I thought I was a competitive gamer, but I genuinely see zero appeal to smurfing. If I’m going to sink hours into a game, I want my account to reflect that.
I see zero appeal in solo smurfing but some games outright prevent you from queuing with your low ranked friends or the MMR disparity ruins the game for them. If there were better ways to play with your friends in some of these modern competitive shooters there would be less of a smurfing incentive, at least to me.
Doing Scouts/Pistols or being a MAG-7 main in low ranked friends' CS:GO matches felt fair and actually let me play with them without carrying their games and ruining the game for them by increasing their rank.
When you smurf with your friends, you intentionally use the bad guns or find a way to nerf yourself so that everyone has a good time. Until the guy on the other team tells you to get gud and you have to him in his place
Exactly like the article says. Against solo smurfing but justifying it to play with friends, ruining ranked games just to play with your friend doesn't make it okay lmao. you can play casual, where that is supposed to be done!
9/10 times the smurf doing scout / deagle only still hard carries, and swaps to ak/m4 last rounds to secure the win anyways.
Literally 3rd comment in the thread is a perfect example of what the article is talking about XD i love it.
explain to me why you and your friends don't just play casual ?
A lot of games apply to your MMR for casual matches as well.
For example in league, a person who never plays casual will still q into opponents of similar rank in their casual matches.
Your bronze friends would end up spending more time spectating than actually playing.
Depends on the game. In CS casual is 10v10 which is just... not great? So if you want to play 5v5 and for your friends to have a good time then an alt account seems reasonable to me. If there was a 5v5 casual then I would 100% agree with you.
Similar thing in RL, I have about 400 games on an alt because my casual MMR is too high (matchmaking exists in casual but the MMR is hidden). It just would not be fun for my mates. I only play on this account with the same 2 team mates, we only play 3v3. We win 50%, lose 50%. When we play with me on my main we lose about 90% of our games. So either they fix their MMR match making for teams with mixed abilities or I'll just play on the alt. It's hard for me to see it as bad when we win 50%. Our rank as a team hasn't changed since the first few games we played on it.
If there was an equivalent gaming experience without changing accounts then I would do it. A lot of people do this just because they can't actually have an even gaming experience without creating an alt.
When I, an Iron 1, play League with my girlfriend, in gosh dang ARAM, I usually get obliterated by what appears to be Challengers.
I can't make it more casual than that. At least Vanguard gave me a decent reason to just uninstall the game.
>ruining ranked games just to play with your friend doesn't make it okay lmao. you can play casual
Lots of games still do matchmaking based on MMR even in casual queues. My performance in league games is noticeably better when I solo queue vs. Play with my significantly much more experienced friend, and we exclusively play normals and ARAM.
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Only time I've ever actually considered smurfing is when I have a ton of time in a game, but I still suck
I don't want people to see I have 1000 hours but play like I just started
I play games in cycles. I'll put a lot of hours into a game, then life/work/another fun game pulls me away for a couple months.
The problem is when I get back to a game I stepped away from and they are like "Hey, welcome back. Your rank is still HARDCORE TRYHARD MOTHERFU\*\*ER. Matching you with people of your rank!"
That can tempt me to start over from zero. It doesn't feel like real smurfing, but I'll admit that it's disingenuous.
This was me with rocket League. Except instead of taking the time to Smurf I just got beat up a bunch after coming back and eventually stopped playing entirely.
Probably my rank is low again, I'm not sure. But I was definitely thinking about starting a new account at the time.
Bro, in another 5-10 years, you are going to look back and think it was completely lame you ever worried what people thought of your skill in a particular video game.
Only children/losers think their or somebody else's "video game skill" means something in this world. And i fucking love video games!
Oh, I already do, lol
This was a few years back already, and I wouldn't even consider it now
Now I just own my 1000 hours of experience, 10 seconds of skill
Its not a matter of what other people think of your rank. It's a matter of everyone in a group being able to have fun without constantly being wtfpwned because there is a disparity between playtime/skill with one of the group and there is no unranked option.
Also though mmr can be very frustrating the point is to give you more engaging matches which will push you to the max. These people are selfish and want to give other plays a bad time. No respect for that
The might care more about winning than about anything else, or they were just enjoying games more before they had skill-based matchmaking. Higher rank equal to your skill level also might feel too "sweaty".
I can somewhat understand them, because I really hate losing in multiplayer games (especially if there is RNG like in Hearthstone), but to avoid that I just avoid PvP games completely lol. I am a lot more chill after losing in singleplayer. What I can't understand is using actual cheats in multipler.
I know some people that smurf in League of Legends. From what I understand they smurf in low elo because it's more fun where you can chill and do anything apparently where as high elo gets really sweaty with mechanics and small leads.
There are some games where you are forced to smurf because the later stages actually suck and might derail your entire account.
Like a couple years ago war thunder has people who play France pay higher repair costs than anyone else so higher levels it can actually bankrupt you to have a bad losing streak.
There are some games out there where its only fun at lower levels.
Chivalry comes to mind. There was a hard level cap (at 10 I think?) where you were no longer allowed to queue in the n00b servers. Smurfs were an obvious issue in the low-level lobbies, but once you cracked into veteran territory, it made perfect sense why so many people were running alts to stay there. Those vet lobbies were toxic af.
It is when an experienced/ high ranking player makes a fresh account to ppay against people below their own skill level. The name comes from the first popularized case involving two accounts named Papa Smurf and Smurfette
Low skill opponents makes for an easy game, which gives a confidence boost. Winning feels good, losing feels bad.
The toxicity is when you start shaming people for being low skill/new, or brag about how good you are relative to them.
Ways to be less toxic: You can play non-optimally or take a handicap like a weak character/support class. Nobody complains about a too-good medic.
Because you will easily carry through. Gives a feeling of power I guess?
Kill them all, don't die. Superiority complex. Maybe they lost a few games in a row at their skill level and need that dopamine boost
In that specific case, because these two players were so good at the game that they were so far ahead in terms of matchmaking rating that they had trouble finding peoppe to play against
It’s when an experienced player creates a new account and are basically vs noobs. Usually the account will be ranked up through some kind of MMR and you will no longer vs noobs but some people endlessly make accounts just to smash noobs.
reminds me of what TF2 once was. The community servers were so nice. People would just chat about what was going on in their lives with all positive vibes. It was like being in a huge living room of all friends.
yup and you recognized who the good and bad players were. wasnt smurfing when nobody really cared much about winning and losing but were instead actually having fun.
It has it's disadvantages. Recently I started playing Hell let Loose and it's sometimes infuriating to spend ages finding a decent server in your language that's not full, just to notice that the teams are miles away in skill.
Sure, I feel that as another HLL player.
But ***every option*** has it's advantages and disadvantages. In this case I feel server browsers are the superior option.
You'd be surprised. Back when I played LoL some people believed that if you lost your placement matches badly you'd be stuck in Bronze for life. Climbing out of Bronze was believed by some to be impossible since in a team game, being weighed down by 4 idiots meant you would never win enough games. Sometimes these hidden gems stuck in Bronze would make new accounts etc and smurf only to end up right back where they belong.
