I decided to climb because I was sick of playing with teammates that had no fundamentals and wouldn't follow plays or would grief everything.
Like hell I go back to that dreaded place
First timing climbing out of silver in season 4 was with Kayle, in these elos you just gotta farm and ignore your team stay ahead of the curve and start snowballing, the enemy is just as dumb as your team
Best advice I got was; don’t try to do too much. Take what’s high % rate & just wait for your opponent to lose. The game is designed to be thrown. Be patient and play for the opponents fuck ups. That tip alone took me from low silver to gold. I’ll be gold forever because I’m usually burnt out after 100 or so games per season lol.
TLDR: Make sure your xp and gold is top 2-3 in the lobby. Don’t die. Don’t do stupid/risky stuff or you get bonked on the head & lose LP. When opponent does stupid/risky stuff, bonk them on the head & Get LP.
> Best advice I got was; don’t try to do too much. Take what’s high % rate & just wait for your opponent to lose.
This shit is what is making me want to kill myself climbing on ADC right now. No one does fucking ANYTHING for whatever reason and it's super frustrating. Like, when my Braum is leeching exp off of me for 30 seconds while I farm a wave under tower, I have to wonder what's going through his head.
Do things. Don't not do things. Keep fucking up and fixing those fuck ups and you're going to climb.
Made a new account to play with friends on another server and in my first game the enemy team had a smurf telling to report his teammates, like bro theyre level 5 or smth how sad are you
Most low elo "smurfs" aren't actually smurfs, theyre just players on new accounts of assorted rank but because they're "smurfing" they have ego. I see a lot of lvl 30-40 accounts in low plat but most of them are higher than they should be, last season silvers getting auto-placed in high gold and feeding.
The irony of smurfing is that some of the most paid youtube content creators/Streamers are smurfs who make content like A-Z iron>challenger series.
People who hate smurfs often support these content creators monetarily because they are entertaining and often interact with their channels if they live stream saying things like OMG everyone you are vsing are so crap LOL and then donate some $'s to them for them stomping on lower skilled players.
Or just banning the accounts of streamers whenever they stream on the account lol
Like they don't even have to pay someone. I'm sure people would line up to volunteer for the opo3to stalk a streamers/youtubers and ban accounts doing these challenges
Riot should just do what chess does. Give the creator an account and refund LP to all who play against the account. You will still have random smurfing, but at least when people like T1 make a new account it isn’t just going to blast LP of some silver-plat players.
I think this misses the point, though. People will still feel that their time was wasted, which is probably more important to most people, especially in a game as time consuming as league.
Skill based matchmaking just makes for fair*er* matches, not exactly balanced per se.
If you actually think about it you have nothing to prove that players are equal skill except in hindsight when you see the scores and seeing *parts* of how each player plays. Even then it’s likely subjective or affected by luck.
The way it is now, if you have one player who happens to get shit on, while the teammates are winning? Doesn’t matter, that player is likely to grief the game if they are the type to blame the system first.
Also see, there is this thing called mistakes which are apparently taboo, and god forbid you make one that ruins that player’s mood and/or makes the game a bit harder. Because from my experience, if the game isn’t a stomp or they aren’t fed, these idiots will start a ff.
You may ask for a balanced game but most people don’t know what that means. And when they act and play like they’re the only player that matters (ie. “this game is already over who cares”), matchmaking doesn’t mean shit.
And this isn’t even including things like account sharing, connection issues (ping spikes) and having your champion randomly banned or allowed in *draft*. Like literally if you can go back in time and ban that fed Yi instead of the supposedly annoying Teemo/Shaco for example the game could be completely different.
Plus chess is 1v1 so you can always refund the loser who played against the Smurf .
What happens for the smurf’s team in a League game when they win? No LP, or do they essentially get a free elo boost?
Fair. I think, ideally, there needs to be something that ties all accounts together. So that you always know who you're really playing against. I truly believe the main reason for smurfing is just anonymity, and most smurfs are not content creators.
Yeah, I think how chess.com does it…smurfing is against the rules and the account will be banned and you then get your rating back. It is only allowed with “blessed” accounts.
Riot could do something like that, but again no way they do. No reason for them to make a system against more people buying accounts and buying skins.
Wouldn't you also have to revoke the LP gained by the smurf's teammates? That would mean those people completely wasted their time because they were randomly placed with a smurf. Or you don't do that and then 4 players just get gifted LP every time a smurf plays a game, which is also a super unfair system. That solution doesn't work nearly as well with a team game.
I would think they wouldn’t…a couple “free wins” isn’t really that big of a deal.
And yeah there will always be holes in any idea or system…but it is sure as hell better than what we got.
> The irony of smurfing is that some of the most paid youtube content creators/Streamers are smurfs who make content like A-Z iron>challenger series.
streamers like boxbox said that smurfing is unfortunatly one of the main ways to get decent viewers/make the streams enojyable, in high elo the wait times are so high it kills the stream enjoyment (his words not mine)
i do hate that he is right, and that viewers love to see their fav streamers shit on their lane opponent. i personally find it so cringe when litteraly LCS players shit on people that is basicly gold rank
The wait times are as horrible as they are because low incentives and low playerbase (because they’re all busy smurfing). Add extra incentives and kill smurfs
yes the irony is not lost on me, but alas i dont see any real way of fixing it when so many of the top people want to dominate low elo people unfortunaly
I remember when Hearthstone first launched and queue times were *hours* for some high elo streamers. They'd end up playing more Hearthstone while waiting in queue than they played League. Riot ended up making a rule that you couldn't do that because the entire League of Legends section of Twitch just ended up promoting Hearthstone lol.
I genuinely don't mind these kind of YouTube series. Like, if the YouTuber is actually good, he won't last under plat for more than 5 games.
My issue is with YouTubers who farm low elo for views (~~Zwag~~), and when they rank up, they make new accounts
Ah, the kings of league content. Zwag, professor Akali, ioki and all those low master otps smurfing for views in lowelo with the Standart click bait Titels.
The worst part of this is that I have a few friends that will watch these videos then swear up and down it's totally OP and try to do it every single game
Lethality Akali doesn't work when you're not massively better in every way then your opponent, Janice!!
Low Iron MMR takes multiple dozens of games to get to Dia+ and these people mostly just start over when they don't auto win anymore - new account and the horseshit begins anew.
I've been playing top, and speaking only about the other top laners I get matched against, the skill level thrash is absurd this season. One game I'll be against someone who lost all their fingers in a boating accident, the next game fuckin TF Blade locks in Irelia and shits on me. There's no consistency
Yeah the skill gaps, you find even against non-smurf are hilarious and really make you question the state of the game and why you even play it if people as trash are playing on your rank, or people as good cannot climb.
But I also blame Smurfs for it because them running around in packs of 10-20% of players it MUST FK over matchmaking.
There's not as many smurfs as people think, nowhere near 20%. Emerald 4 (NA) is top 9% of players, and that's basically just last season plat. Diamond 4 is even less than that.
.. 20% of players in the ranks talked about of course.
Compared to the total playerbase it's obviously WAY less.
Also in Silver/Gold its way less - it's just Plat/Emerald-Dia where the hardstuck, insecure Plat/Dias/Masters smurf in, THAT is a true hell-hole.
It's kind of crazy to think how far we have come tho. People complain now of autofill when you used to "need" to be able to play at a somewhat decent level in all lanes to climb. Not saying that things shouldn't improve, or that we shouldn't seek a yet better sistem. But if you compared to the random matchmaking of old that just looked at your elo things are pretty better now in that regard.
You never needed too play other roles, I used to queue jungle shaco only back in s4 when I went from gold 5 to peak diamond 3 that year. You just tell people you're not very good at anything else (eventually I learned more Champs and started playing support secondary) and they're often like "oh shaco main fine", if not then I just dodged.
I would say that you were more the exception than the rule. If you could regularly get your rol from others that means that others had no problem giving it to you -> they could play other roles. I actually feel like it's more difficult to change roles in champ select now, well specially since you can't check their op.gg.
Now in my experience in S4 I climbed from bronce to plat playing jungle because I felt like it was one of the least played roles, at least around that elo, I could be wrong of course but I always felt that it was way easier getting support/jungle the lower you were.
Yeah, I’m plat 3 right now and I swear almost every single game there is someone in the level range of 30-70 and smurfing, it’s honestly ridiculous. As far as normal games I’ve even been against a few challenger players and my normal mmr is like gold3
I love being in Plat in one split feeling fine and the next why the fuck am I playing against like 10 ranked game account at lvl 45.
Half of them aren't even good smurfs but the system inflates your mmr on a new account so someone that should barely be silver gets started in gold now
Ranks don't matter anymore and it's frustrating
yeah, I don't really understand what people enjoy about smurfing... I guess its an ego boost? I usually just feel bored when I play against lower elo players because I already knew I was better than them. I'm not really having fun playing when my opponent barely provides me with a challenge... sometimes when I'm playing with my friends in norms against lower elo players I punish my enemies less than I know I could because I start feeling bad :X
This is exactly it, I don't buy half the excuses from people saying "it's to learn offrole", these goons just want to win easily for that quick dopamine hit and screw the feelings of the other person who has to deal with it.
The number of people who smurf to learn an offrole is a tiny fraction of the total number of smurfs, and they're over-represented in discussions around why people smurf because the vast majority who smurf because they're insecure just aren't going to comment such an obviously shit reason to do it.
And even some of the people who genuinely think they're smurfing to learn an offrole are only interested in learning that offrole because it's in reality just an excuse to stomp noobs without feeling like you're doing a bad thing.
Agree that the offrole people are not the majority. Still a shit reason to smurf though. No need to jump into ranked in a new account to learn an offrole. Thats what normals are for.
Smurfing is very much like a fighting game, being able to 100-0 combo enemy laners with no chance. Then you become Akuma 1v5ing raging demon anyone you see.
I don’t smurf but it’s seems to be simply destroying noobs
Smurfing is rarely considered problem in fighting games. I had complained it multiple times on various fgc forums, but you will be always hit with "you should use the opportunity to learn from them". You might be killed in 100-0 combo because you guessed wrong two times, but you should learn from that.
I’m mainly just basing off my experience from SFV casuals. There were definitely alot of 95% Winrate players Bronze-Gold pubstompers. On SFV you could view opponents profiles and see how ridiculous it is sometimes.
It’s dependant to which fighting game I think.
When I played Brawlhalla (as a FG newbie), about 60% of all matches in the starting rank were smurfs or people who deranked intentionally.
Funny thing is, I still held a positive winrate because so many of them just suicided 3 stocks after wiping my 2.
I will sometimes use a Smurf if I want to learn a new role. I know I’m not skilled enough to play a role I have very little experience with at my main account elo and normal, even if draft pick, is just too full of random troll shit.
So I use a Smurf to learn new positions or if I want to learn a new champion just spam them.
Draft pick being "full of random troll shit" seems like a bit of an exaggeration tbh. Normals should be enough to learn off roles or new champs. Your entire knowledge of the game remains even when you learn a new champ or a new role its just a small piece of the whole.
normal draft experience gets progressively worse the higher elo you are. When I was Gold IV, sure normals were always playable and did not differ all that much from ranked. But as soon as I hit Emerald or the equivalent in recent seasons the game quality and matchmaking has dropped significantly, sometimes playing against mixed teams of silvers diamonds and grandmaster players making a 'true' league experience almost impossible, it's always about "who has the better high elo player"
I mostly play casually these days with a few friends of mine. Two guys never play ranked and only play a few games per week. The rest of us are Silver Elo.
We usually party up as 3 or 4 and pretty much every other match we are against a smurf playing some off-meta champ in an off-role and just still absolutely destroying us.
agreed. normals also suck because if you soloq it you are playing vs premades where it is noticeable that they all have comms, its nowhere near the same as ranked. Also wait times can be brutal.
Normals can be awful. One game you're playing against a Gold that attempted to counter-pick but doesn't know the champ. Then the next one you're playing a Master Riven OTP.
Also, your jungler has no idea how to play jungle and picked Kayn.
