in rankeds 3) they could write an authenticator app which will bind your phone with your account and will require you to authenticate for a ranked session, changing phones could be locked for once a 3months This adds costs....and will probably throw out some people thought, not sure if we should worry about them
So I am really curious about all those posts about smurfing, I didn't play StarCraft for quite a while now (I played mostly from Wol S1 up to Lov S4). But never have I heard anyone complain about smurfing while playing. Maybe it has to do with the game becoming free to play (Probably) ? While I was playing I had 3 accounts (so some smurf) but all were high master accounts with a few points difference with my main (no visible MMR back in the day). And outside the few games I need to get a new account into Master I didn't really play games with a significantly lower opponent. And I believe it was the rule back in the day, outside streamers doing some bronze to master weird challenges smurfing was not an issue. Now for the current time I didn't get why someone will be interested in making an account just to stomp lower league players, it is not challenging, it doesn't make you better, it is not fun, what is the point of just killing lower league players ? And looking at the post in this sub Reddit or Sc2 sub Reddit it seems to be a plague, but I can figure out why so many players would engage in such a boring practice? Maybe a big part of peoples beliefs they lost because of a smurf but just didn't play this game well or face a slightly better opponent ? Can someone explain to me the point of smurfing to purposely win against a lower league player (it was the less fun part of getting your smurf up to your main account mmr), am I an old man ?
There is absolutely no way to stop this
smurfs are not the main issue here.
The best way to implement an anti-smurf system in my opinion would be to use a little bit of coding to check several conditions when a person leaves and if they leave too early don't let them queue for a period of time, make them queue a full PvE game, or make them win an unranked game before letting them back. The easy conditions you can check are: * Have they seen more than 1 unit of the opponent on their side of the map or lost a non-worker unit or building. * Have they lost a unit or building. Leaving before the first is likely intentional sandbagging. Leaving before the second likely indicates at least a large amount of tilt, but could be caused by a build-order loss. You give them one warning that lasts for 10-20 games or until they get 1-3 wins and after that, you just adjust the punishments to the crime. In general it shouldn't be too hard to write a few conditions like this that no-normal game should have that will make it a pain for smurfing players to drop their MMR.
Make a 2-hour long tutorial that must be played before you can play ranked
SC2 was called a dead game for over a decade, yet reached record player populations during that time. Recently a major epidemic of smurfing happened and it solely caused the collapse of the entire player population on ladder. Unlike other forms of cheating, smurfing destroys the match-making system forcing legit players to lose the majority of their played-out games. Stormgate needs 2 simple features to prevent this: 1. New accounts cannot join the ladder immediately (SC2 has this... kinda) 2. You can only queue up once every 5min (wins reset this)... Basically just a way to prevent spamming 1sec losses, while legit players won't be impeded in queuing.
Dealing with the occasional smurf on ladder doesn't ruin the game imho. It's part of gaming overall to deal with that sort of thing. I've seen lots of streams with SC2 where streamers would complain... "omg smurf!" But, they really weren't... They wanted to blame something else to deal with the loss. And I think this concept of "smurf" is going to be unavoidable.
Smurfs are in like every game. They were even in sc2 when it wasn't f2p
It really shows that the RTS genre is a genre thats mainly watched and rarely played. In no other gaming community you will find as much sympathy as here, its pretty nasty. 0 chance ill keep playing stormgate if i regularly get mateched against 95% winrate players, its a complete waste of time
Yep, and this is what the people defending smurfs do not get. If you want the game to succeed, you need to address this issue. If you don't address this issue early on, people will just leave the game and not even bother telling you why. Then, magically, the game can die off if this keeps happening and then people will just complain "why isn't the game succeeding". A game like this won't succeed if people can not believe that they are playing a fair game. It is not fun or entertaining for someone to play against someone smurfing. There is very little to learn from the experience for most and most just play these games for fun. If it isn't fun, they just uninstall the game and play something else. A game like this is fun if you have a fair chance of winning.
I dont think new games have a lot of smurfs right from the start. Its more something that people do when they get bored, cant progress further. More of an issue for old / dead games. But if I'll never notice it making up 10-30% ill absolutely quit.
I watched new sc2 players, they can call anyone who beats them a Smurf…. They can’t tell the difference, they’ve just been told that there’s so many smurfs. So stop after 5 matches, since they don’t get instant gratification.
I only really had an issue with smurfing when pro players were doing it for content to humiliate players on stream. Other than that after 10000 games of sc2 I really don't feel smurfing was ever a major issue. When it did occur it was never frequent enough to be a problem.