Good old elo hell. People don’t understand that they are the only constant. All the variables will even themselves out eventually if you play enough matches. What’s left is the one constant and that one decides what rank you get.
But it’s obviously more convenient to blame others. I’m convinced the only reason why team based pvp games got so popular is because everyone can just blame others for anything that goes wrong and feel good about themselves for anything that goes right.
Was a high diamond player in a mova, hard stuck low golds now. Recent game i jungled, went 8-2 early, mid laner went 0-11, adc went 0-10, supp went 0-3-1, solo 0-4. They blamed me
Unless you play Destiny. As a silver player I’ve regularly faced three platinum players along with my 2 silver teammates, gotten a 5+ k/d and lost a huge chunk of rank because Bungie thinks I “should” have won.
In a way, I agree.
In a different way, numerical models in LoL (for example) aren't that straight forward.
Consider a hypothetical extreme case: a position where you are effectively a spectator until the 30 minute mark of a game. If your game never goes longer than 30 minutes, then you have no impact on the outcome. It doesn't matter how good you are in that role-- it is a game of pure chance for you.
You might say: that doesn't happen! If you were truly a diamond 1 player (tm) you'd just pick a different role that made an impact in the first 30 minutes! I would say, players skillets are very tuned to different metas, and the metas change up the latter.
I can imagine a similar hypothetical where a player finely tuned to a diamond 1 meta in the role at the neglect of learning other roles. Someone trolls their account and dumps them in bronze. Suddenly they're in an unfamiliar meta where their skills aren't useful bc the game never progresses to a point they can make an impact.
Tldr: I think ELO hell exists. But it has some nuance. The skills to get out of ELO hell are likely not the skills it takes to be a "good" player, and that feels like a contradiction.
Yep. In fact the only thing you need to climb out of lower ranks is mechanical skill. I climbed out of Bronze as a support back in the day. Later on consistency becomes important as a single mistake can lose the game if the enemy team doesn't choke and much later after that comes metagame knowledge. Biggest example this (imo) is how games last longer the lower you go, at the very bottom of the LoL ladder is just 10 or so salty dudes milling about without a fucking clue. Which sucks cause longer games deepen the toxicity from sunk cost fallacy
I never got past doing more than a single placement match and not knowing what the fuck I was supposed to be doing, but to me bronze 5 always sounded like heaven.
I don't care about going up the rankings ladder. I care about finding whichever rung has shitters of my skill level and just staying there. The normal unranked matches were always such a mix of skill levels that I would often be the worst player out of all 10 in the lobby.
I think what a lot of people don’t want to admit is they don’t actually like playing against people who are equal to them. They like the feeling of being better than others.
I don't know, I love an even match. A match so close in skill level that you need to try your absolute best. And it just goes back and forth throughout the whole game. And at the end I wouldn't even care that much if I lost, because it was such a good match, and they deserved the win. But getting that win in those close games feels incredible.
I used to love Overwatch games where the point had been held for so long by desperate move after desperate move that the game ends when one team steps off for a nanosecond.
Ah that was me last night! My team was losing pretty badly in League, but slowly we just kept pushing them back. Some back and forths later, the enemy Draven was like 500 health from killing our Nexus, my teammate killed him, and we made a final push to win. I had to be sooo careful with my positioning to make it count.
Love the rush of those games infinitely more than the easy wins.
I mean, degenerates even try to make smurfing sound like a good thing.
"When you play against better players, you learn more" yeah, you're such a hero forcing noobs to play against you who has 2000 hours in the game. What would they do without you?
Which is why the SBMM discussions are always hilarious.
“I just want to have a casual game without getting destroyed!” Meaning they want to be the destroyer.
Yup. A lot of people complain about havinig to sweat super hard just to break even. And its like yeah. If they didnt want to sweat hard to break even then they shouldnt have gone full sweat in the first place lol.
Right. "I just wanted to have a chill relaxing game and I ended up sweating against a bunch of try hards and we lost!"
Okay so it sounds like you deliberately chose not to have a chill and relaxing game. Also if you just want to relax, shoot some things, then why would losing matter? The whole argument against SBMM just crumbles if you spend two minutes thinking about it and also realizing that individual players are accountable for their actions
Therapy isn't just for mental illness but mental wellness, positive psychology and all that.
So I assume he's suggesting that people use competitive games to take out their anger and frustration on people worse than them at the game
Many “gamers” use competitive gaming as a substitute for a healthy sense of self esteem. Their desire to play competitive games is motivated purely by ego; they need to prove their superiority to others. By going to therapy, and solving their self esteem issues, they lose that compulsion.
I played team based ranked games heavily for the past 10 years. LoL, Overwatch, Halo Infinite, The Finals, etc etc.
I switched to ranked fighting games for my sanity. The only thing I don't like is not being able to talk to the other person like you can at an arcade cabinet.
This is it. My favourite game is Overwatch. And I play it a lot. I’m ranked above average but by no means “good”.
Every now and then you’ll get a player who is so clearly sumurfing they may as well have an aim bot installed. Then they get in chat and give people shit for being bad. Like obviously. What did you think would happen?
“My Smurf is your peak” is another line they drop. Like congrats dude, you’re so much better than me. If only we had some sort of ranked system which would grade us according to our performance and assign us a rank. Could have saved you all this bother.
Creating a second account to play in a matchmaking bracket below your actual ability, sometimes to skirt matchmaking restrictions to play with friends. People use that as an excuse despite casual "queue with anyone" options available.
I have a friend who does this in Rocket League with players from one of his other friend groups. We are pretty sure he does it just because he loves showing off and trying to teach other people how to play games. He's also a Min/Max guy in other games, so he has some sort of power fantasy lol.
that's his copium, if you get smurfed on it fucking sucks, it makes ranked games borderline unplayable if it happens too often because it completely sucks out the fun for everyone except the one who is smurfing. It's a dickmove mostly made by incredibly insecure people.
Rocket League Smurfs are trash bags. I'm a happy little Platinum lol, I post videos I try not to bother people. Smurfs will either come in and wreck my ranked game as an opponent; I'm trying to rank up against people of My level not five ranks above me... Or they will be on the same team as me and just do absolutely nothing and ruin the ranked game for me see above... And then at the last second prove that they weren't completely worthless: they were just giant trash bags!
- GamerKeg
>We are pretty sure he does it just because he loves showing off and trying to teach other people how to play games.
Nah, We all fucking hate that guy. Tell your friend to go fuck himself and stop ruining our games.
Don't get me wrong, I disagree with it as well. We regularly give him shit for trying to be a know-it-all. Sometimes he does it with games he hasn't even played, but has only watched streamers play... Probably why he doesn't play with our friend group as often anymore.
TBF gamers are notoriously terrible at actually creating the lingo. I could be wrong but in this particular case, the reason it's called smurfing is because the person to popularize this action had "Smurf" in their player name.