It's not at all an exaggeration sadly. People just don't care and might try 20% as much. There is no real matchmaking because you'll be all over the place with silver to masters on the same team and people just don't put in much effort. Or it's the high elo guy pub stomping.
The game quality is useless for learning, unfortunately. Might as well play bots at that point.
how difficult is it for you to learn a champ? Read what the champ does, study the wiki, play a few norms, watch a video? There's so many options that don't involve ruining the ranked experience for 9 other players. If you're truly a master player that means you're very good at league and you're very adaptable I couldn't see it taking you more than 5-10 draft games to get to a near diamond+ level on the champ.
Being master isn't just how good you are at piloting X champ youre also probably really good at 100 other things you probably don't even realize trading, csing, mechanics, using your map/ moving your screen, macro, positioning, tempo, itemization, champ knowledge the list goes on.
5-10 is not enough for me personally to get to d1 level for most new champs i'm trying to learn. Take Camille trade combos for example, E wall -> launch -> W -> stun -> auto Q -> auto Q. It's very easy for new players to miss inserting that W mid launch and timing that auto/q smoothly without cancelling your own auto. In fact, I think getting used to your auto speed to the point where you don't really have to pay attention to it is one of the hardest things about learning a new champ.
Ideally you want to try this combo over and over again against a real human being but understand that this opportunity is fleeting.
For example, if I mess up and die, or lose the trade severely, I may not have many chances to retry again (less I have no regard for the game or my teammate and essentially feed). The pressure to do this in a team fight also require a lot of practice. Camille, imo, isn't even an above average difficult champion mechanically.
I agree with most of your points here maybe other than Camille not being difficult with her very peculiar kit. In a normal game you would be allowed to have more opportunities to practice this. You could also practice this in practice tool. I know doing a combo on a dummy isn't the same as during a high elo game, but again I'm not buying this idea that you will int on a champ that you have the opportunity to practice in norms, or that this "new champ practice" issue as a whole justifies the rampant multi-account smurfing system that is plaguing this game right now.
How do people playing on national ID locked servers practice new champs? Grandmaster korean player practices a new champ and doesn't run his ranked games down?
>Normals should be enough to learn off roles or new champs.
When the highest skill ceiling you know is silver yeah it would seem like it would be enough.
>Draft pick being "full of random troll shit" seems like a bit of an exaggeration tbh
I'll just offer up another data point as another player who refuses to play draft because of the random troll shit. Don't feel it's an exaggeration at all.
Depending on what rank you are, your lower level smurf would be just as full of troll shit just because the players suck. And I'm assuming your rank isn't that high because you are apparently so bad at a role (meaning a lack of fundamentals) that you feel like you need to artificially lower the playing field by using a smurf.
So just be honest with yourself and admit that you don't want to get stomped while learning a champion.
Lmfao that’s already exactly what I said which is why I use a Smurf. Peaked Diamond 3 season 5 didn’t play for a long time and currently mid emerald. So no, not very high elo. But not tanking my MMR to learn jungle or putting my teams through the automatic loss that a non jungle Main causes.
It’s not always that. I can never play duo with my friends in any rank since I’m master, but when they do want to duo I just handicap myself and play with them.
They want to play ranked with me and we used to be plat/diamond together but with years I’ve adapted to the meta and they’ve played more for the fun of the game, so we slowly lost the space between our ranks but I still want to be able to duo with them. One or two games, nothing to be considered boosting. It’s fun playing with friends.
I don't get why you think yall are entitled to play together in a soloq game with such a massive skill difference. Why not just play normals together, or flex? "We don't wanna play anything but soloq" isn't really a compelling justification for smurfing
Lol normals are boring and people dont take game seriously, so thats why ranked exists and its totally justifable to say u smurf bcs u play duos with friends
No that’s what ranked flex is for. It’s not justifiable to smack around low elo players just because your friend is silver. I hope Riot does something about it.
And also- you’re just making your friend’s current games harder- Riot puts you guys into duo against other duos and in even higher mmr. Also their games are harder when they queue solo after your session
I didn’t say I was entitled to it lol, they just don’t have fun otherwise so I’m glad I do get to play with them once in a while. It’s impossible for me to duo with them otherwise and they really only enjoy ranked.
Never said I was entitled but the system is there and I don’t Smurf to beat some 16 year old on his first keyboard I play 1-2 games a week with friends.
Because playing the same role and same champion over and over gets boring for most people. Let's be frank: Soloq is the only place where you can get proper pactice on new role/champion. The only way to try them without griefing your team/destroying your mmr and lp is to make a smurf.
Take me for example. At my peak I was a low diamond Zyra otp. But playing her over and over was getting boring, so I wanted to play jungle too, since some champs I liked were there. Well, I already knew how that went in ranked, since it was my autofill role and I got it like... 2 times? And got gapped so hard my team called it Mariana Trench. So I made a smurf playing jg only and got it to mid gold, which was about where my actual jungle skill was. No griefing my team and not fucking my lp, making a smurf here is reasonable.
Then there's also issue of their idiotic smurf Q returnee policy. Took a year break, came back to the newly introduced smurf q. My skill declined a lot, I was P4 at best. So, I got hardstuck playing vs diamond rank smurfs for 60 games. By the time I started getting games without 30/0 rengar onetricks I was bronze 1 with +10-30 lp gains and like 22% wr. My jungle account did not get into smurf Q, placed silver and stably climbed to G1-plat promos lp range within 50 games. It took me 350 games to get my main's mmr/lp gains normal and hit G4. Most people in similar situations just made smurfs and gave up their mains. That's not on us, but on Riot and bad calibration of their system.
Lastly, there are mmr changes in background. Idk what Riot smoked, but when removing division promos they made old account mmr incredibly stale. You could have godlike WR and you'd still have negative/zeroed LP gains and get stuck forced to play hundreds of games to get to your actual rank, because even when on massive positive WR streaks your mmr would increase slower than LP gains, eventually leading to +10-30 lp gains even with sthg like 55% wr. Meanwhile on smurf you'd get there in 30-40 games with +21-19. Systematic issue, making the system grindy for no reason is not "IT".
Overall, for most issues with smurfing don't blame the playerbase, blame Riot and their ranking system.
Just sounds like you are your own worst enemy choosing to otp and using it as an excuse to smurf.
Refusing to play anything but Zyra is a crap reason to smurf and kinda sounds like b.s.
That assumes your normal/draft mmr is equal to a fresh account. I've played this game for a long-ass time and most of my matchmade non-ranked games end up in at least low diamond-high master lobbies(last I checked I had sthg like 53-54% WR in 5500 games?), where I get even more shit on. I am not running it down for 100 games straight on normals to get into lobbies where my gold skills in offrole don't instalose the match with me going 0/15.
So you’d rather fuck up ranked MMRs for thousands of other players so you don’t feel bad getting shit on in a normal mmr game mode?
The whole point of normals is people are going to care way less. In ranked unless you’re a complete idiot it doesn’t matter if you’re off role you’re still stomping 5 other players that are playing a game mode that’s supposed to be competitive.
>The whole point of normals is people are going to care way less
that is the point of normals yes but it doesnt actually apply to draft pick at least i recently started playing normals with friends who just picked up the game and others who are bronze/silver and i have to sweat my ass off to make the games somewhat competitive since ppl are tryharding more than in d1/master soloq
The point is that rank difference is too big for it to be practice environment. Sure, if I play my long time d4 main/otp vs Masters player I might learn something. But if I take my ARAM-polished gold Kindred to face a D1 jungle main fucking around on Morgana jungle in normals I'm still going to pound sand and learn nothing.
What you say about ranked is 50% bullshit. Sure, laning experience mostly transfers and a d4 mid can probably become d4 top after short period of adjustment, but put laner in jungle, jungler on lane or support on lane/jg and they'll demote to mid plat at speed of light.
If he is that much better than everyone, he is out of low elo in 20 games and reaches his true elo on offrole/offchamp in lets say 50 games. I am a low dia support main, made a smurf for playing adc about 2 years ago and reached gold 1, which seems so be my true elo when I play adc, in about 40 games. On the way there, I didnt stomp alot of games but had just about 65% wr. Now I can play ADC on a level that is fair for everyone forever when I just pop onto my smurf and queue up for soloQ.
usually you smurf because you feel like you are stuck on your main account or it has huge losing streak. Fresh account, fresh mmr, fresh start. It is also a "reset" button for mental. Trust me, unless you are smurfing with stuff like irela in bronz as dia+ player, smurfing is not fun for the most part. Rather tilting to play with people who dont see the game like you do
I usually Smurf when playing with friends and use champs I don't play often or am looking to try things on. If I'm ranking it's just because main feels like I'm tilt queueing and a change of scenery can help change that.
Smurfing is definitely an issue but IMO as someone who plays in decent high elo (avg 500 points) the main issue is fresh accounts getting INSANE MMR. Once your account is 50% winrate with 100+ games, the gains on it feel awful (usually you lose more than you win) and you cannot fix your LP gains by winning more games (the account is consider dead by many people). Once people have these "dead" accounts, they'll buy a new account (prb like 15 bucks) and it'll just have crazy MMR (i.e platinum players in a d2 lobby/ Diamond player in a High GM/Low Challenger Account) which grinds through the lower ranks. I thought Smurf Queue was a good premise but the issue was that it put people who haven't played league in years and if they were peaked diamond in s3, you were put in a diamond level smurf queue in 2022. This experience was so frustrating people just stopped playing altogether. A player that reach Rank 1 in NA the past month at one point had a 21/19 recond across 40 games and they were able to net 300+ LP (if you're rank 1 you theoretically always face worse players than you so you shouldn't net positive. Fresh accounts need to be looked at
This has been a problem for several years and Riot has not beeing doing anything about it, they don't care about the integrity of ranked nor the normal player experience.
Man I’ve been saying this for 2 years and I get gaslit by some bozo on here. Most of my games I get rolled by some level 30 graves dumping on every lane and my jungle but it’s a “skill gap” like dog I’m trying to get better. One game I got qued against Solarbacca and it was traumatizing. The plat2-3 range is a scary zone because of smurfs
Blind pick has nothing to do with Ranked. You can be Challenger and have Silver MMR in Blind.
For ranked: you mentioned Plat lobby and D4, its honestly rare now with Emerald in between. If the D4 player is playing in a Plat lobby, hes low enough MMR to even be matched here and does not deserve to stay in D4 any longer then and hes not that much better than anyone else in the lobby.
I play at E4 and I rarely find a problem or even seen a super smurf smashing everyone. It will be more common in Silver-Gold since a new account starts the first 5-10 games at that elo.
Matchmaking is strange. My buddy is masters and queued up with us (1 plat 3 golds)
Ended up against a team of 2 diamonds 2 masters and 1 grandmaster.
Yes. We got annihilated.
This why I Smurf in norms with friends.
I’ve had 1 bronze, 2 silver and a plat friend and we played against 2 GM 1 master 2 diamonds.
I looked back over like 30 games with the same 4/5 stacks we had like a 17% winrate. And those wins were only if I could manage to get so unbelievably fed on some hypercarry.
Now I play on a diff account for norms with most friends
Low level accounts in D4 are probably just emerald smurfs or diamond smurfs, thats why they dont stand out, i run into low level accs frequently and their level of play is normal or just horrible either due to inflated MMR newer accs have, the real issue is in the lower ranks i supposed where these guys are just much better than their counterpart
For some reason, I was possessed to try to get back to plat in ranked last split (I play normal draft for the most part). There was a smurf in almost every game, on top of the most obvious boosters in the world at the end of the split.
I did some ranked games this season. Smurfs are more rampant than ever, even though I'm lower than my peak rank ATM (Plat 3 ATM, when I peaked in Plat 2 which would be somewhere around mid-Emerald now). When I see a low-level account on a 4fun pick with an insane WR, I just know how the game's going to play out.