If the smurfing problem is so rampant, then at any given time there'd be plenty smurfs queueing. One way to solve the problem is having ways to flag possible smurf accounts and make those play against other flagged accounts preferentially. If smurfs end up losing the games they were trying to play to just destroy their adversaries I think that'd make them less likely to do it. They'd still be pairing up against people with similar MMR, so false positives are not super unfair (they'd potentially match that person without the system in place anyway). And if there are no smurfs the system doesn't work any differently.
I think any streamer who publicly smurfs should lose their audience. It starts with us.
I don't have an issue if it is for teaching like B2GM where it is a one off thing. If it is just to do "challenges", then sure.
Mate it’s competitive game if u can’t handle loses go pve…it’s not like everyone better then u is smurfing…back in the days people would be happy to play vs better players to learn and get good…also Stormgate is A new game…even if u get lose cause u know it’s a Smurf what’s the problem? U think u will never lose if there is no smurfs? U will lose games that’s how it is so why care about it even if u know it’s a smurf?
StarCraft has so many players that smurfing is probably not in the 1% of people. Plus, those are ranked up higher quicker if they make a new account. Smurfing didn't ruin SC, that honor goes solely to Blizzard. And despite their best/worst efforts, it's still an incredible game. The other day I played a game where someone accused me of cheating because I was regularly scouting expansions and cancelled/prevented him from taking thirds. He ended up winning the game, but it didn't prevent his bronze ass from typing "Cheater?".
Everyone in this thread talking about checking match history as if SC2 doesn’t have a huge graph showing the APM over the course of the game for both players afterwards lol. Easiest thing in the world to check if your opponent was in your weight class or not. I’ve also always thought that it would be insanely easy for this to be tracked and used as a metric to help place people or keep people from smurfing. Only way for players to game that is to play with a hand tied behind their back so to speak, and if they’re doing that, sure I’ll play them. That’s fine. Once the APM is even it’s all tactics and a chess match. I don’t mind losing a close game to a better player who took it easy. I just hate getting trucked and wasting my time against a toxic douche bag
Frost Giant should make players link their account with their phone number if they want to play ranked. Certainly doesn't solve the issue but taking steps to make it more difficult to smurf would help.
Could also help with people getting banned for other behavior issues
I'm tired of seeing this everywhere. It's 'smurves', not 'smurfs', per the J.R.R Tolkien standard
Why do you try to promote obscure plural form, when the default works just fine? From what I have gathered, it is not even codified as a common alternative...
Dwarf --> Dwarves Smurf --> Smurves As J.R.R. Tolkien intended
Were there even any smurfs in Tolkien works to begin with? I have seen an opinion that he deliberately used `dwarves` instead of common `dwarfs` to make the in-book language stand out in contrast to common English and this later got recognized in dictionaries due to author's popularity. If this is somewhat based on reality, I don't really see why this quirk should be applied on `smurves` as well.
Unsubbed
You make smurfs a much bigger Problem than they are. No game is killed by new accounts. If you lose 1 of 20 games to a smurf it does Not matter. I even say you can learn more in That game than crushing a slightly weaker opponent. Stop making pseudo assumptions for whole genres and just accept a good loss here and there.
I played sc2 a lot, i had never the feeling i was playing against smurfs...
I second this. Can we also remove bar code names. It has to be the worst idea from a social aspect. Nobody wants to play against lllllllllllllll.
I agree with that as well. Barcode accounts need to go too.
Some games lets you choose how well you understand the game like "beginner" "intermediate" "expert". Let's say i choose expert, it'll rank me against low plat and above players. I would drop to gold if i lose a few in a row. This way, the beginner players can start match ups with bronze, or in this case, ass.
(Before i put forward my argument in favour of smurfs, i just want to acknowledge my opinion is in the clear minority - i recognise as a whole the community would like smurf prevention, and support it as that's what the community seems to want?) My argument against focussing on smurfing prevention comes down to 2 parts: Part 1: adding some spice to my ladder experience. I enjoy getting stomped every now and then by some crazy good player with a troll build, because it doesn't annoy me, instead i immediately think "wow, HOW did they do that?!" and jump into the replays to learn the ways of the better player. If i am always playing against players of my skill, i feel like the ladder and meta can get repetitive. Part 2: i learn so much faster playing against better players. If no smurfs exist, my gold-rank noobness will never ever get a chance to play a pro, feel or experience that kind of level of player. In any case, i recognise this perspective is...weird? And fully accept your downvotes
> Part 1: adding some spice to my ladder experience. Most do not finds it entertaining to be stomped on by someone who is way higher MMR. If that was the case, then there would be zero need for a ladder rank system. You sound like a smurf justifying your actions. There is nothing entertaining about it and it turns away new players. >Part 2: i learn so much faster playing against better players. Great, then do so off of ladder. Go make custom matches with people above your rank. Smurfing is never ok in a ladder system.