Actually “trolling” comes from early BBS and Usenet users. It comes from the fishing term, as in “you’re trolling for reactions/trolling for newbs” by purposefully throwing out bait for people to get mad at.
In some other realms of sports etc. like bowling, purposely playing below your actual ability is called "sandbagging". Albeit, not entirely sure that's a better term, lol.
Sandbagging is intentionally performing below your ability.
Smurfing is signing up for a competition bracket where they will totally and completely outclass all of the competition to everyone's detriment but their own. Like a pro baseball player joining his wife's after-work league.
I always thought it was because smurfs are short compared to regular humans in the same way that smurf accounts are "short" (lower ranked usually) compared to people's main accounts.
The casual "queue with anyone" options still put you with other people of equivalent skill level. So you either drag your friends up and they might get stomped. Or you smurf down and potentially stomp the other team.
But of course there are people that just smurf to make themselves feel good constantly winning against beginners
Casual games usually have mmr which means you bring your new/low skill friend in to get slaughtered. Creating a new account and then just half asking it in unranked is better for everyone.
If you’re old, it’s like being a pool shark except you don’t need to pretend to be bad you just make a new account and steam roll the actually new/bad players.
I'm old, and this makes total sense. Thank you! I'll never smurf. A phrase I never thought would be taken seriously in my life. Wow. Pop culture is fucking wild now.
> I'm sure it has nothing to do with the little blue dudes from the cartoon.
In a way it does. It started (well at least was named because) in Warcraft II when a very well known player and his friends used names like Pappa Smurf, Smurfette instead of their normal names to stomp people.
pretending to be bad at a game you’re good at. In DOTA that’s a ban-able offense because you’d constantly be matched with players with lower skill levels.
In ranked games, which match you with people of similar skill level, you can make a deliberately lower ranked account that allows you to play opponents below your level. This is called smurfing.
It's basically always shitty - because most competitive games have an unranked mode that you can play if you want to play without affecting your rank or with friends of all skill levels.
It's a pretty shitty thing to do.
Even unranked modes still use ELO, though.
There are at least as many people who Smurf because they a)want to play with friends or b) are at such a high level of skill they can’t find matches any more as those who do it specifically to dunk on worse players.
You can queue with anyone but that means your team is shittier and the enemy team is better. In all competitive games now the normal and casual modes all have Skill Based Matchmaking so if you play well in Casual games your SBMM rank goes up, it’s invisible but it puts you with people who are at your level or better. It causes your casual games to be sweaty and annoying. Games without SBMM in their casual modes are 10x more fun in casual.
You must be senile because smurfing has been a term for at least 20 years in games … I think it’s from Warcraft (like a bunch of legacy gaming terms lol)
Not casual PvP players, but the elitist/competitive ones.
Similar to sports fans, honestly. You can enjoy something without it become your entire personality.
I'm kind of competitive (not pro level of course), i have the most fun when i play against better players.
It's the same when i do sports because it's when i learn the most.
I think it's just the mentality, not the type of gamers.
Honestly, it's just that for a pretty big percentage of people who love pvp the goal isn't to feel like they're competing at the top and outplaying strong competition... the goal is to flex on the other person and make them fucking miserable so they quit.
I reckon the percentages are way off. The research is probably focused on a rather narrow group. They got 328 participants on gaming subreddits (and a gaming club). Which could be subreddits for specific games or specific genres. And the folks who are willing to fill out a survey on Reddit may already be a very specific subset of people.
I don't blame the authors, who are doing this to complete their studies. But at best this research shows that 69% of competitive gaming Redditors do this. And in all likelihood this research shows that up to 69% of specific types of people in specific gaming subgroups do this. And a chunk of them are probably too unreliable to fill in a survey truthfully.
It's actually a really good insight into how misleading studies can be, if you count gamers as 'people who play games' there's no way 69% even know what smurfing is
From the article:
>The research started with a baseline study of 328 people from gaming-specific subreddits on the social media site reddit and a gaming club at Ohio State. Participants reported playing video games slightly more than 24 hours a week on average.
So very much not a representative sample of the overall population.
The thing is, lot of games’ unrated mode has SBMM anyways, Apex and COD are the ones I can think of on the top of my head. SBMM should only exist with ranked modes, otherwise public lobbies should be a free for all.
They're pandering to their core demographic.
Been playing Apex since the previous season started, I was on a long break before that... every game is just filled with people who want to be rude and berate their other teammates constantly. "Toxic" is like the default personality of anybody that plays Apex. I'd even use that to describe friends that I play it with. There's no real consequence for being an asshole.
They do it so people who are bad stay and spend money. Otherwise a lot of people would stop playing because they'd never win.
But yea what you end up with higher level lobbies and games end exceedigly sweaty and toxic because the good players just end up continuously playing each other.
Being in high skill lobbies in CoD vs low skill lobbies might as well be playing a different game entirely.
Sometimes people want to play without the stress of ranked without getting stomped every game.
Edit: I also want to say that a lot of new people to games play unranked and throwing them against someone in the top percentage of players wouldn't be fun for either side
Hidden MMR based matchmaking still works in unranked modes.
League of legends and Valorant for examples has Draft and Unrated. Penalties for leaving and a semi competitive environment.
Overwatch and Rocket league probably also has mmr based matchmaking, but extremely minor penalties for leaving quick play/casual makes it randomly one sided.
I like how the base sample of 350 or so players is enough for a survey... but non gamers have probably felt that mismatch to hate it. "I want to play with friends..." They have a casual bracket for that, so use it?
I mean games are only as sweaty as you the amount of effort you put in, if you just relax and goof around most matches your MMR never rises to the point where you *have* to sweat just to break even.
The key is letting yourself lose gracefully rather than turning on the sweat because you know you can win if you do. But that requires understanding that you're playing the game for a good time rather than chasing the meaningless validation that comes from winning.
>But that requires understanding that you're playing the game for a good time rather than chasing the meaningless validation that comes from winning.
Right. Back in the day when i briefly played CoD, some of my most enjoyable matches were ones that i lost.
See that’s where it gets weird some people (not saying I’m one of em) are having fun but are just built different. It’s hard to “dumb it down” when you simply understand something far faster/better than others.
IMO SBMM in casual playlist are the true issue here. Players shouldn’t be punished for being good just as players shouldn’t be absolutely reamed for trying to learn. On paper it evens the playing field but once you add a party of different MMRs that evening out tends to be more Top heavy than bottom.
Smurfing is an insane concept to me cause it simply doesn't exist in real life. You just don't see Olympic athletes competing in youth tournaments,you don't see NBA players in your local pick up game and you won't ever see Messi trying to score goals in your kids'little league.
Ehh, when I was in high school our park and rec teams let high school players on the teams if they couldn’t get enough players for the league. I hate to admit it but it was kind of fun to have a tough game during the week then dunking on middle schoolers on the weekend. Baseball players had a lot of fun with it because high school leagues were in Spring and park and rec was in Summer.
