This is such a great change. I wish league of legends would do the same. In lol it feels like more players have smurf accounts than not. Smurfs contribute nothing to the games and only ruin the experience for the other 9 players.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Playing in plat / emerald elo feels like each game is a complete landslide in favor of one team. I wonder if banning Smurf accounts would fix this issue and make games more fun
That's terrible! We have to tell Papa Smurf, Gargamel must be behind this!
Your comment is really smurfy! I was just thinking, "This type of account should be called a Gargamel account, not a Smurf account. Smurfs are nice. Gargamel is the bad one."
That'll scare the smurf out of these mother smurfers
Wish they did this in Rocket League. I stopped playing because of all the smurfs. Shits annoying.
How exactly does smurfing work? I don't play Dota and the description on the page doesn't really help me understand
You're an experienced player but create a new account to get matched against noobs. Since the game is free, there's no cost to doing so.
In dota, there is a cost: you have to play 100 hours of unranked before you can play ranked. Honestly, because of this, while smurfing obviously still happens rarely, I don't think I've seen any smurfs in my last 50 games of ranked, which is at least 30 hours of gameplay. I would assume you see more smurfs in unranked games, but since I'm not playing those, I don't see them.
Ahh thanks, that does sound really shitty to do.
You still need a valid phone number to play ranked games, so there is some limitation.
Well yeah, but you can get a verification number for less than half a dollar usually if you know where to look.
Smurfing is when a player has a secondary account so they can play against/with lower ranked players. Imagine a chess grand master putting on a disguise and going to a beginners chess tournament
On chess.com smurfing is actually not permitted, but chess grandmaster can play on special accounts to do fun challenges and all of the elo is refunded to the players that they beat.
Smurfing is when you play Ranked ladder on an alt-account in a much lower skill bracket with the intention to curb stomp lesser-skilled players.
It's a very big issue in any competitive multiplayer game, especially direct competitors of DOTA 2 like League of Legends and SMITE. Valve may just be the first company to start actively banning smurfs.
Basically someone with a high matchmaking rating creates a brand new Steam account and installs the game, pretending to be a new player. They then proceed to stomp on the actual new players and just be generally as toxic as possible. After all, if that account gets banned, they can always make a new one.
Does this effectively mean that making a new account for any other reason is effectively against the rules in these kinds of game, because you'd start at the bottom rank, or is there some way of telling between an experienced player just making an alt or new account, and one specifically doing it for facing low ranked players?
If you play on a separate account specifically to play in a different skill range, then that would be smurfing. But if you play through the calibration games on that account to your best ability, then it should place you roughly where your other account would be within a handful of games.
Smurfing is knowingly and deliberately playing at the incorrect skill-level/mmr/elo. Most times, people will create or buy a separate account that somehow has a lower mmr/elo attached to it, to do this. You can 'play bad' or 'throw the game' for 50 games in a row and your rating will tank a lot, so that's a bummer to encounter as your new teammate randomly... Then this player can win a lot of games in a row playing as 'themselves' and completely stomp games all the way back to their 'true' mmr. Does that help explain it?
Yep I understand now! Thanks for the explanation. I don't get how that'd be fun unless the person just enjoys being an asshole...
This seems like a reasonable approach but the smurfs have already ruined all the games prior to being banned. I wonder how difficult it is to prevent smurfing altogether? Doesn't seem like it'd be easy at all.
For Korea and China, probably quite easy.
Both regions require you to register for the game using a residential ID due to strict internet laws in those regions. China's are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you'd see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
As for the West, the only companies from my experience that genuinely ask for personal details beyond a username, email address and password are those that host shoddy Korean MMO's and have notoriously bad internet security. Valve have tried to address smurfing in the past by requiring accounts to register phone numbers before they can play Ranked, but this can easily be bypassed with cheap burner phones and other services.
China's are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you'd see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
Got any resources to back this up? I have a hard time imagining a culture where cheating is the norm alongside one that ruins your life if caught cheating. One of these things can't be true.
Doesn't China literally have a social credit score system?
maybe ban the main account for a period? like first offense, 1 month
By what metrics do they use to even tell a player is a smurf to be able to take action against them?
On top of my head (uneducated guess) :
- multiple accounts regularly logging in through a single IP
- day/time login patterns
- same champion pools
- consistently stomps games
- frequent higher than average KDA
- frequent higher than average CS/min
- higher than rank level winrate
- higher than rank level MMR
These items taken individually don't tell much. But when cross-referenced with other data, I'm pretty sure it becomes clear really fast when someone is smurfing.
don't forget fun stuff like:
mouse and keyboard config
audio and visual config
and the ability of the creating and looking into a log file in the gamr folder
Meanwhile, smurfs in CSGO/CS2