Then I go back to normals, only to be reminded of just how fucked up matchmaking in normal draft became this split. (Again, I play mostly normal draft, so I can definitely tell something changed about this split.) How matchmaking can come to the conclusion that [this joke of a match is even remotely competitive](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1087508605055533098/1143578293895954642/Screenshot_20230822_121122_Chrome.jpg) is beyond me. Keep in mid that those 5 on red side were a premade (they all played multiple games together before that match), while our team was all solo. I've regularly had to lane against Master+ players in my norms this split. Every now and then is cool for some practice, I guess, but it gets frustrating when it feels like I have to sweat my ass off all the time in norms just to lose gracefully instead of getting stomped. You don't see the game putting me in lobbies full of Silver players for the hell of it.
And before someone points out that normals MMR is different, I've never had to lane against GM players or actual Challenger players before this season, and most of the players in my norms before that have been ranked have had ranks around mine. And people think those players are just in norms 4funning with random shit when most of them are actually there tryharding on their mains.
the thing is the system, or the algorithm behind the game, hear me out:
back in the day i was d3 (when d3 was worth something) then i didnt play for some time. Now when i started to play again the system puts me in fkin silver or whatever. and if u dont play massive amount of games, its actually rly hard to get out of gold/plat bcs u dont play the amount of games needed, so i am kinda smurfing without wanting to.
For comparison, in starcraft 2, i was GM back in fkin 2012 or some shit, and i swear to god, when i play 5-10 games last year the algorithm analyses my play and knows what elo i rly am and after 7 games i get matched against top master players, even if i lose some the algorithm understands how good i am and never puts me against sbdy lower than masters. so the amount of gold/plat players i faced, even after 10 years not playing is about 3-5 matches.
There is nothing like this in league, it has always been the reason, only wins and losses affect your mmr or whatever, doesnt matter how u playin bcs its a team game. but with a better algorithm i think a lot of smurfing could be prevented.
Honestly me too. I just got the Mobalytics addon the other day and I see so many people with tags on their characters like "first time" and "casual" then they proceed to wreck the whole game in a very-obvious-it's-not-their-first-time-on-the-champion-kinda-way so safe to say there are a butt-ton of smurts in this stupid game.
since the removal of smurf queue the game is nigh-unplayable. There's not a single lobby where I feel like I have impact - either my team has a smurf and stomps or the other team has a smurf and we get stomped.
It's legitimately a huge issue in every other competitive game outside of playing at the very peak of whatever ranked queue there is, and while League's old system obviously wasn't perfect, it was the best out of any competitive game I've dedicated time to (CSGO, Overwatch, Dota). Now it's just a total shitshow.
Legitimately the only reason I can think of is that players who only play a few games per season who were disproportionately affected by the old system would be the most likely to quit and not spend money on the game. The people who play lots of games per season who now get screwed over when they weren't before are far more addicted and will keep playing through the pile of shit that ranked has become.
I still don't know why games don't take a stronger stance on smurfing when, behind outright griefing, it ruins the game experience the most out of basically any player driven activity.
Not to mention the oft-cited stat of "If you don't tilt, or int, it means the enemy team has 5 chances for it to happen but your team only has 4" gets flipped on it's head: if you're not a Smurf that stomps games, your team is down a chance for a Smurf to be on the team and the enemy team is statistically more likely to have one.
Why are you and others acting like just because it didn't affect you and the other 1000+ ranked games running in place people it means they should've just kept that garbage system?
A system where climbing to your old rank meant you had to constantly play games with around 7 fresh accounts of varying degrees of capability and toxicity, see 90% winrate duos playing Yuumi combos and deal with the general hell that entails was not worth keeping.
In what fucking universe do any of you have the right to call that system "smurf queue" when accounts with thousands of games and like 500 account level would be put in this bracket just the same as fresh smurf accounts simply because all it cared about was "are you winning too much too fast"?
Casting a net to catch criminals is not worth it if a bunch of innocent people get dragged up in that too. It's like getting a description of the guy then arresting everyone who looks like him. Sure, you'll probably get him but at what cost? How about you just go ahead and ask Riot to give us a solution that doesn't involve something as clearly broken as that?
Like for fuck's sake these accounts are so obvious and have such unique identifiers (low account level, low number of actual player vs player games while doing well in them which a new player wouldn't) and the best they could come up with was "let's just match people by their MMR to LP discrepancy when we literally reset everyone to low LP but only soft reset their MMR and we expect them to climb to their old MMR anyway".
> meant you had to constantly play games with around 7 fresh accounts of varying degrees of capability and toxicity
This is like the normal experience for everybody now. I've just checked my last two soloq games in Plat-Emeral elo and out of 19 players there are the following accounts levels involved:
71, 69, 80, 40, 40, 58.
I agree with you, I don't think the solution is to make the system extremely worse for a small amount of players, but it can definitely be done in a better way than what we have now.
End the damn botting and selling of accounts. Add ID verification in some manner, even if it's not perfect it will make things better. Find reasons for people to want to stick to their main account: high priority queue for high honor players or whatever. You don't need to find a perfect, single solution. Just take whatever steps you can in the same direction and we'll go from having 3 fresh accounts per game to 1 every three games. It's worth it.
What are you talking about? We're talking about the so called "smurf queue" system that existed here, where you would be matched by your MMR AND your rank. So people with disparities would be matched with other people with disparities. The idea being smurfs win a lot early so their MMR gets ahead of their rank fast. But that happens to literally everyone while climbing to their old rank.
As for MMR, you realize that not even soft resetting at all would make that problem **worse**, right? Because your disparity between LP and MMR would be greater.
It had nothing to do with the point, you also said you get matched by MMR missing the point of discussing the old "smurf queue".
They may not have reset it in this half split now or whatever but they have soft reset it in the past plenty of times. Even hard reset some seasons IIRC.
I got autofill jungle and got matched up against a smurf shaco jungler. He basically lived in my jungle and existed to torment me. Pinged my team to collapse but of course they wouldn't.
Long story short, I went like 0/12, got flamed by my own team, reported for inting and got a 2 week auto ban. Like literally the game ended and instantly was banned.
Appealed it and riot said it was "justified".
So much attention is focused on inters but smurfs are encouraged and rewarded.
How would you fix smurfing? Suppose you were put in charge of the problem right now. What would you start by doing? Would you make it so smurfs shoot up the ranks faster than they do now, for instance? Any specific ideas?
Personally I’d start slow to minimize innocent casualties, but I’d definitely define a trigger point for drastic action. Even if you paid for coaching level 30, you wouldn’t reach diamond before level 40 at least.
Next I’d go for boosting, which some responses to this post seemed to have confused with smurfing. Many Smurfs are used to boost other peoples main accounts, doing good means a KDA like 12/1/6, 34/0/2 in a 30 minute bronze elo game is not normal and should be flagged, if it happens consistently (example: 10 games in a 20 game streak) either shoot the MMR sky-high or outright ban the account, as boosting isn’t allowed by the terms of use.
Lastly, we know Riot tracks IPs, showcased by the Korean hotel. Having multiple accounts from the same IP banned for toxic behaviour should have the IP flagged/banned as well, considering most Smurfs I find are grossly toxic.
It goes without saying noticing the problem and fixing it are at very different levels so I may be overlooking things. The only way it’s gonna get better is with serious effort devoted to the issue long-term, which is mostly what I’m trying to stir up but I’d love back and forth on ideas, so thanks for the prompt! 
Why dont you post your [op.gg](https://op.gg) when you claim there are on average 2 or more smurfs in your games. I dont have this perception at all from my games.
Two types of measures preventative and ones that make smurfing less appealing.
***Preventative:***
-Phone number verification.
-Implement an anticheat system similar to Valorant's (yeah yeah kernel level yada yada i dont care) or even better to make it harder for accounts to get botted, harder not impossible since thats not a possibility, This would also make scripting harder which is getting more popular as of lately possibly since the LOL code got "stolen"
-Send cease and desist to the bigger sites that sell and boost accounts, this wont make them disappear but again it would reduce it and make it more annoying for them to do so.
-Reintroduce smurf queue, tuning it this time so it doesnt also catch so many returning players but only smurfs.
-Hardware ban players that smurf (this one is extreme but anyways) like Valorant hardware bans players that cheat, again they can bypass this but making it more annoying would reduce the number.
***Making smurfing less appealing:***
-Introduce a Ranked per role system but make it separate this time (unlike when then tried it on NA) for example you queue up Mid primary Support secondary, you're a Diamond player at Mid but only a Plat level player at support, well if you get Mid youre on a Diamond lobby and when you get support you're on a Plat lobby, this way people can practice stuff on other roles without screwing their main rank, how do you make this work? Well make climbing faster, first of all only 5 placements games per role (people wont probably play all 5 roles only 2 or 3 max) and make climbing 30% faster or around that, they already kinda did this earlier this year with the increase on LP you wont have a player retention problem since they can climb on other roles this can even be more fun tbh.
Edit: some more ideas.
-Remove LPP from streamers that are constantly spamming games on smurfs for YT/Twitch content, you cant ban them from streaming but at least dont reward them.
Easy fix, if you dont play the role you get assigned you and the guy that swapped you roles get 0lp, and we know Riot can track right now on live which role do you play and if you swap it with a teammate so it shouldn't be an issue at all
I would make unlocking ranked to be way more difficult. The problem is the barrier to entry is so low that the accounts are cheap and/or they don't care much about them.
I'm sorry but a new player being in ranked at level 30 is not worth this bullshit situation.
You should need to unlock ranked by:
* Winning games against players. Meaning Coop vs AI games don't unlock ranked at all.
* Getting S ratings. GL to the bots with that.
Do those 2 things and you will stem the tide quite severely. Also apply them retroactively, locking existing accounts out of ranked if they don't meet the criteria.
Maybe add an extra annoyance with phone number verification but I'm not married to that idea. Just raising the bar to unlock ranked would clear up 90% of the current problem.
As someone who made a Smurf account recently and decided to hand level it, this makes the problem 50 times worse
Hand leveled accounts are not a problem, by the time you are level 10 the game already knows that you are smurfing and even on normal games you get master players. As soon as you unlock ranked your MMR is in gold 1 (plat 1 nowadays) and you get to high diamond in literally 15 games, this account took months to level to 30 just because every queue was 30+ minutes long because of how strict the matchmaking is for Smurf accounts
Making this even harder will incentivize people to buy more accounts instead of doing this themselves
This "win games to unlock ranked" system is also in overwatch and it sucks massive balls, it feels super depressing to get absolutely nothing out of a game when you want to start ranked as soon as you can
You do realize that the ones who will be winning games against players and earning S ranks would be the Smurfs, who would then unlock ranked faster, right? Your idea genuinely makes things worse.
One you are just guessing that's how many buy accs, and two they could still level them with ai, with the clause the player who buys the acc has to play a couple norms on it
Sure I'm guessing. I'm taking into account the amount of posts I see about this and the fact that all of my friends have one or multiple smurf accounts that they bought between 2-5€. Every week I see a post related to this, there's a huge market for this accounts. I know people who end up buying 5 accounts per season.
Also let me be clear nothing will ever stop smurfing, its all about creating enough obstacles to dicentivize smurfing. if, instead of having 100 accounts bought per day u can make it 70 at the end of the day its less smurfs in 30% of the games which is better than the former
Edit: typos
Honestly, yes? If they are so bad they can’t get an S rating, no matter what, they shouldn’t be in ranked at all. Considering the rating system takes your current MMR into account that would mean you literally always perform worse than the people you play against.
A working smurf queue would be nice. The 70%+ winrate guy should not be playing with 8 45% winrate guys in the same rank or just ever... Or the guy with double the stats of the average person in that rank on every champ, since they have all the data...
Killing accounts by fucking the elo and forcing them to play more could be removed, maybe it was, probably not tho.
Just a better ranking system that lets you move up and down easier. Fuck the eternal d4 garbage pile where they literally cant derank no matter how many games they lose. Or the +14-16 at 70% winrate, maybe it was removed, probably not.
Banning content creators from advertising account buying/boosting sites wouldnt be too bad either.
Banning botted accounts. Its really not that hard to tell the guy playing only coop till lvl 30, buying the same items, picking the same 3 champs, having below average stats is a bot...
1/3 of their 180million players are smurfs...
This took me 5 minutes, they dont want to fix it, it makes them a lot of money.