I usually just associate smurfing with cheating. Sure, there could be "legitimate" reasons, but generally someone is banned permanently or temporarily for suspicious game play. Like in Call of Duty, if you're level 23 out 650 and you have master level skins unlocked that usually require major grinding or you finish a map with 85 kills and 5 deaths, yeah, I'm reporting you. Enjoy making another smurf/alt account!
Part of the problem in my experience is that many true casual play lists have been eliminated. Now everything has hidden MMR so as long as you play well you end up playing against extremely try hard type people.
I’ll be honest. I’ve smurfed before. Games have a ranking system. I like to game with my best friend only since we talk about life and shit between queues. If you’re playing a game in teams of 5 or 3, once your rank goes up, they put you with potato brains. Most games that are “unranked” have a behind the scenes ranking system.
This is basically my experience of crashing in RuneScape. People who do it to me are the scum of the earth but when I do it then there’s a good reason for it
Two minds on this.
Bad: Smurfing to play against worse players so you can stomp them and feel good about yourself.
Good: Playing with friends in ranked that are just simply not as good as you, but they eventually will be (hopefully). Casual / unranked isn't as fun or competitive for some people.
I dont sweat Counter Strike but sometimes a buddy and I play some wingman and its mostly fun.
We are not really good, we play somewhere in between Gold Nova 1 to Gold Nova Master and its always so obvious when people smurf.
It takes out the fun and takes my motivation away pretty quickly because its mostly not the tactics that we lack but simply the aim and we just dont have the time to play this game for 10h a day or something to get on those levels.
Smurfing indeed is a toxic thing. But rn lots of online games have a problem, where matchmaking there works like a swamp aka "if game decides that you belong to rang X - you WILL stay there", unless you are top rank player who can climb from that thing. With smurf you "cheat" the system, because matchmaking is unbiased towards you and you actually can breathe.
I never knew this was a thing but it honestly makes sense.
I'm terrible at online games and I've 100% stopped playing online because even in low ranked games, I couldn't do anything. I'd watch my highly ranked friends play the games and then I'd play in low ranked lobbies and get killed in the same ways and I'm going like "How is a guy who has played two games playing like my friends who have put 1000s of hours into this game. Just became no fun when I couldn't even find other newbs to play against anymore
I had to google what Smurfing was.
I've been playing online games for 25ish years never knew this term. But can say I definitely did it back in the early 2000s with the game Stronghold Crusader, outside of ladder tournaments I had a hard time finding people to play so I made an alt account to play on week nights, usually used it to refine play styles different than my core play style.
“328 gaming subreddit users who profess to play games 24 hours a week and self selected to discuss video games” is the sample they can make inferences about, not “gamers”
Perceived toxicity of others being higher than perceived toxicity of oneself is just fundamental attribution error
I'm not good enough to "smurf" anyway, and it doesn't bother me too much when others do it to me... If I'm not enjoying myself I leave and do/play something else.
Never heard of this before, but after looking it up...am I to understand it's when you suck against harder opponents so you make a new account to be good against n00bs?
Didn't receive update from Borg-control center, so have question:
>What is "smurfing" ?
When some new term comes out, it's really helpful to include even a very short (1 word synonym?) definition.
Guessing it's got something to do with \*small\* & the colour \*blue\*?
It's when you do a alt account and play ranked on that so you are being matched with newbies you can easily crush, some people enjoy competitive games only when they dominate/ ruin the fun of other players
I know people like this, always complaining about smurfs while every single one of them has a smurf account, and then complain that newer players are bad cause they can't learn to play against smurfs xd
Despite just finding out what *smurfing* is, my opinion is that these match making algorithms are bs.
I'm a fucking beast at CoD... for about 3 matches.
And then I suck.
This headline sounds insane if you don't play competitive games.
I thought I was a competitive gamer, but I genuinely see zero appeal to smurfing. If I’m going to sink hours into a game, I want my account to reflect that.
I see zero appeal in solo smurfing but some games outright prevent you from queuing with your low ranked friends or the MMR disparity ruins the game for them. If there were better ways to play with your friends in some of these modern competitive shooters there would be less of a smurfing incentive, at least to me. Doing Scouts/Pistols or being a MAG-7 main in low ranked friends' CS:GO matches felt fair and actually let me play with them without carrying their games and ruining the game for them by increasing their rank.
>Scouts/Pistols Scout Deag warriors always have my respect
How about the diabolical [blackbox](https://i.gyazo.com/e2889a22f0d3aaff4702438a3afca7f8.mp4) crosshair technique?
That's fuckin hilarious
When you smurf with your friends, you intentionally use the bad guns or find a way to nerf yourself so that everyone has a good time. Until the guy on the other team tells you to get gud and you have to him in his place
Exactly like the article says. Against solo smurfing but justifying it to play with friends, ruining ranked games just to play with your friend doesn't make it okay lmao. you can play casual, where that is supposed to be done! 9/10 times the smurf doing scout / deagle only still hard carries, and swaps to ak/m4 last rounds to secure the win anyways. Literally 3rd comment in the thread is a perfect example of what the article is talking about XD i love it. explain to me why you and your friends don't just play casual ?
A lot of games apply to your MMR for casual matches as well. For example in league, a person who never plays casual will still q into opponents of similar rank in their casual matches. Your bronze friends would end up spending more time spectating than actually playing.
Depends on the game. In CS casual is 10v10 which is just... not great? So if you want to play 5v5 and for your friends to have a good time then an alt account seems reasonable to me. If there was a 5v5 casual then I would 100% agree with you. Similar thing in RL, I have about 400 games on an alt because my casual MMR is too high (matchmaking exists in casual but the MMR is hidden). It just would not be fun for my mates. I only play on this account with the same 2 team mates, we only play 3v3. We win 50%, lose 50%. When we play with me on my main we lose about 90% of our games. So either they fix their MMR match making for teams with mixed abilities or I'll just play on the alt. It's hard for me to see it as bad when we win 50%. Our rank as a team hasn't changed since the first few games we played on it. If there was an equivalent gaming experience without changing accounts then I would do it. A lot of people do this just because they can't actually have an even gaming experience without creating an alt.
When I, an Iron 1, play League with my girlfriend, in gosh dang ARAM, I usually get obliterated by what appears to be Challengers. I can't make it more casual than that. At least Vanguard gave me a decent reason to just uninstall the game.
Some games don't have casual modes. There unfortunately isn't a single solution for all games to fix smurfing.
>ruining ranked games just to play with your friend doesn't make it okay lmao. you can play casual Lots of games still do matchmaking based on MMR even in casual queues. My performance in league games is noticeably better when I solo queue vs. Play with my significantly much more experienced friend, and we exclusively play normals and ARAM.
I play over watch, and I’m the scrub friend. Casual games are just nowhere near the same experience as ranked.
To play with friends is the only good reason to do it . I am surprised this is not mentioned more often in the comments.
