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tackling the smurfing problem

Xilixer·9/3/2018, 2:02:47 AM·2 votes·2,357 views

This issue is troublesome. As there is no clear cut way of dealing with it. On one hand you can prevent lower skilled players from being stomped by people who are too good. Then on the other hand you can't play with your lower skilled friends without ruining the experience of the opposing team. I know as I've been there and I felt terribly guilty when I tried to play with my friends in Europe who haven't hit level 30 yet. Even though I haven't even climbed out of bronze (someday I'll make it) I could tell my skill placement was much higher than that of those I was playing against.

Now the problem is.....how do we enable players to play with friends without ruining the experience of the opposing team who deserves a fair chance to win? You could just play on your main account but then you have people complaining about their MMR. Which is an "ok" argument as i suppose but then what about the people who get their MMR ruined because of your smurfing?

The only way I can see for this issue being somewhat solved or rather limited, is by requiring accounts to be linked to a phone number, credit card, etc. Basically an outside piece of information that links you personally to the game. However i know a lot of players will hate this because they don't have phones, don't want personal info tied to a company or simply doesn't want to deal with the added security. (this one is probably a smurf)

Honestly though I highly doubt Riot would do that as they would then have to secure that private information and make sure nobody else could access it. If such info was breached then Riot could get sued for a healthy amount of money by literally anyone who gave them personal info but with that solution excluded just how do we handle this issue that no competitive game has been able to solve?

For those unaware, smurfing has been around since the 90s in multiplayer games. The term was created due to 2 highly skilled warcraft players creating alternate accounts due to nobody wanting to play with them because they were so good. the accounts they made were actually named after smurfs and thus this issue was created and hasn't been properly handled till this day.

So how would you handle this problem that online gaming has faced since competitive multiplayer was practically created? Does your solution only decide that smurfs shouldn't be accepted at all? Or be allowed as otherwise playing with friends with varying skill would be impossible?

(felt like brainstorming this as i really don't have anything to do at the moment while i'm taking a break from a playthrough of Tactics Ogre)

8 Comments

emarythomp29/3/2018, 2:17:05 AM2 votes

One way to handle it is for Riot to get ahold of your IP address and use that to determine if you have a high level account and are playing on a low level account instead of your high level. It's also a good way to permaban people based on their IP address so they can't just make another account and start over. Plenty of games have done IP address bans before. The only problem is there are so many programs to change your ip address nowadays and smurfing is fairly hard to punish since you could just have someone who was in silver but watched a lot of league high elo videos, practiced, and just got insanely better than their mmr and in turn make it appear as they are smurfing. Besides I don't think it's as bad because even if you lose to a smurf you still have plenty of games to climb back to where you were or higher. It's just annoying if anything haha.

Illabethe9/3/2018, 6:13:00 AM1 votes

Most Countries actually have laws against phone linked accounting due to privacy laws and protection of individual transmission. Korea used to do it, as did China and Japan, but Korea and Japan no longer do (since like 2014).

Also, the practice is something that doesn't actually have a cohesive argument with League's objectives and restrictions.

A HUGE portion of League of Legends players have been outright banned. Most of us are running Second, third, or 4th accounts sheerly out of bans. If League adopted such a policy, they'd have a lot of skins to refund because many active accounts would immediately become unusable and conflicting between which account is the legitimate account: the bans or the unbanned. Furthermore, Riot will ban more in the future, so this would be an exponentially dwindling population as a result of your suggestion.

Any suggestion (including the guy below me) that would lessen the total possible population of league would be detrimental. There's a reason Riot is being more lenient with bans and guidance and pushing much more modern skins: They need to retain their player base which is visibly shrinking on its own.

As to smurfing: Most smurfs know exactly how to behave like other players of an elo. Don't think they can track it unless someone is visibly abusing the system. Most will have really bad games with really good games on purpose. They will try to force 15 minute surrender losses that don't seem too obvious when they can. Like.... the 3/8/1 top laner who just is absent after he feeds a Garen. Sometimes that's actually a smurf de-ranking.

Furthermore, what if a Smurf is using the same phone, or same IP address as family members? What then?