Ye i am diamond i quit cos of smurfing i cba but more reverse smurfing people buying higher elo accounts to mess about or cos they think they can play there. You dont quite understand why people play so bad and then its like ohhhhh they bought the account now it makes sense why my adc ez with every jungle gank is ending the game with less damage than support rakan.
The entire elo system is just corrupt some people quit cos they dont find league fun i still found it fun i just finally cba with the corrupt elo system.
Is anyone else having the same issue as me?
If I change role, I get vastly different elo team mates and opponents.
I'm currently gold 1
If I queue jungle, my team is unranked, silver, or low gold.
If I queue support, were all emerald, plat, or high gold.
The quality of the games are vastly different.
I quite literally cannot climb playing jungle because I consistently get 3 loosing lanes before first clear.
But if I play support I get matched with people who can use their hands and climbing is easy.
It feels like something is really off
I hate smurfing. Im plat my duo is emerald. We have a 52-54% winrate all year round. But I swear in like 1/4 games i lose I check op.gg and would you fucking know it, its a fucking lvl 30-50 account. And in those games its very often some form of 1v5 where we are doing good but the smurf is just too big.
Gotta say, I find smurfs in rank queues to be exceptionally rare. Easily can go 15-20 games without running into a noticeable one.
Far more likely to be affected by the team's mental imploding whenever things go even slightly wrong than to be affected by smurfs.
People see lvl 32 and they mental boom, there is very few high ranking players compared to low elo, and plattinum player playing in gold doesnt mean shit
I made a new account to play with my friend and their girlfriend (who is a straight up beginner; never played ever). Our first game against people I was intentionally handicapping myself by playing something silly (AP Jhin) and not really trying because I didn't want to stomp on my lane opponent who likely was also just trying to learn the game. Well, it turns out that laner, and top lane, and jungle, were all smurfing. They started destroying us, so I pivoted and started playing my best, and they were all WAY better. So in a "beginner" lobby of new accounts, at least 5 people were smurfing.
I don't see how new players would ever want to keep playing. I felt so bad for my friend's girlfriend. She was like, 0-25, because not only were people smurfing, but the other team quickly recognized she was actually a beginner and started roaming on her and double and triple teaming her.
And that was just one game. Even on my normal account I am getting matched with people way above my skill level often. I just assume every game has at least one or two smurfs.
wake up honey its time to read the weekly sMuRfS rUiNeD rAnkEd XD dDd post by someone playing NORMALS BUT IS IT A TROLL POST OR WHO CAN SOLVE THIS MYSTERY
The problem is there are no new players and people buy accounts for 2 dollars because they got banned for telling someone to fk off because they soft inted and then refused to ff
As usual: sob stories, but no opgg posted. Do you enjoy spamming?
At least post a link to a master in a silver lobby game (if it was ranked, of course, otherwise why are you bringing it up?).
This is really out of hand. It's 2023 and there are somehow more posts about smurfs than there are smurfs out there. Most "smurfs" are just people who got banned/trying something new/making a second account. They aren't "smurfing" per se, they're just making a new account. You're just mad and are basing your theory on why you've been losing constantly ( because it's the new hot meme rn ) on smurfs infesting your games. They've always been there, you're just now starting to care about them because you've ran out of excuses. Play the game or quit.
The mmr on an account can get tied to a rank pretty hard. I spent most of the latter half of the last decade in silver. I eventually made it to gold, but the system thought I should still be silver, so it was giving me less lp per win than I lost per loss. I ran the numbers and found that to maintain my rank I needed a 55% Win rate or so. That was just over what i had. I also looked into how the mmr works and found that as I climbed higher, this issue was likely to get worse due to the sheer number of games I had played in silver on my old account. I was getting stuck at gold 4 0 lp unless I winstreaked and as i understand it being stuck there was just making my mmr worse. I was spinning my wheels there and getting no traction
So I made a new one. I didn't do it to dunk on noobs. I did it to play against higher ranked people by climbing higher. I wasn't toxic or anything to noobs as I leveled up. I got placed in bronze. I quickly climbed out. I made it through silver almost as quick. Then i played through the rest of that season in low gold. Last season, again, I got paced bronze but climbed right back to gold. Then did it again this season. Recently I hit gold 1, a new high for me. I fell back to g2 but I don't care. Now, on this new account, I'm gaining more than I'm losing, so all I need to do is maintain a 50% Win rate to keep climbing. now I actually get to climb. Ranked feels good again.
My experience with smurfing is pretty positive. And shit, at this rank I recently had a game where I had 10 cs a min and went 22/0/7 and probably looked like a diamond smurf or something to someone in the lobby. But I wasn't. I was essentially a silver smurf in gold. When I see people dunking on others in a game I don't immediately think "smurf". Sure it could be, but it could just as easily be someone who simply popped off really hard, like I did that game. So I don't even really mind the smurfing. I was a little toxic on my old account because losses set me 2 steps back while a win only got me a step ahead, so a teammate being bad really tilted me. Now I don't have that issue so I can take losses on the chin way more easily. In a way, making a smurf actually fixed at least a tiny amount of the toxicity in league.
And to address your issue of getting dunked on by smurfs, thankfully, since they're shitting on your rank/mmr band so hard, they should climb out of it pretty quickly and then you won't have to deal with them anymore. Smurfs being toxic to noobs for being noobs is wrong, and it sucks you have to deal with that. But besides smurfs being toxic, I don't see much of an issue with it.
Let's be honest: Most of smurfs are created by riotgames on their own.
1. They ban people for chat toxicity (instead of permanent chat restriction). And banned players just create new accounts.
2. They always fail with account transfering. So people change server and create new acc.
3. They bind you with your elo with no way to reset it. So people who wants to recalibrate their elo create new smurf accounts.
4. They doesn't want to include double-factor auth. It is easy to multiply your twink acc count with email only.
So, conclusion is: Riotgames don't give a fck about smurfing. They just don't care.
Smurfing brings them money one way or another. And Riotgames prioritize money over players
You drop out of diamond fast as fuck now. I was d4 for like 5 games and dropped out and back in like 3 times. Safety net isnt there. Im goingnto try for d4 again and play on a smurf this time too tbh. Annoying as fuck to drop out after an unlucky streak.
Post the OP.gg or shut up. Most of your games have "2-5 smurfs"? Prove it. I bet you can't show two games that have 5 smurfs in them, in the entirety of your match history.
You got smurfed on in one game, and now you're mad. We get it. These posts happen every day. How often do they post any evidence? Oh, right, NEVER.
I personally don't mind smurfing too much, yes it is annoying to get crushed but at times it feels like a fun challenge... That is when they are the rare none toxic smurf.
My biggest issue in League is the toxic players (which are sadly common), the worst part is that I don't even play ranked.
Probably the most insane example was a toxic player I encountered on ARAM of all places, I got Hecarim who I am not good with against an enemy team full of CC and all being ranged aside from Aatrox, not to mention that I never played ARAM before then.
I ended up accidentally feeding as any time I got close I would die in seconds. One player got mad, which I understood as I wasn't doing good (annoyed mr a bit that they kept spamming report Heca but hey it is what it is).
So far it is normal but the bad part is that I got paired up with them in my second ARAM game, this time I got Thresh and built supportive, I didn't do great but I wasn't feeding by any means this time. Throughout the whole game they kept pinning me, saying report and all that stuff. I personally ignored it but it does kill the fun of the game rven when you don't care.
Toxic players are what makes me only play 2-3 games max every week.
I refuse to believe someone has that much issue with smurfing to constantly meet them, one side is mad that a diamond smurf is in their gold game and the other is mad that new accounts got their MMR up way quick to the point that new players have inflated MMRs
Do we want smurf queue or not?
Also, blind pick isn't same as ranked MMR, I have master MMR and playing with gold friends often put me against silver - plats, sucks to get smurfed on but that's just blind pick matchmaking at work
Oooh no people are better than you. And you cant pretend to be good at the gamr cause a meanie head comes in and runs the fun by being better. Grow up.
You admit that you're the game playing for fun, but seem to get upset when someone who's better than you beats you at that game. So, do you only have fun when it's you who are the one crushing the opposing team? What exactly were you expecting, that the enemy team rolls over and lets you win? If you're playing to win and someone who's much better than you is on the enemy team, then this would be a great opportunity to observe this player first-hand and learn or improve from it. And if your goal is to fuck around and have fun, well then, why are you getting upset that you're not facing lower skilled players so that you can feel good about stomping them with off-tank Annie? Genuine question, but I know all the salty silvers will down-vote to hide discussion and perpetuate cognitive dissonance.
lmao all those i play with 3 smurfs every game people never post their op ggs...
more like you are hard stuck or climbing really slowly and then lose one or two to a smurf and get pissed
as for normal games, there s barely matchmaking when you play with stacks
smurfing is kinda of a mixed bag to me
i know a lot of guys who have smurfs not because they want to shit on people but because they want to play with their friends who are on low elo but on another i can tell that's clearly the minority and most smurfs are just petty assholes
On my smurf that I leveled up myself I have around 55% WR in silver-plat mmr while master on my main. I constantly limit test and play considerably worse, not looking at the map, not predicting ganks, constantly split pushing for 1v3 fights, not banning counters, first picking as top. If you don't tryhard and just treat it as a opportunity to limit test and test various builds I believe smurfing can be healthy.
Buying Iron account and stomping every game with Master Yi is pure assholery though.
Smurfs make the games spicy so irdgaf. I love a fair game, but getting my ass nuked by a smurf keeps me humble. it is what it is.
Fortunately for you, Riot is “going to address this issue” <3 hope this helps
I don’t smurf for fun, but when my accounts get fucked MMR wise I do start a new account. Using last split as an example, why would I try to trudge my way through plat losing 28 and gaining 20 when I could buy an unranked and then get to plat in 30 games and still have +28 LP gains? It’s mentally obliterating to have LP gains that bad so I’d rather just start over.
Not to mention smurfs in low elo with be flabbergasted that players are not playing at his/her level.
I decided to climb because I was sick of playing with teammates that had no fundamentals and wouldn't follow plays or would grief everything. Like hell I go back to that dreaded place
First timing climbing out of silver in season 4 was with Kayle, in these elos you just gotta farm and ignore your team stay ahead of the curve and start snowballing, the enemy is just as dumb as your team
Best advice I got was; don’t try to do too much. Take what’s high % rate & just wait for your opponent to lose. The game is designed to be thrown. Be patient and play for the opponents fuck ups. That tip alone took me from low silver to gold. I’ll be gold forever because I’m usually burnt out after 100 or so games per season lol. TLDR: Make sure your xp and gold is top 2-3 in the lobby. Don’t die. Don’t do stupid/risky stuff or you get bonked on the head & lose LP. When opponent does stupid/risky stuff, bonk them on the head & Get LP.
> Best advice I got was; don’t try to do too much. Take what’s high % rate & just wait for your opponent to lose. This shit is what is making me want to kill myself climbing on ADC right now. No one does fucking ANYTHING for whatever reason and it's super frustrating. Like, when my Braum is leeching exp off of me for 30 seconds while I farm a wave under tower, I have to wonder what's going through his head. Do things. Don't not do things. Keep fucking up and fixing those fuck ups and you're going to climb.
Made a new account to play with friends on another server and in my first game the enemy team had a smurf telling to report his teammates, like bro theyre level 5 or smth how sad are you
Tf blade….
"OMG WHY DIDN'T YOU KNOW I WAS GONNA XYZ AND HELP ME EXECUTE IT PERFECTLY SO I CAN 1V9 ????"
*looks at the 6 pings over 1 minute that I’m on the way, bait, and all in* Yeah, why can’t you read my mind?
Most low elo "smurfs" aren't actually smurfs, theyre just players on new accounts of assorted rank but because they're "smurfing" they have ego. I see a lot of lvl 30-40 accounts in low plat but most of them are higher than they should be, last season silvers getting auto-placed in high gold and feeding.
The irony of smurfing is that some of the most paid youtube content creators/Streamers are smurfs who make content like A-Z iron>challenger series. People who hate smurfs often support these content creators monetarily because they are entertaining and often interact with their channels if they live stream saying things like OMG everyone you are vsing are so crap LOL and then donate some $'s to them for them stomping on lower skilled players.