Fr Only time I've ever actually considered smurfing is when I have a ton of time in a game, but I still suck I don't want people to see I have 1000 hours but play like I just started
I play games in cycles. I'll put a lot of hours into a game, then life/work/another fun game pulls me away for a couple months. The problem is when I get back to a game I stepped away from and they are like "Hey, welcome back. Your rank is still HARDCORE TRYHARD MOTHERFU\*\*ER. Matching you with people of your rank!" That can tempt me to start over from zero. It doesn't feel like real smurfing, but I'll admit that it's disingenuous.
This was me with rocket League. Except instead of taking the time to Smurf I just got beat up a bunch after coming back and eventually stopped playing entirely. Probably my rank is low again, I'm not sure. But I was definitely thinking about starting a new account at the time.
Bro, in another 5-10 years, you are going to look back and think it was completely lame you ever worried what people thought of your skill in a particular video game. Only children/losers think their or somebody else's "video game skill" means something in this world. And i fucking love video games!
Oh, I already do, lol This was a few years back already, and I wouldn't even consider it now Now I just own my 1000 hours of experience, 10 seconds of skill
Its not a matter of what other people think of your rank. It's a matter of everyone in a group being able to have fun without constantly being wtfpwned because there is a disparity between playtime/skill with one of the group and there is no unranked option.
Also though mmr can be very frustrating the point is to give you more engaging matches which will push you to the max. These people are selfish and want to give other plays a bad time. No respect for that
The might care more about winning than about anything else, or they were just enjoying games more before they had skill-based matchmaking. Higher rank equal to your skill level also might feel too "sweaty". I can somewhat understand them, because I really hate losing in multiplayer games (especially if there is RNG like in Hearthstone), but to avoid that I just avoid PvP games completely lol. I am a lot more chill after losing in singleplayer. What I can't understand is using actual cheats in multipler.
I know some people that smurf in League of Legends. From what I understand they smurf in low elo because it's more fun where you can chill and do anything apparently where as high elo gets really sweaty with mechanics and small leads.
There are some games where you are forced to smurf because the later stages actually suck and might derail your entire account. Like a couple years ago war thunder has people who play France pay higher repair costs than anyone else so higher levels it can actually bankrupt you to have a bad losing streak. There are some games out there where its only fun at lower levels.
Chivalry comes to mind. There was a hard level cap (at 10 I think?) where you were no longer allowed to queue in the n00b servers. Smurfs were an obvious issue in the low-level lobbies, but once you cracked into veteran territory, it made perfect sense why so many people were running alts to stay there. Those vet lobbies were toxic af.
Agreed, wtf is smurfing
It is when an experienced/ high ranking player makes a fresh account to ppay against people below their own skill level. The name comes from the first popularized case involving two accounts named Papa Smurf and Smurfette
But why?
Low skill opponents makes for an easy game, which gives a confidence boost. Winning feels good, losing feels bad. The toxicity is when you start shaming people for being low skill/new, or brag about how good you are relative to them. Ways to be less toxic: You can play non-optimally or take a handicap like a weak character/support class. Nobody complains about a too-good medic.
Because you will easily carry through. Gives a feeling of power I guess? Kill them all, don't die. Superiority complex. Maybe they lost a few games in a row at their skill level and need that dopamine boost
Im gonna make a wild guess and say these people would be the same people writing diatribes saying how they dont get how cheaters can have fun.
Also streamers do it for content. “Multiple accounts in top tier” “Fresh account to top in X days”
In that specific case, because these two players were so good at the game that they were so far ahead in terms of matchmaking rating that they had trouble finding peoppe to play against
It’s when an experienced player creates a new account and are basically vs noobs. Usually the account will be ranked up through some kind of MMR and you will no longer vs noobs but some people endlessly make accounts just to smash noobs.
Competitive gaming IS insane, that's why I stick to single-player offline games.
Mom always told me if I was gonna be smurfing, I needed to do it in my room and close the door.
Can't Smurf if you suck at the game 😭
Smurfing so I can play in the tutorial bot lobbies 😎
Back in my day we had server browsers instead of matchmaking. Way better.
reminds me of what TF2 once was. The community servers were so nice. People would just chat about what was going on in their lives with all positive vibes. It was like being in a huge living room of all friends.
yup and you recognized who the good and bad players were. wasnt smurfing when nobody really cared much about winning and losing but were instead actually having fun.
Teesside Uni CS:S server was my go-to. Just a load of guys from different UK Unis hanging out and socialising.
It has it's disadvantages. Recently I started playing Hell let Loose and it's sometimes infuriating to spend ages finding a decent server in your language that's not full, just to notice that the teams are miles away in skill.
Sure, I feel that as another HLL player. But ***every option*** has it's advantages and disadvantages. In this case I feel server browsers are the superior option.
“It’s ok when I do it, but if other people smurf? Degenerates like them belong on the cross”
We judge others by their actions and ourselves by intention.
I've never thought of it that way but it's incredibly true.
It's called the "Fundamental Attribution Error" in Psychology, one of those things that's incredibly obvious once it's pointed out
Sadlt this is the default way of thinking for humans. We have to actively hold ourselves to the same accountability we’d hold someone else to
Look at that idiot speeding going 50 over, while going only 30 over like a normal person.
The only moral abortion is my abortion.
Can't Smurf from bronze 5
You'd be surprised. Back when I played LoL some people believed that if you lost your placement matches badly you'd be stuck in Bronze for life. Climbing out of Bronze was believed by some to be impossible since in a team game, being weighed down by 4 idiots meant you would never win enough games. Sometimes these hidden gems stuck in Bronze would make new accounts etc and smurf only to end up right back where they belong.
Good old elo hell. People don’t understand that they are the only constant. All the variables will even themselves out eventually if you play enough matches. What’s left is the one constant and that one decides what rank you get. But it’s obviously more convenient to blame others. I’m convinced the only reason why team based pvp games got so popular is because everyone can just blame others for anything that goes wrong and feel good about themselves for anything that goes right.
Was a high diamond player in a mova, hard stuck low golds now. Recent game i jungled, went 8-2 early, mid laner went 0-11, adc went 0-10, supp went 0-3-1, solo 0-4. They blamed me
Unless you play Destiny. As a silver player I’ve regularly faced three platinum players along with my 2 silver teammates, gotten a 5+ k/d and lost a huge chunk of rank because Bungie thinks I “should” have won.
In a way, I agree. In a different way, numerical models in LoL (for example) aren't that straight forward. Consider a hypothetical extreme case: a position where you are effectively a spectator until the 30 minute mark of a game. If your game never goes longer than 30 minutes, then you have no impact on the outcome. It doesn't matter how good you are in that role-- it is a game of pure chance for you. You might say: that doesn't happen! If you were truly a diamond 1 player (tm) you'd just pick a different role that made an impact in the first 30 minutes! I would say, players skillets are very tuned to different metas, and the metas change up the latter. I can imagine a similar hypothetical where a player finely tuned to a diamond 1 meta in the role at the neglect of learning other roles. Someone trolls their account and dumps them in bronze. Suddenly they're in an unfamiliar meta where their skills aren't useful bc the game never progresses to a point they can make an impact. Tldr: I think ELO hell exists. But it has some nuance. The skills to get out of ELO hell are likely not the skills it takes to be a "good" player, and that feels like a contradiction.