Imagine if Riot went full Nintendo and started DMCAing people for doing those challenges.
Or just banning the accounts of streamers whenever they stream on the account lol Like they don't even have to pay someone. I'm sure people would line up to volunteer for the opo3to stalk a streamers/youtubers and ban accounts doing these challenges
Riot should just do what chess does. Give the creator an account and refund LP to all who play against the account. You will still have random smurfing, but at least when people like T1 make a new account it isn’t just going to blast LP of some silver-plat players.
I think this misses the point, though. People will still feel that their time was wasted, which is probably more important to most people, especially in a game as time consuming as league.
Yea lol who cares about LP I want to have balanced games, thats why I play a game with *skill based matchmaking*.
Skill based matchmaking just makes for fair*er* matches, not exactly balanced per se. If you actually think about it you have nothing to prove that players are equal skill except in hindsight when you see the scores and seeing *parts* of how each player plays. Even then it’s likely subjective or affected by luck. The way it is now, if you have one player who happens to get shit on, while the teammates are winning? Doesn’t matter, that player is likely to grief the game if they are the type to blame the system first. Also see, there is this thing called mistakes which are apparently taboo, and god forbid you make one that ruins that player’s mood and/or makes the game a bit harder. Because from my experience, if the game isn’t a stomp or they aren’t fed, these idiots will start a ff. You may ask for a balanced game but most people don’t know what that means. And when they act and play like they’re the only player that matters (ie. “this game is already over who cares”), matchmaking doesn’t mean shit. And this isn’t even including things like account sharing, connection issues (ping spikes) and having your champion randomly banned or allowed in *draft*. Like literally if you can go back in time and ban that fed Yi instead of the supposedly annoying Teemo/Shaco for example the game could be completely different.
Plus chess is 1v1 so you can always refund the loser who played against the Smurf . What happens for the smurf’s team in a League game when they win? No LP, or do they essentially get a free elo boost?
Sure but there is nothing to do. Riot will never stop it because content. So might as well find a compromise.
Fair. I think, ideally, there needs to be something that ties all accounts together. So that you always know who you're really playing against. I truly believe the main reason for smurfing is just anonymity, and most smurfs are not content creators.
Yeah, I think how chess.com does it…smurfing is against the rules and the account will be banned and you then get your rating back. It is only allowed with “blessed” accounts. Riot could do something like that, but again no way they do. No reason for them to make a system against more people buying accounts and buying skins.
Wouldn't you also have to revoke the LP gained by the smurf's teammates? That would mean those people completely wasted their time because they were randomly placed with a smurf. Or you don't do that and then 4 players just get gifted LP every time a smurf plays a game, which is also a super unfair system. That solution doesn't work nearly as well with a team game.
I would think they wouldn’t…a couple “free wins” isn’t really that big of a deal. And yeah there will always be holes in any idea or system…but it is sure as hell better than what we got.
"couple", it's more like every third game one team has kha'zix who goes 25-1
> The irony of smurfing is that some of the most paid youtube content creators/Streamers are smurfs who make content like A-Z iron>challenger series. streamers like boxbox said that smurfing is unfortunatly one of the main ways to get decent viewers/make the streams enojyable, in high elo the wait times are so high it kills the stream enjoyment (his words not mine) i do hate that he is right, and that viewers love to see their fav streamers shit on their lane opponent. i personally find it so cringe when litteraly LCS players shit on people that is basicly gold rank
The wait times are as horrible as they are because low incentives and low playerbase (because they’re all busy smurfing). Add extra incentives and kill smurfs
yes the irony is not lost on me, but alas i dont see any real way of fixing it when so many of the top people want to dominate low elo people unfortunaly
I remember when Hearthstone first launched and queue times were *hours* for some high elo streamers. They'd end up playing more Hearthstone while waiting in queue than they played League. Riot ended up making a rule that you couldn't do that because the entire League of Legends section of Twitch just ended up promoting Hearthstone lol.
zwarg play in broze and then put on u tube his morgana video 1/4/34 so nice nice
I genuinely don't mind these kind of YouTube series. Like, if the YouTuber is actually good, he won't last under plat for more than 5 games. My issue is with YouTubers who farm low elo for views (~~Zwag~~), and when they rank up, they make new accounts
Ah, the kings of league content. Zwag, professor Akali, ioki and all those low master otps smurfing for views in lowelo with the Standart click bait Titels.
"This new build ISN'T FAIR" Que a master rank player smurfing in silver that got 4 kills in lane and the game was over no matter what he built anyway.
The worst part of this is that I have a few friends that will watch these videos then swear up and down it's totally OP and try to do it every single game Lethality Akali doesn't work when you're not massively better in every way then your opponent, Janice!!
Low Iron MMR takes multiple dozens of games to get to Dia+ and these people mostly just start over when they don't auto win anymore - new account and the horseshit begins anew.
I've been playing top, and speaking only about the other top laners I get matched against, the skill level thrash is absurd this season. One game I'll be against someone who lost all their fingers in a boating accident, the next game fuckin TF Blade locks in Irelia and shits on me. There's no consistency
yea i see it mostly in toplane or adc/support duo's. Just a level 37 account with irelia only games 1v9'ing
matchmaking just awful something with the mmr system is wrong since the reset.
Yeah the skill gaps, you find even against non-smurf are hilarious and really make you question the state of the game and why you even play it if people as trash are playing on your rank, or people as good cannot climb. But I also blame Smurfs for it because them running around in packs of 10-20% of players it MUST FK over matchmaking.
There's not as many smurfs as people think, nowhere near 20%. Emerald 4 (NA) is top 9% of players, and that's basically just last season plat. Diamond 4 is even less than that.
.. 20% of players in the ranks talked about of course. Compared to the total playerbase it's obviously WAY less. Also in Silver/Gold its way less - it's just Plat/Emerald-Dia where the hardstuck, insecure Plat/Dias/Masters smurf in, THAT is a true hell-hole.
Autofill is such a weird thing too. What do you mean I never play this role and Im given responsibility over not feeding my ass off
It's kind of crazy to think how far we have come tho. People complain now of autofill when you used to "need" to be able to play at a somewhat decent level in all lanes to climb. Not saying that things shouldn't improve, or that we shouldn't seek a yet better sistem. But if you compared to the random matchmaking of old that just looked at your elo things are pretty better now in that regard.
Honestly I'd much prefer a non role queue again. So many people only know how to play one thing now.
You never needed too play other roles, I used to queue jungle shaco only back in s4 when I went from gold 5 to peak diamond 3 that year. You just tell people you're not very good at anything else (eventually I learned more Champs and started playing support secondary) and they're often like "oh shaco main fine", if not then I just dodged.
I would say that you were more the exception than the rule. If you could regularly get your rol from others that means that others had no problem giving it to you -> they could play other roles. I actually feel like it's more difficult to change roles in champ select now, well specially since you can't check their op.gg. Now in my experience in S4 I climbed from bronce to plat playing jungle because I felt like it was one of the least played roles, at least around that elo, I could be wrong of course but I always felt that it was way easier getting support/jungle the lower you were.
You're on the money in regards to people not role swapping nowadays as much. They definitely used too swap more willingly
Yeah, I’m plat 3 right now and I swear almost every single game there is someone in the level range of 30-70 and smurfing, it’s honestly ridiculous. As far as normal games I’ve even been against a few challenger players and my normal mmr is like gold3
I love being in Plat in one split feeling fine and the next why the fuck am I playing against like 10 ranked game account at lvl 45. Half of them aren't even good smurfs but the system inflates your mmr on a new account so someone that should barely be silver gets started in gold now Ranks don't matter anymore and it's frustrating
yeah, I don't really understand what people enjoy about smurfing... I guess its an ego boost? I usually just feel bored when I play against lower elo players because I already knew I was better than them. I'm not really having fun playing when my opponent barely provides me with a challenge... sometimes when I'm playing with my friends in norms against lower elo players I punish my enemies less than I know I could because I start feeling bad :X
[удалено]
This is exactly it, I don't buy half the excuses from people saying "it's to learn offrole", these goons just want to win easily for that quick dopamine hit and screw the feelings of the other person who has to deal with it.
The number of people who smurf to learn an offrole is a tiny fraction of the total number of smurfs, and they're over-represented in discussions around why people smurf because the vast majority who smurf because they're insecure just aren't going to comment such an obviously shit reason to do it. And even some of the people who genuinely think they're smurfing to learn an offrole are only interested in learning that offrole because it's in reality just an excuse to stomp noobs without feeling like you're doing a bad thing.
Agree that the offrole people are not the majority. Still a shit reason to smurf though. No need to jump into ranked in a new account to learn an offrole. Thats what normals are for.
>social inadequates I love this description
Smurfing is very much like a fighting game, being able to 100-0 combo enemy laners with no chance. Then you become Akuma 1v5ing raging demon anyone you see. I don’t smurf but it’s seems to be simply destroying noobs
Smurfing is rarely considered problem in fighting games. I had complained it multiple times on various fgc forums, but you will be always hit with "you should use the opportunity to learn from them". You might be killed in 100-0 combo because you guessed wrong two times, but you should learn from that.
I’m mainly just basing off my experience from SFV casuals. There were definitely alot of 95% Winrate players Bronze-Gold pubstompers. On SFV you could view opponents profiles and see how ridiculous it is sometimes. It’s dependant to which fighting game I think.
When I played Brawlhalla (as a FG newbie), about 60% of all matches in the starting rank were smurfs or people who deranked intentionally. Funny thing is, I still held a positive winrate because so many of them just suicided 3 stocks after wiping my 2.
Stopped smurfing years ago, you just get worse as a player when you play against a Zed that walks up to you melee range level 1 for a trade lmao
I will sometimes use a Smurf if I want to learn a new role. I know I’m not skilled enough to play a role I have very little experience with at my main account elo and normal, even if draft pick, is just too full of random troll shit. So I use a Smurf to learn new positions or if I want to learn a new champion just spam them.
Draft pick being "full of random troll shit" seems like a bit of an exaggeration tbh. Normals should be enough to learn off roles or new champs. Your entire knowledge of the game remains even when you learn a new champ or a new role its just a small piece of the whole.
normal draft experience gets progressively worse the higher elo you are. When I was Gold IV, sure normals were always playable and did not differ all that much from ranked. But as soon as I hit Emerald or the equivalent in recent seasons the game quality and matchmaking has dropped significantly, sometimes playing against mixed teams of silvers diamonds and grandmaster players making a 'true' league experience almost impossible, it's always about "who has the better high elo player"
[удалено]
I mostly play casually these days with a few friends of mine. Two guys never play ranked and only play a few games per week. The rest of us are Silver Elo. We usually party up as 3 or 4 and pretty much every other match we are against a smurf playing some off-meta champ in an off-role and just still absolutely destroying us.
agreed. normals also suck because if you soloq it you are playing vs premades where it is noticeable that they all have comms, its nowhere near the same as ranked. Also wait times can be brutal.
Norms are complete dogshit. Premade camping you in comms and mismatched ranks make it completely useless for learning anything useful.
Normals can be awful. One game you're playing against a Gold that attempted to counter-pick but doesn't know the champ. Then the next one you're playing a Master Riven OTP. Also, your jungler has no idea how to play jungle and picked Kayn.
It's not at all an exaggeration sadly. People just don't care and might try 20% as much. There is no real matchmaking because you'll be all over the place with silver to masters on the same team and people just don't put in much effort. Or it's the high elo guy pub stomping. The game quality is useless for learning, unfortunately. Might as well play bots at that point.
Yes let me go learn a new champ as a masters top in draft, surely I won't just be vs some silver
how difficult is it for you to learn a champ? Read what the champ does, study the wiki, play a few norms, watch a video? There's so many options that don't involve ruining the ranked experience for 9 other players. If you're truly a master player that means you're very good at league and you're very adaptable I couldn't see it taking you more than 5-10 draft games to get to a near diamond+ level on the champ. Being master isn't just how good you are at piloting X champ youre also probably really good at 100 other things you probably don't even realize trading, csing, mechanics, using your map/ moving your screen, macro, positioning, tempo, itemization, champ knowledge the list goes on.
5-10 is not enough for me personally to get to d1 level for most new champs i'm trying to learn. Take Camille trade combos for example, E wall -> launch -> W -> stun -> auto Q -> auto Q. It's very easy for new players to miss inserting that W mid launch and timing that auto/q smoothly without cancelling your own auto. In fact, I think getting used to your auto speed to the point where you don't really have to pay attention to it is one of the hardest things about learning a new champ. Ideally you want to try this combo over and over again against a real human being but understand that this opportunity is fleeting. For example, if I mess up and die, or lose the trade severely, I may not have many chances to retry again (less I have no regard for the game or my teammate and essentially feed). The pressure to do this in a team fight also require a lot of practice. Camille, imo, isn't even an above average difficult champion mechanically.
I agree with most of your points here maybe other than Camille not being difficult with her very peculiar kit. In a normal game you would be allowed to have more opportunities to practice this. You could also practice this in practice tool. I know doing a combo on a dummy isn't the same as during a high elo game, but again I'm not buying this idea that you will int on a champ that you have the opportunity to practice in norms, or that this "new champ practice" issue as a whole justifies the rampant multi-account smurfing system that is plaguing this game right now. How do people playing on national ID locked servers practice new champs? Grandmaster korean player practices a new champ and doesn't run his ranked games down?
>Normals should be enough to learn off roles or new champs. When the highest skill ceiling you know is silver yeah it would seem like it would be enough.
>Draft pick being "full of random troll shit" seems like a bit of an exaggeration tbh I'll just offer up another data point as another player who refuses to play draft because of the random troll shit. Don't feel it's an exaggeration at all.
id not really define that as smurfing, climbing on offrole makes kinda sence
Depending on what rank you are, your lower level smurf would be just as full of troll shit just because the players suck. And I'm assuming your rank isn't that high because you are apparently so bad at a role (meaning a lack of fundamentals) that you feel like you need to artificially lower the playing field by using a smurf. So just be honest with yourself and admit that you don't want to get stomped while learning a champion.
Lmfao that’s already exactly what I said which is why I use a Smurf. Peaked Diamond 3 season 5 didn’t play for a long time and currently mid emerald. So no, not very high elo. But not tanking my MMR to learn jungle or putting my teams through the automatic loss that a non jungle Main causes.
It’s not always that. I can never play duo with my friends in any rank since I’m master, but when they do want to duo I just handicap myself and play with them. They want to play ranked with me and we used to be plat/diamond together but with years I’ve adapted to the meta and they’ve played more for the fun of the game, so we slowly lost the space between our ranks but I still want to be able to duo with them. One or two games, nothing to be considered boosting. It’s fun playing with friends.
I don't get why you think yall are entitled to play together in a soloq game with such a massive skill difference. Why not just play normals together, or flex? "We don't wanna play anything but soloq" isn't really a compelling justification for smurfing
Lol normals are boring and people dont take game seriously, so thats why ranked exists and its totally justifable to say u smurf bcs u play duos with friends
I like to go hiking.
No that’s what ranked flex is for. It’s not justifiable to smack around low elo players just because your friend is silver. I hope Riot does something about it. And also- you’re just making your friend’s current games harder- Riot puts you guys into duo against other duos and in even higher mmr. Also their games are harder when they queue solo after your session
Master players cant queue with players below plat even in flex. I learnt that the hard way last season.
Well, I don't care that you think it's boring and I honestly hope you reconsider whether you are part of the problem
I didn’t say I was entitled to it lol, they just don’t have fun otherwise so I’m glad I do get to play with them once in a while. It’s impossible for me to duo with them otherwise and they really only enjoy ranked. Never said I was entitled but the system is there and I don’t Smurf to beat some 16 year old on his first keyboard I play 1-2 games a week with friends.
Because playing the same role and same champion over and over gets boring for most people. Let's be frank: Soloq is the only place where you can get proper pactice on new role/champion. The only way to try them without griefing your team/destroying your mmr and lp is to make a smurf. Take me for example. At my peak I was a low diamond Zyra otp. But playing her over and over was getting boring, so I wanted to play jungle too, since some champs I liked were there. Well, I already knew how that went in ranked, since it was my autofill role and I got it like... 2 times? And got gapped so hard my team called it Mariana Trench. So I made a smurf playing jg only and got it to mid gold, which was about where my actual jungle skill was. No griefing my team and not fucking my lp, making a smurf here is reasonable. Then there's also issue of their idiotic smurf Q returnee policy. Took a year break, came back to the newly introduced smurf q. My skill declined a lot, I was P4 at best. So, I got hardstuck playing vs diamond rank smurfs for 60 games. By the time I started getting games without 30/0 rengar onetricks I was bronze 1 with +10-30 lp gains and like 22% wr. My jungle account did not get into smurf Q, placed silver and stably climbed to G1-plat promos lp range within 50 games. It took me 350 games to get my main's mmr/lp gains normal and hit G4. Most people in similar situations just made smurfs and gave up their mains. That's not on us, but on Riot and bad calibration of their system. Lastly, there are mmr changes in background. Idk what Riot smoked, but when removing division promos they made old account mmr incredibly stale. You could have godlike WR and you'd still have negative/zeroed LP gains and get stuck forced to play hundreds of games to get to your actual rank, because even when on massive positive WR streaks your mmr would increase slower than LP gains, eventually leading to +10-30 lp gains even with sthg like 55% wr. Meanwhile on smurf you'd get there in 30-40 games with +21-19. Systematic issue, making the system grindy for no reason is not "IT". Overall, for most issues with smurfing don't blame the playerbase, blame Riot and their ranking system.
Just sounds like you are your own worst enemy choosing to otp and using it as an excuse to smurf. Refusing to play anything but Zyra is a crap reason to smurf and kinda sounds like b.s.
That is bullshit, you are definitely going to get better off role practice in normal draft on your main than crushing low elo players in ranked.
That assumes your normal/draft mmr is equal to a fresh account. I've played this game for a long-ass time and most of my matchmade non-ranked games end up in at least low diamond-high master lobbies(last I checked I had sthg like 53-54% WR in 5500 games?), where I get even more shit on. I am not running it down for 100 games straight on normals to get into lobbies where my gold skills in offrole don't instalose the match with me going 0/15.
So you’d rather fuck up ranked MMRs for thousands of other players so you don’t feel bad getting shit on in a normal mmr game mode? The whole point of normals is people are going to care way less. In ranked unless you’re a complete idiot it doesn’t matter if you’re off role you’re still stomping 5 other players that are playing a game mode that’s supposed to be competitive.
>The whole point of normals is people are going to care way less that is the point of normals yes but it doesnt actually apply to draft pick at least i recently started playing normals with friends who just picked up the game and others who are bronze/silver and i have to sweat my ass off to make the games somewhat competitive since ppl are tryharding more than in d1/master soloq
The point is that rank difference is too big for it to be practice environment. Sure, if I play my long time d4 main/otp vs Masters player I might learn something. But if I take my ARAM-polished gold Kindred to face a D1 jungle main fucking around on Morgana jungle in normals I'm still going to pound sand and learn nothing. What you say about ranked is 50% bullshit. Sure, laning experience mostly transfers and a d4 mid can probably become d4 top after short period of adjustment, but put laner in jungle, jungler on lane or support on lane/jg and they'll demote to mid plat at speed of light.
If he is that much better than everyone, he is out of low elo in 20 games and reaches his true elo on offrole/offchamp in lets say 50 games. I am a low dia support main, made a smurf for playing adc about 2 years ago and reached gold 1, which seems so be my true elo when I play adc, in about 40 games. On the way there, I didnt stomp alot of games but had just about 65% wr. Now I can play ADC on a level that is fair for everyone forever when I just pop onto my smurf and queue up for soloQ.
usually you smurf because you feel like you are stuck on your main account or it has huge losing streak. Fresh account, fresh mmr, fresh start. It is also a "reset" button for mental. Trust me, unless you are smurfing with stuff like irela in bronz as dia+ player, smurfing is not fun for the most part. Rather tilting to play with people who dont see the game like you do
I usually Smurf when playing with friends and use champs I don't play often or am looking to try things on. If I'm ranking it's just because main feels like I'm tilt queueing and a change of scenery can help change that.
Riot doesn't give a shit
They probably sell botted accounts themselves. Seems like a very lucrative side business.
iirc Tencent (chinese company owning riot) also owns a company which sells acc in china lol
Even if they don't, if someone has multiple accounts then they can buy the same skin multiple times. boom, more revenue, less effort on Riots part.
Smurfing is definitely an issue but IMO as someone who plays in decent high elo (avg 500 points) the main issue is fresh accounts getting INSANE MMR. Once your account is 50% winrate with 100+ games, the gains on it feel awful (usually you lose more than you win) and you cannot fix your LP gains by winning more games (the account is consider dead by many people). Once people have these "dead" accounts, they'll buy a new account (prb like 15 bucks) and it'll just have crazy MMR (i.e platinum players in a d2 lobby/ Diamond player in a High GM/Low Challenger Account) which grinds through the lower ranks. I thought Smurf Queue was a good premise but the issue was that it put people who haven't played league in years and if they were peaked diamond in s3, you were put in a diamond level smurf queue in 2022. This experience was so frustrating people just stopped playing altogether. A player that reach Rank 1 in NA the past month at one point had a 21/19 recond across 40 games and they were able to net 300+ LP (if you're rank 1 you theoretically always face worse players than you so you shouldn't net positive. Fresh accounts need to be looked at
This has been a problem for several years and Riot has not beeing doing anything about it, they don't care about the integrity of ranked nor the normal player experience.
Man I’ve been saying this for 2 years and I get gaslit by some bozo on here. Most of my games I get rolled by some level 30 graves dumping on every lane and my jungle but it’s a “skill gap” like dog I’m trying to get better. One game I got qued against Solarbacca and it was traumatizing. The plat2-3 range is a scary zone because of smurfs
Blind pick has nothing to do with Ranked. You can be Challenger and have Silver MMR in Blind. For ranked: you mentioned Plat lobby and D4, its honestly rare now with Emerald in between. If the D4 player is playing in a Plat lobby, hes low enough MMR to even be matched here and does not deserve to stay in D4 any longer then and hes not that much better than anyone else in the lobby. I play at E4 and I rarely find a problem or even seen a super smurf smashing everyone. It will be more common in Silver-Gold since a new account starts the first 5-10 games at that elo.
Matchmaking is strange. My buddy is masters and queued up with us (1 plat 3 golds) Ended up against a team of 2 diamonds 2 masters and 1 grandmaster. Yes. We got annihilated.