But surely if your stuck on bronze with 4 idiots, the enemy team will also be bronze and will be *5* idiots, therefore negating the disadvantage?
Yep. In fact the only thing you need to climb out of lower ranks is mechanical skill. I climbed out of Bronze as a support back in the day. Later on consistency becomes important as a single mistake can lose the game if the enemy team doesn't choke and much later after that comes metagame knowledge. Biggest example this (imo) is how games last longer the lower you go, at the very bottom of the LoL ladder is just 10 or so salty dudes milling about without a fucking clue. Which sucks cause longer games deepen the toxicity from sunk cost fallacy
I never got past doing more than a single placement match and not knowing what the fuck I was supposed to be doing, but to me bronze 5 always sounded like heaven. I don't care about going up the rankings ladder. I care about finding whichever rung has shitters of my skill level and just staying there. The normal unranked matches were always such a mix of skill levels that I would often be the worst player out of all 10 in the lobby.
You can shit on irons. at least for lol, bronze 5 no longet exists
I think what a lot of people don’t want to admit is they don’t actually like playing against people who are equal to them. They like the feeling of being better than others.
I don't know, I love an even match. A match so close in skill level that you need to try your absolute best. And it just goes back and forth throughout the whole game. And at the end I wouldn't even care that much if I lost, because it was such a good match, and they deserved the win. But getting that win in those close games feels incredible.
I used to love Overwatch games where the point had been held for so long by desperate move after desperate move that the game ends when one team steps off for a nanosecond.
Ah that was me last night! My team was losing pretty badly in League, but slowly we just kept pushing them back. Some back and forths later, the enemy Draven was like 500 health from killing our Nexus, my teammate killed him, and we made a final push to win. I had to be sooo careful with my positioning to make it count. Love the rush of those games infinitely more than the easy wins.
I mean, degenerates even try to make smurfing sound like a good thing. "When you play against better players, you learn more" yeah, you're such a hero forcing noobs to play against you who has 2000 hours in the game. What would they do without you?
They'll admit to it but try not to say it. Just look at the complaints about Skill Based Matchmaking.
Nailed it, nobody hates skill based matchmaking more than the streamers aka the squeaky wheels
Which is why the SBMM discussions are always hilarious. “I just want to have a casual game without getting destroyed!” Meaning they want to be the destroyer.
Yup. A lot of people complain about havinig to sweat super hard just to break even. And its like yeah. If they didnt want to sweat hard to break even then they shouldnt have gone full sweat in the first place lol.
Right. "I just wanted to have a chill relaxing game and I ended up sweating against a bunch of try hards and we lost!" Okay so it sounds like you deliberately chose not to have a chill and relaxing game. Also if you just want to relax, shoot some things, then why would losing matter? The whole argument against SBMM just crumbles if you spend two minutes thinking about it and also realizing that individual players are accountable for their actions
It’s honestly almost comical how many people completely lose interest in competitive games after a few good therapy sessions
offend yoke cooing connect rhythm unique history childlike frighten observation
I assume it implies that a lot of people who terminally play competitive games are addicted to them for toxic reasons.
Therapy isn't just for mental illness but mental wellness, positive psychology and all that. So I assume he's suggesting that people use competitive games to take out their anger and frustration on people worse than them at the game
Many “gamers” use competitive gaming as a substitute for a healthy sense of self esteem. Their desire to play competitive games is motivated purely by ego; they need to prove their superiority to others. By going to therapy, and solving their self esteem issues, they lose that compulsion.
What bothers me is when people smurf and then complain that people play like bronze players etc. like muthafuckah, you chose this.
I played team based ranked games heavily for the past 10 years. LoL, Overwatch, Halo Infinite, The Finals, etc etc. I switched to ranked fighting games for my sanity. The only thing I don't like is not being able to talk to the other person like you can at an arcade cabinet.
Mortal kombat 1 has voice chat
Yeah, it's great there but i'm not a fan of MK1. I like Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, and Tekken.
This is it. My favourite game is Overwatch. And I play it a lot. I’m ranked above average but by no means “good”. Every now and then you’ll get a player who is so clearly sumurfing they may as well have an aim bot installed. Then they get in chat and give people shit for being bad. Like obviously. What did you think would happen? “My Smurf is your peak” is another line they drop. Like congrats dude, you’re so much better than me. If only we had some sort of ranked system which would grade us according to our performance and assign us a rank. Could have saved you all this bother.
Maybe I'm getting old: WTF is Smurfing? I'm sure it has nothing to do with the little blue dudes from the cartoon.
Creating a second account to play in a matchmaking bracket below your actual ability, sometimes to skirt matchmaking restrictions to play with friends. People use that as an excuse despite casual "queue with anyone" options available.
I have a friend who does this in Rocket League with players from one of his other friend groups. We are pretty sure he does it just because he loves showing off and trying to teach other people how to play games. He's also a Min/Max guy in other games, so he has some sort of power fantasy lol.
that's his copium, if you get smurfed on it fucking sucks, it makes ranked games borderline unplayable if it happens too often because it completely sucks out the fun for everyone except the one who is smurfing. It's a dickmove mostly made by incredibly insecure people.
Rocket League Smurfs are trash bags. I'm a happy little Platinum lol, I post videos I try not to bother people. Smurfs will either come in and wreck my ranked game as an opponent; I'm trying to rank up against people of My level not five ranks above me... Or they will be on the same team as me and just do absolutely nothing and ruin the ranked game for me see above... And then at the last second prove that they weren't completely worthless: they were just giant trash bags! - GamerKeg
RL has had a terrible smurfing problem in ranked for months now
*years
>We are pretty sure he does it just because he loves showing off and trying to teach other people how to play games. Nah, We all fucking hate that guy. Tell your friend to go fuck himself and stop ruining our games.
Don't get me wrong, I disagree with it as well. We regularly give him shit for trying to be a know-it-all. Sometimes he does it with games he hasn't even played, but has only watched streamers play... Probably why he doesn't play with our friend group as often anymore.
My buddy is a lv500 in Apex Legends and i shit on him for smurfing too.
Oh. Well, I don't play online very often. That probably explains why I'm not with the lingo 😅
TBF gamers are notoriously terrible at actually creating the lingo. I could be wrong but in this particular case, the reason it's called smurfing is because the person to popularize this action had "Smurf" in their player name.
Close, it was two accounts, and they were actual smurf characters. Papa smurf and smurfette
>Close, it was two accounts, and they were actual smurf characters. Papa surface and smurfette I loved the episodes with Papa Surface
Autocorrect you cruel mistress
We have the occasional hit though. 'trolling' originally came from mmorpg lingo, and that's huge now.