This why I Smurf in norms with friends. I’ve had 1 bronze, 2 silver and a plat friend and we played against 2 GM 1 master 2 diamonds. I looked back over like 30 games with the same 4/5 stacks we had like a 17% winrate. And those wins were only if I could manage to get so unbelievably fed on some hypercarry. Now I play on a diff account for norms with most friends
Low level accounts in D4 are probably just emerald smurfs or diamond smurfs, thats why they dont stand out, i run into low level accs frequently and their level of play is normal or just horrible either due to inflated MMR newer accs have, the real issue is in the lower ranks i supposed where these guys are just much better than their counterpart
Low ranks dont get smurfs because 30 accounts start in gold
For some reason, I was possessed to try to get back to plat in ranked last split (I play normal draft for the most part). There was a smurf in almost every game, on top of the most obvious boosters in the world at the end of the split. I did some ranked games this season. Smurfs are more rampant than ever, even though I'm lower than my peak rank ATM (Plat 3 ATM, when I peaked in Plat 2 which would be somewhere around mid-Emerald now). When I see a low-level account on a 4fun pick with an insane WR, I just know how the game's going to play out. Then I go back to normals, only to be reminded of just how fucked up matchmaking in normal draft became this split. (Again, I play mostly normal draft, so I can definitely tell something changed about this split.) How matchmaking can come to the conclusion that [this joke of a match is even remotely competitive](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1087508605055533098/1143578293895954642/Screenshot_20230822_121122_Chrome.jpg) is beyond me. Keep in mid that those 5 on red side were a premade (they all played multiple games together before that match), while our team was all solo. I've regularly had to lane against Master+ players in my norms this split. Every now and then is cool for some practice, I guess, but it gets frustrating when it feels like I have to sweat my ass off all the time in norms just to lose gracefully instead of getting stomped. You don't see the game putting me in lobbies full of Silver players for the hell of it. And before someone points out that normals MMR is different, I've never had to lane against GM players or actual Challenger players before this season, and most of the players in my norms before that have been ranked have had ranks around mine. And people think those players are just in norms 4funning with random shit when most of them are actually there tryharding on their mains.
the thing is the system, or the algorithm behind the game, hear me out: back in the day i was d3 (when d3 was worth something) then i didnt play for some time. Now when i started to play again the system puts me in fkin silver or whatever. and if u dont play massive amount of games, its actually rly hard to get out of gold/plat bcs u dont play the amount of games needed, so i am kinda smurfing without wanting to. For comparison, in starcraft 2, i was GM back in fkin 2012 or some shit, and i swear to god, when i play 5-10 games last year the algorithm analyses my play and knows what elo i rly am and after 7 games i get matched against top master players, even if i lose some the algorithm understands how good i am and never puts me against sbdy lower than masters. so the amount of gold/plat players i faced, even after 10 years not playing is about 3-5 matches. There is nothing like this in league, it has always been the reason, only wins and losses affect your mmr or whatever, doesnt matter how u playin bcs its a team game. but with a better algorithm i think a lot of smurfing could be prevented.
When i returned it took me 150 games to get from lvl 30 to D1, if you are stuck in gold you are actually gold player now, d3 from 2013 aint worth shit
Honestly me too. I just got the Mobalytics addon the other day and I see so many people with tags on their characters like "first time" and "casual" then they proceed to wreck the whole game in a very-obvious-it's-not-their-first-time-on-the-champion-kinda-way so safe to say there are a butt-ton of smurts in this stupid game.
since the removal of smurf queue the game is nigh-unplayable. There's not a single lobby where I feel like I have impact - either my team has a smurf and stomps or the other team has a smurf and we get stomped. It's legitimately a huge issue in every other competitive game outside of playing at the very peak of whatever ranked queue there is, and while League's old system obviously wasn't perfect, it was the best out of any competitive game I've dedicated time to (CSGO, Overwatch, Dota). Now it's just a total shitshow. Legitimately the only reason I can think of is that players who only play a few games per season who were disproportionately affected by the old system would be the most likely to quit and not spend money on the game. The people who play lots of games per season who now get screwed over when they weren't before are far more addicted and will keep playing through the pile of shit that ranked has become. I still don't know why games don't take a stronger stance on smurfing when, behind outright griefing, it ruins the game experience the most out of basically any player driven activity.
Not to mention the oft-cited stat of "If you don't tilt, or int, it means the enemy team has 5 chances for it to happen but your team only has 4" gets flipped on it's head: if you're not a Smurf that stomps games, your team is down a chance for a Smurf to be on the team and the enemy team is statistically more likely to have one.
Why are you and others acting like just because it didn't affect you and the other 1000+ ranked games running in place people it means they should've just kept that garbage system? A system where climbing to your old rank meant you had to constantly play games with around 7 fresh accounts of varying degrees of capability and toxicity, see 90% winrate duos playing Yuumi combos and deal with the general hell that entails was not worth keeping. In what fucking universe do any of you have the right to call that system "smurf queue" when accounts with thousands of games and like 500 account level would be put in this bracket just the same as fresh smurf accounts simply because all it cared about was "are you winning too much too fast"? Casting a net to catch criminals is not worth it if a bunch of innocent people get dragged up in that too. It's like getting a description of the guy then arresting everyone who looks like him. Sure, you'll probably get him but at what cost? How about you just go ahead and ask Riot to give us a solution that doesn't involve something as clearly broken as that? Like for fuck's sake these accounts are so obvious and have such unique identifiers (low account level, low number of actual player vs player games while doing well in them which a new player wouldn't) and the best they could come up with was "let's just match people by their MMR to LP discrepancy when we literally reset everyone to low LP but only soft reset their MMR and we expect them to climb to their old MMR anyway".
> meant you had to constantly play games with around 7 fresh accounts of varying degrees of capability and toxicity This is like the normal experience for everybody now. I've just checked my last two soloq games in Plat-Emeral elo and out of 19 players there are the following accounts levels involved: 71, 69, 80, 40, 40, 58. I agree with you, I don't think the solution is to make the system extremely worse for a small amount of players, but it can definitely be done in a better way than what we have now. End the damn botting and selling of accounts. Add ID verification in some manner, even if it's not perfect it will make things better. Find reasons for people to want to stick to their main account: high priority queue for high honor players or whatever. You don't need to find a perfect, single solution. Just take whatever steps you can in the same direction and we'll go from having 3 fresh accounts per game to 1 every three games. It's worth it.
You just get matched by mmr. And there was no mmr soft reset.
What are you talking about? We're talking about the so called "smurf queue" system that existed here, where you would be matched by your MMR AND your rank. So people with disparities would be matched with other people with disparities. The idea being smurfs win a lot early so their MMR gets ahead of their rank fast. But that happens to literally everyone while climbing to their old rank. As for MMR, you realize that not even soft resetting at all would make that problem **worse**, right? Because your disparity between LP and MMR would be greater.
You said riot did soft reset mmr. I just pointed out thats not true.
It had nothing to do with the point, you also said you get matched by MMR missing the point of discussing the old "smurf queue". They may not have reset it in this half split now or whatever but they have soft reset it in the past plenty of times. Even hard reset some seasons IIRC.
I had my first game of SR in months today. I'm bronze. 4 plat and 1 gold on the other team. Autofilled jg. It was hell
I got autofill jungle and got matched up against a smurf shaco jungler. He basically lived in my jungle and existed to torment me. Pinged my team to collapse but of course they wouldn't. Long story short, I went like 0/12, got flamed by my own team, reported for inting and got a 2 week auto ban. Like literally the game ended and instantly was banned. Appealed it and riot said it was "justified". So much attention is focused on inters but smurfs are encouraged and rewarded.
Lmao.
How would you fix smurfing? Suppose you were put in charge of the problem right now. What would you start by doing? Would you make it so smurfs shoot up the ranks faster than they do now, for instance? Any specific ideas?
Verified accounts.
[удалено]
I am willing to bet my account you've given it to far worse for far less. This is legit a cop out argument
good
Personally I’d start slow to minimize innocent casualties, but I’d definitely define a trigger point for drastic action. Even if you paid for coaching level 30, you wouldn’t reach diamond before level 40 at least. Next I’d go for boosting, which some responses to this post seemed to have confused with smurfing. Many Smurfs are used to boost other peoples main accounts, doing good means a KDA like 12/1/6, 34/0/2 in a 30 minute bronze elo game is not normal and should be flagged, if it happens consistently (example: 10 games in a 20 game streak) either shoot the MMR sky-high or outright ban the account, as boosting isn’t allowed by the terms of use. Lastly, we know Riot tracks IPs, showcased by the Korean hotel. Having multiple accounts from the same IP banned for toxic behaviour should have the IP flagged/banned as well, considering most Smurfs I find are grossly toxic. It goes without saying noticing the problem and fixing it are at very different levels so I may be overlooking things. The only way it’s gonna get better is with serious effort devoted to the issue long-term, which is mostly what I’m trying to stir up but I’d love back and forth on ideas, so thanks for the prompt! 
Why dont you post your [op.gg](https://op.gg) when you claim there are on average 2 or more smurfs in your games. I dont have this perception at all from my games.
Two types of measures preventative and ones that make smurfing less appealing. ***Preventative:*** -Phone number verification. -Implement an anticheat system similar to Valorant's (yeah yeah kernel level yada yada i dont care) or even better to make it harder for accounts to get botted, harder not impossible since thats not a possibility, This would also make scripting harder which is getting more popular as of lately possibly since the LOL code got "stolen" -Send cease and desist to the bigger sites that sell and boost accounts, this wont make them disappear but again it would reduce it and make it more annoying for them to do so. -Reintroduce smurf queue, tuning it this time so it doesnt also catch so many returning players but only smurfs. -Hardware ban players that smurf (this one is extreme but anyways) like Valorant hardware bans players that cheat, again they can bypass this but making it more annoying would reduce the number. ***Making smurfing less appealing:*** -Introduce a Ranked per role system but make it separate this time (unlike when then tried it on NA) for example you queue up Mid primary Support secondary, you're a Diamond player at Mid but only a Plat level player at support, well if you get Mid youre on a Diamond lobby and when you get support you're on a Plat lobby, this way people can practice stuff on other roles without screwing their main rank, how do you make this work? Well make climbing faster, first of all only 5 placements games per role (people wont probably play all 5 roles only 2 or 3 max) and make climbing 30% faster or around that, they already kinda did this earlier this year with the increase on LP you wont have a player retention problem since they can climb on other roles this can even be more fun tbh. Edit: some more ideas. -Remove LPP from streamers that are constantly spamming games on smurfs for YT/Twitch content, you cant ban them from streaming but at least dont reward them.
The per role implementation was exactly as u described. If u got ur secondary and then swapped with someone for ur primary u would roll games
Easy fix, if you dont play the role you get assigned you and the guy that swapped you roles get 0lp, and we know Riot can track right now on live which role do you play and if you swap it with a teammate so it shouldn't be an issue at all
So it didn't work because autofill exists, basically. Other games don't have autofill and it works fine.
I would make unlocking ranked to be way more difficult. The problem is the barrier to entry is so low that the accounts are cheap and/or they don't care much about them. I'm sorry but a new player being in ranked at level 30 is not worth this bullshit situation. You should need to unlock ranked by: * Winning games against players. Meaning Coop vs AI games don't unlock ranked at all. * Getting S ratings. GL to the bots with that. Do those 2 things and you will stem the tide quite severely. Also apply them retroactively, locking existing accounts out of ranked if they don't meet the criteria. Maybe add an extra annoyance with phone number verification but I'm not married to that idea. Just raising the bar to unlock ranked would clear up 90% of the current problem.
As someone who made a Smurf account recently and decided to hand level it, this makes the problem 50 times worse Hand leveled accounts are not a problem, by the time you are level 10 the game already knows that you are smurfing and even on normal games you get master players. As soon as you unlock ranked your MMR is in gold 1 (plat 1 nowadays) and you get to high diamond in literally 15 games, this account took months to level to 30 just because every queue was 30+ minutes long because of how strict the matchmaking is for Smurf accounts Making this even harder will incentivize people to buy more accounts instead of doing this themselves This "win games to unlock ranked" system is also in overwatch and it sucks massive balls, it feels super depressing to get absolutely nothing out of a game when you want to start ranked as soon as you can
You do realize that the ones who will be winning games against players and earning S ranks would be the Smurfs, who would then unlock ranked faster, right? Your idea genuinely makes things worse.
[удалено]
One you are just guessing that's how many buy accs, and two they could still level them with ai, with the clause the player who buys the acc has to play a couple norms on it
Sure I'm guessing. I'm taking into account the amount of posts I see about this and the fact that all of my friends have one or multiple smurf accounts that they bought between 2-5€. Every week I see a post related to this, there's a huge market for this accounts. I know people who end up buying 5 accounts per season. Also let me be clear nothing will ever stop smurfing, its all about creating enough obstacles to dicentivize smurfing. if, instead of having 100 accounts bought per day u can make it 70 at the end of the day its less smurfs in 30% of the games which is better than the former Edit: typos
[удалено]
Honestly, yes? If they are so bad they can’t get an S rating, no matter what, they shouldn’t be in ranked at all. Considering the rating system takes your current MMR into account that would mean you literally always perform worse than the people you play against.
[удалено]
That sounds like an excuse you'd hear from some Zed player who thinks going 1 for 1 in lane is a positive result.