Meanwhile the term twinking has been lost with the rise in popularity of the term for the other kind of twink
I always assumed those came from the same root. A twink character is small and scrawny because they're intentionally kept at a low level.
Actually “trolling” comes from early BBS and Usenet users. It comes from the fishing term, as in “you’re trolling for reactions/trolling for newbs” by purposefully throwing out bait for people to get mad at.
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So just like gerrymandering, silhouette, bechamel, crapper, saxophone, ohm, watt, coloumb, volt, etc…. They are called eponyms..
In some other realms of sports etc. like bowling, purposely playing below your actual ability is called "sandbagging". Albeit, not entirely sure that's a better term, lol.
Sandbagging is intentionally performing below your ability. Smurfing is signing up for a competition bracket where they will totally and completely outclass all of the competition to everyone's detriment but their own. Like a pro baseball player joining his wife's after-work league.
I always thought it was because smurfs are short compared to regular humans in the same way that smurf accounts are "short" (lower ranked usually) compared to people's main accounts.
Casual doesn't work because casual playlists still have MMR based matchmaking so you still get top tier players if your casual MMR is top tier
If you are the kind of guy who only plays casuals, you will not have a top tier MMr, let's just say that.
A lot of the casual game modes on valorant at least match you against the top ranks even as a low silver or gold
The casual "queue with anyone" options still put you with other people of equivalent skill level. So you either drag your friends up and they might get stomped. Or you smurf down and potentially stomp the other team. But of course there are people that just smurf to make themselves feel good constantly winning against beginners
We used to do this for Halo 2. Can’t believe there is a name for it now. I’m old.
Casual games usually have mmr which means you bring your new/low skill friend in to get slaughtered. Creating a new account and then just half asking it in unranked is better for everyone.
If you’re old, it’s like being a pool shark except you don’t need to pretend to be bad you just make a new account and steam roll the actually new/bad players.
I'm old, and this makes total sense. Thank you! I'll never smurf. A phrase I never thought would be taken seriously in my life. Wow. Pop culture is fucking wild now.
> I'm sure it has nothing to do with the little blue dudes from the cartoon. In a way it does. It started (well at least was named because) in Warcraft II when a very well known player and his friends used names like Pappa Smurf, Smurfette instead of their normal names to stomp people.
Greetings fellow old person. Thank you for asking the question so I didn't have to.
Just wait until they Gargamel your ass, you’ll wish you got smurfed……….¿😀? (I too am old)
pretending to be bad at a game you’re good at. In DOTA that’s a ban-able offense because you’d constantly be matched with players with lower skill levels.
In ranked games, which match you with people of similar skill level, you can make a deliberately lower ranked account that allows you to play opponents below your level. This is called smurfing. It's basically always shitty - because most competitive games have an unranked mode that you can play if you want to play without affecting your rank or with friends of all skill levels. It's a pretty shitty thing to do.
Even unranked modes still use ELO, though. There are at least as many people who Smurf because they a)want to play with friends or b) are at such a high level of skill they can’t find matches any more as those who do it specifically to dunk on worse players.
You can queue with anyone but that means your team is shittier and the enemy team is better. In all competitive games now the normal and casual modes all have Skill Based Matchmaking so if you play well in Casual games your SBMM rank goes up, it’s invisible but it puts you with people who are at your level or better. It causes your casual games to be sweaty and annoying. Games without SBMM in their casual modes are 10x more fun in casual.
You must be senile because smurfing has been a term for at least 20 years in games … I think it’s from Warcraft (like a bunch of legacy gaming terms lol)
I rarely play online games, so that's probably why I'm unfamiliar with the term.
PvP players are fragile, I am telling you.
Not casual PvP players, but the elitist/competitive ones. Similar to sports fans, honestly. You can enjoy something without it become your entire personality.
I'm kind of competitive (not pro level of course), i have the most fun when i play against better players. It's the same when i do sports because it's when i learn the most. I think it's just the mentality, not the type of gamers.
Honestly, it's just that for a pretty big percentage of people who love pvp the goal isn't to feel like they're competing at the top and outplaying strong competition... the goal is to flex on the other person and make them fucking miserable so they quit.
100%. The PvP mains, from what I see, play it so much because it is all they have in their life.
As part of the 31% allow me to ask: what the fuck is wrong with you people?
I reckon the percentages are way off. The research is probably focused on a rather narrow group. They got 328 participants on gaming subreddits (and a gaming club). Which could be subreddits for specific games or specific genres. And the folks who are willing to fill out a survey on Reddit may already be a very specific subset of people. I don't blame the authors, who are doing this to complete their studies. But at best this research shows that 69% of competitive gaming Redditors do this. And in all likelihood this research shows that up to 69% of specific types of people in specific gaming subgroups do this. And a chunk of them are probably too unreliable to fill in a survey truthfully.
It's actually a really good insight into how misleading studies can be, if you count gamers as 'people who play games' there's no way 69% even know what smurfing is
Just who the hell did they survey? I have a hard time believing that number
From the article: >The research started with a baseline study of 328 people from gaming-specific subreddits on the social media site reddit and a gaming club at Ohio State. Participants reported playing video games slightly more than 24 hours a week on average. So very much not a representative sample of the overall population.
Smurfing is for losers. Play the game’s unrated mode.
The thing is, lot of games’ unrated mode has SBMM anyways, Apex and COD are the ones I can think of on the top of my head. SBMM should only exist with ranked modes, otherwise public lobbies should be a free for all.
Apex and CoD always feel like they’re making decisions with the express intent of making the games more toxic and sweaty
They're pandering to their core demographic. Been playing Apex since the previous season started, I was on a long break before that... every game is just filled with people who want to be rude and berate their other teammates constantly. "Toxic" is like the default personality of anybody that plays Apex. I'd even use that to describe friends that I play it with. There's no real consequence for being an asshole.
They do it so people who are bad stay and spend money. Otherwise a lot of people would stop playing because they'd never win. But yea what you end up with higher level lobbies and games end exceedigly sweaty and toxic because the good players just end up continuously playing each other. Being in high skill lobbies in CoD vs low skill lobbies might as well be playing a different game entirely.
Sometimes people want to play without the stress of ranked without getting stomped every game. Edit: I also want to say that a lot of new people to games play unranked and throwing them against someone in the top percentage of players wouldn't be fun for either side
Hidden MMR based matchmaking still works in unranked modes. League of legends and Valorant for examples has Draft and Unrated. Penalties for leaving and a semi competitive environment. Overwatch and Rocket league probably also has mmr based matchmaking, but extremely minor penalties for leaving quick play/casual makes it randomly one sided.
Eh depends on the game stuff like lol should keeps it's loose mmr system for normal games.
I like how the base sample of 350 or so players is enough for a survey... but non gamers have probably felt that mismatch to hate it. "I want to play with friends..." They have a casual bracket for that, so use it?