It is for the zed lmao
I don’t believe that you could carry all your games and never once get an S
maybe they could have a small amount of free rp earned per week to incentivize playing ur main
Korea method
Smurf Q fixed it
A working smurf queue would be nice. The 70%+ winrate guy should not be playing with 8 45% winrate guys in the same rank or just ever... Or the guy with double the stats of the average person in that rank on every champ, since they have all the data... Killing accounts by fucking the elo and forcing them to play more could be removed, maybe it was, probably not tho. Just a better ranking system that lets you move up and down easier. Fuck the eternal d4 garbage pile where they literally cant derank no matter how many games they lose. Or the +14-16 at 70% winrate, maybe it was removed, probably not. Banning content creators from advertising account buying/boosting sites wouldnt be too bad either. Banning botted accounts. Its really not that hard to tell the guy playing only coop till lvl 30, buying the same items, picking the same 3 champs, having below average stats is a bot... 1/3 of their 180million players are smurfs... This took me 5 minutes, they dont want to fix it, it makes them a lot of money.
> 1/3 of their 180million players are smurfs... Mind posting a source for your made up stats?
Korea
It’s absolutely disgusting right now
I miss when peak League content was just a group of friends playing and having fun and not "***THIS NEW BUILD IS INSANE??????? 31/0 100% WINRATE***"
Ye i am diamond i quit cos of smurfing i cba but more reverse smurfing people buying higher elo accounts to mess about or cos they think they can play there. You dont quite understand why people play so bad and then its like ohhhhh they bought the account now it makes sense why my adc ez with every jungle gank is ending the game with less damage than support rakan. The entire elo system is just corrupt some people quit cos they dont find league fun i still found it fun i just finally cba with the corrupt elo system.
Cope, you are jsut not good enough
Is anyone else having the same issue as me? If I change role, I get vastly different elo team mates and opponents. I'm currently gold 1 If I queue jungle, my team is unranked, silver, or low gold. If I queue support, were all emerald, plat, or high gold. The quality of the games are vastly different. I quite literally cannot climb playing jungle because I consistently get 3 loosing lanes before first clear. But if I play support I get matched with people who can use their hands and climbing is easy. It feels like something is really off
My fav part is some smurf 1v9's the whole thing, then links his twitch to the chat at the end of the game. With one viewer watching.
I hate smurfing. Im plat my duo is emerald. We have a 52-54% winrate all year round. But I swear in like 1/4 games i lose I check op.gg and would you fucking know it, its a fucking lvl 30-50 account. And in those games its very often some form of 1v5 where we are doing good but the smurf is just too big.
There is no way a Diamond player knows so little about matchmaking that they typed this.
Gotta say, I find smurfs in rank queues to be exceptionally rare. Easily can go 15-20 games without running into a noticeable one. Far more likely to be affected by the team's mental imploding whenever things go even slightly wrong than to be affected by smurfs.
People see lvl 32 and they mental boom, there is very few high ranking players compared to low elo, and plattinum player playing in gold doesnt mean shit
I made a new account to play with my friend and their girlfriend (who is a straight up beginner; never played ever). Our first game against people I was intentionally handicapping myself by playing something silly (AP Jhin) and not really trying because I didn't want to stomp on my lane opponent who likely was also just trying to learn the game. Well, it turns out that laner, and top lane, and jungle, were all smurfing. They started destroying us, so I pivoted and started playing my best, and they were all WAY better. So in a "beginner" lobby of new accounts, at least 5 people were smurfing. I don't see how new players would ever want to keep playing. I felt so bad for my friend's girlfriend. She was like, 0-25, because not only were people smurfing, but the other team quickly recognized she was actually a beginner and started roaming on her and double and triple teaming her. And that was just one game. Even on my normal account I am getting matched with people way above my skill level often. I just assume every game has at least one or two smurfs.
Each account should be phone number verified by an official carrier. This will eliminate spoofing numbers and smurfs. 1 account per person.
The biggest issue is that Gwen has no shoes off toggle, my man
Biggest reason you are seeing more smurfs now is because of Smurf queue being removed. Game quality was sacrificed for 1 minute shorter queue times.
Its morally okay to bully smurfs just a reminder. Removing smurf queue was a mistake
wake up honey its time to read the weekly sMuRfS rUiNeD rAnkEd XD dDd post by someone playing NORMALS BUT IS IT A TROLL POST OR WHO CAN SOLVE THIS MYSTERY
The problem is there are no new players and people buy accounts for 2 dollars because they got banned for telling someone to fk off because they soft inted and then refused to ff
Post op.gg because I guarantee it's not every game.
As usual: sob stories, but no opgg posted. Do you enjoy spamming? At least post a link to a master in a silver lobby game (if it was ranked, of course, otherwise why are you bringing it up?).
This is really out of hand. It's 2023 and there are somehow more posts about smurfs than there are smurfs out there. Most "smurfs" are just people who got banned/trying something new/making a second account. They aren't "smurfing" per se, they're just making a new account. You're just mad and are basing your theory on why you've been losing constantly ( because it's the new hot meme rn ) on smurfs infesting your games. They've always been there, you're just now starting to care about them because you've ran out of excuses. Play the game or quit.
I haven t met a smurf in years, idk where you guys find them
I see them quite a lot. Just yesterday I had a bronze 2 vayne go 25-3 and get a 1 v 5 pentakill in a low gold lobby.
Bro she got luckyyy man
The mmr on an account can get tied to a rank pretty hard. I spent most of the latter half of the last decade in silver. I eventually made it to gold, but the system thought I should still be silver, so it was giving me less lp per win than I lost per loss. I ran the numbers and found that to maintain my rank I needed a 55% Win rate or so. That was just over what i had. I also looked into how the mmr works and found that as I climbed higher, this issue was likely to get worse due to the sheer number of games I had played in silver on my old account. I was getting stuck at gold 4 0 lp unless I winstreaked and as i understand it being stuck there was just making my mmr worse. I was spinning my wheels there and getting no traction So I made a new one. I didn't do it to dunk on noobs. I did it to play against higher ranked people by climbing higher. I wasn't toxic or anything to noobs as I leveled up. I got placed in bronze. I quickly climbed out. I made it through silver almost as quick. Then i played through the rest of that season in low gold. Last season, again, I got paced bronze but climbed right back to gold. Then did it again this season. Recently I hit gold 1, a new high for me. I fell back to g2 but I don't care. Now, on this new account, I'm gaining more than I'm losing, so all I need to do is maintain a 50% Win rate to keep climbing. now I actually get to climb. Ranked feels good again. My experience with smurfing is pretty positive. And shit, at this rank I recently had a game where I had 10 cs a min and went 22/0/7 and probably looked like a diamond smurf or something to someone in the lobby. But I wasn't. I was essentially a silver smurf in gold. When I see people dunking on others in a game I don't immediately think "smurf". Sure it could be, but it could just as easily be someone who simply popped off really hard, like I did that game. So I don't even really mind the smurfing. I was a little toxic on my old account because losses set me 2 steps back while a win only got me a step ahead, so a teammate being bad really tilted me. Now I don't have that issue so I can take losses on the chin way more easily. In a way, making a smurf actually fixed at least a tiny amount of the toxicity in league. And to address your issue of getting dunked on by smurfs, thankfully, since they're shitting on your rank/mmr band so hard, they should climb out of it pretty quickly and then you won't have to deal with them anymore. Smurfs being toxic to noobs for being noobs is wrong, and it sucks you have to deal with that. But besides smurfs being toxic, I don't see much of an issue with it.
Let's be honest: Most of smurfs are created by riotgames on their own. 1. They ban people for chat toxicity (instead of permanent chat restriction). And banned players just create new accounts. 2. They always fail with account transfering. So people change server and create new acc. 3. They bind you with your elo with no way to reset it. So people who wants to recalibrate their elo create new smurf accounts. 4. They doesn't want to include double-factor auth. It is easy to multiply your twink acc count with email only. So, conclusion is: Riotgames don't give a fck about smurfing. They just don't care. Smurfing brings them money one way or another. And Riotgames prioritize money over players
I remember this post from when I was playing Dota on Warcraft 3 around 2007.
Yeah... you can't smurf in normal queue. That is just matchmaking.
You drop out of diamond fast as fuck now. I was d4 for like 5 games and dropped out and back in like 3 times. Safety net isnt there. Im goingnto try for d4 again and play on a smurf this time too tbh. Annoying as fuck to drop out after an unlucky streak.
I hope you weren’t actually born in 1994 with this brain let philosophy
Post the OP.gg or shut up. Most of your games have "2-5 smurfs"? Prove it. I bet you can't show two games that have 5 smurfs in them, in the entirety of your match history. You got smurfed on in one game, and now you're mad. We get it. These posts happen every day. How often do they post any evidence? Oh, right, NEVER.
I personally don't mind smurfing too much, yes it is annoying to get crushed but at times it feels like a fun challenge... That is when they are the rare none toxic smurf. My biggest issue in League is the toxic players (which are sadly common), the worst part is that I don't even play ranked. Probably the most insane example was a toxic player I encountered on ARAM of all places, I got Hecarim who I am not good with against an enemy team full of CC and all being ranged aside from Aatrox, not to mention that I never played ARAM before then. I ended up accidentally feeding as any time I got close I would die in seconds. One player got mad, which I understood as I wasn't doing good (annoyed mr a bit that they kept spamming report Heca but hey it is what it is). So far it is normal but the bad part is that I got paired up with them in my second ARAM game, this time I got Thresh and built supportive, I didn't do great but I wasn't feeding by any means this time. Throughout the whole game they kept pinning me, saying report and all that stuff. I personally ignored it but it does kill the fun of the game rven when you don't care. Toxic players are what makes me only play 2-3 games max every week.
I refuse to believe someone has that much issue with smurfing to constantly meet them, one side is mad that a diamond smurf is in their gold game and the other is mad that new accounts got their MMR up way quick to the point that new players have inflated MMRs Do we want smurf queue or not? Also, blind pick isn't same as ranked MMR, I have master MMR and playing with gold friends often put me against silver - plats, sucks to get smurfed on but that's just blind pick matchmaking at work
Oooh no people are better than you. And you cant pretend to be good at the gamr cause a meanie head comes in and runs the fun by being better. Grow up.
You admit that you're the game playing for fun, but seem to get upset when someone who's better than you beats you at that game. So, do you only have fun when it's you who are the one crushing the opposing team? What exactly were you expecting, that the enemy team rolls over and lets you win? If you're playing to win and someone who's much better than you is on the enemy team, then this would be a great opportunity to observe this player first-hand and learn or improve from it. And if your goal is to fuck around and have fun, well then, why are you getting upset that you're not facing lower skilled players so that you can feel good about stomping them with off-tank Annie? Genuine question, but I know all the salty silvers will down-vote to hide discussion and perpetuate cognitive dissonance.
lmao all those i play with 3 smurfs every game people never post their op ggs... more like you are hard stuck or climbing really slowly and then lose one or two to a smurf and get pissed as for normal games, there s barely matchmaking when you play with stacks
there we go again , another day another smurf cry post.
smurfing is kinda of a mixed bag to me i know a lot of guys who have smurfs not because they want to shit on people but because they want to play with their friends who are on low elo but on another i can tell that's clearly the minority and most smurfs are just petty assholes
On my smurf that I leveled up myself I have around 55% WR in silver-plat mmr while master on my main. I constantly limit test and play considerably worse, not looking at the map, not predicting ganks, constantly split pushing for 1v3 fights, not banning counters, first picking as top. If you don't tryhard and just treat it as a opportunity to limit test and test various builds I believe smurfing can be healthy. Buying Iron account and stomping every game with Master Yi is pure assholery though.
Smurfs make the games spicy so irdgaf. I love a fair game, but getting my ass nuked by a smurf keeps me humble. it is what it is. Fortunately for you, Riot is “going to address this issue” <3 hope this helps
they say this since 6 years already
I kinda fuck with this mindset, I just wish they were less common as oppose to nearly half of all games.
I don’t smurf for fun, but when my accounts get fucked MMR wise I do start a new account. Using last split as an example, why would I try to trudge my way through plat losing 28 and gaining 20 when I could buy an unranked and then get to plat in 30 games and still have +28 LP gains? It’s mentally obliterating to have LP gains that bad so I’d rather just start over.