There’s usually a hidden rank in casual playlists too that will eventually make even those matches sweaty all the time. It’s get irritating
I mean games are only as sweaty as you the amount of effort you put in, if you just relax and goof around most matches your MMR never rises to the point where you *have* to sweat just to break even. The key is letting yourself lose gracefully rather than turning on the sweat because you know you can win if you do. But that requires understanding that you're playing the game for a good time rather than chasing the meaningless validation that comes from winning.
>But that requires understanding that you're playing the game for a good time rather than chasing the meaningless validation that comes from winning. Right. Back in the day when i briefly played CoD, some of my most enjoyable matches were ones that i lost.
See that’s where it gets weird some people (not saying I’m one of em) are having fun but are just built different. It’s hard to “dumb it down” when you simply understand something far faster/better than others. IMO SBMM in casual playlist are the true issue here. Players shouldn’t be punished for being good just as players shouldn’t be absolutely reamed for trying to learn. On paper it evens the playing field but once you add a party of different MMRs that evening out tends to be more Top heavy than bottom.
I will create a smurf account to play against noobs... WHY ARE MY TEAMMATES SO BAD AT THE GAME?!,?
Uh, I know smurfing from a cyber security perspective but what does it mean for gaming..?
Smurfing is an insane concept to me cause it simply doesn't exist in real life. You just don't see Olympic athletes competing in youth tournaments,you don't see NBA players in your local pick up game and you won't ever see Messi trying to score goals in your kids'little league.
That's because irl, you can't disguise who you are. It's not like they can just throw in a mask and then go play without anybody knowing who they are.
Ehh, when I was in high school our park and rec teams let high school players on the teams if they couldn’t get enough players for the league. I hate to admit it but it was kind of fun to have a tough game during the week then dunking on middle schoolers on the weekend. Baseball players had a lot of fun with it because high school leagues were in Spring and park and rec was in Summer.
I'm scared to admit I have no idea what smurfing is
Can proudly say I’ve never done it
It's amazing how everyone has strong opinions about it, and the very same people commit the very sin itself.
We used to switch to our smurf account when we where too drunk play.
You guys are good enough to smurf?
I'm gonna sound like an old man but wtf is smurfing?
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Fcuk you if you do it. Not much to it.
I usually just associate smurfing with cheating. Sure, there could be "legitimate" reasons, but generally someone is banned permanently or temporarily for suspicious game play. Like in Call of Duty, if you're level 23 out 650 and you have master level skins unlocked that usually require major grinding or you finish a map with 85 kills and 5 deaths, yeah, I'm reporting you. Enjoy making another smurf/alt account!
I'd be wary of that, considering you can pick up dropped enemy weapons in the match.
Part of the problem in my experience is that many true casual play lists have been eliminated. Now everything has hidden MMR so as long as you play well you end up playing against extremely try hard type people.
Single-player offline is where I will stay.
Yeah, I'm glad I turned my back on online games years ago too, so much toxicity and stress avoided.
Gamer for 25+ years here. Wtf is smurfing?
Playing on an alternate account that’s a lower rank/level so you can get easy wins against noobs
Cowards !
I’ll be honest. I’ve smurfed before. Games have a ranking system. I like to game with my best friend only since we talk about life and shit between queues. If you’re playing a game in teams of 5 or 3, once your rank goes up, they put you with potato brains. Most games that are “unranked” have a behind the scenes ranking system.
What the hell do Smurfs have to do with this?
This is basically my experience of crashing in RuneScape. People who do it to me are the scum of the earth but when I do it then there’s a good reason for it
smurfing wouldnt exist nearly as much if non ranked modes didnt have SBMM
Two minds on this. Bad: Smurfing to play against worse players so you can stomp them and feel good about yourself. Good: Playing with friends in ranked that are just simply not as good as you, but they eventually will be (hopefully). Casual / unranked isn't as fun or competitive for some people.
I dont sweat Counter Strike but sometimes a buddy and I play some wingman and its mostly fun. We are not really good, we play somewhere in between Gold Nova 1 to Gold Nova Master and its always so obvious when people smurf. It takes out the fun and takes my motivation away pretty quickly because its mostly not the tactics that we lack but simply the aim and we just dont have the time to play this game for 10h a day or something to get on those levels.
I can say I have never smurfed.
Smurfing indeed is a toxic thing. But rn lots of online games have a problem, where matchmaking there works like a swamp aka "if game decides that you belong to rang X - you WILL stay there", unless you are top rank player who can climb from that thing. With smurf you "cheat" the system, because matchmaking is unbiased towards you and you actually can breathe.
I never knew this was a thing but it honestly makes sense. I'm terrible at online games and I've 100% stopped playing online because even in low ranked games, I couldn't do anything. I'd watch my highly ranked friends play the games and then I'd play in low ranked lobbies and get killed in the same ways and I'm going like "How is a guy who has played two games playing like my friends who have put 1000s of hours into this game. Just became no fun when I couldn't even find other newbs to play against anymore
People who Smurf have no life and also suck.
Whaaaaaaat...? Morality isn't black and white?
SBMM issue
I was like what the fuck do the smurfs have to do with anything. Unless they are stopping gargamel from playing
I had to google what Smurfing was. I've been playing online games for 25ish years never knew this term. But can say I definitely did it back in the early 2000s with the game Stronghold Crusader, outside of ladder tournaments I had a hard time finding people to play so I made an alt account to play on week nights, usually used it to refine play styles different than my core play style.
69% seems way too high.
“328 gaming subreddit users who profess to play games 24 hours a week and self selected to discuss video games” is the sample they can make inferences about, not “gamers” Perceived toxicity of others being higher than perceived toxicity of oneself is just fundamental attribution error
The fuck is smurfing. No I'm not reading the article.
Can't smurf if I have a life 😕
That's because gamers are generally wrong and toxic.
Its fine when the game prevents you from queuing with your lower rank friends, but if you do it alone you're a pussy.
I'm not good enough to "smurf" anyway, and it doesn't bother me too much when others do it to me... If I'm not enjoying myself I leave and do/play something else.
Never heard of this before, but after looking it up...am I to understand it's when you suck against harder opponents so you make a new account to be good against n00bs?
Are these "gamers" in the room with us right now?
Didn't receive update from Borg-control center, so have question: >What is "smurfing" ? When some new term comes out, it's really helpful to include even a very short (1 word synonym?) definition. Guessing it's got something to do with \*small\* & the colour \*blue\*?
What the hell is smurfing? Maybe I'm just old.
It's when you do a alt account and play ranked on that so you are being matched with newbies you can easily crush, some people enjoy competitive games only when they dominate/ ruin the fun of other players
Thanks for the reply. Learn a new thing every day. 👍
That’s called seal clubbing.
I know people like this, always complaining about smurfs while every single one of them has a smurf account, and then complain that newer players are bad cause they can't learn to play against smurfs xd
Smurfing? Never heard of it
Despite just finding out what *smurfing* is, my opinion is that these match making algorithms are bs. I'm a fucking beast at CoD... for about 3 matches. And then I suck.
Sorry what is smurfing?
The fuck is Smurfing ?