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Any chance Riot will formally address smurfs?

ekimekimekim·10/4/2015, 7:56:40 AM·2 votes·460 views

Playing against someone of similar skill level makes for good games, playing against people who outclass you by a lot makes for a poor experience. For example in ranked (and else where) you don't match Diamonds against Silvers because the Silvers get destroyed, and yet this is exactly what a smurf account does. It take a player of very high skill level and places them against players with much lower skill level because that player gamed the system and pretends to be someone else. In ranked, it destroys the system and leads to both elo boosting as well as costing honest players a lot of their time and LP (time being the most valuable thing most players have). In non ranked games, it leads to frustration and worse.

I have a number of friends I'm trying to get to join me in LOL from other games, and it seems like every time I talk them into playing we get matched against a smurf who single-handedly carries the game with the highskill cap outplay champs. The new players and team get crushed bad, LOL gets a bad rap, and it that it takes me months to talk them into playing again.

For the life of me, I can't think of one positive aspect that comes from having a highlevel player pretend to be a low level player (and who crushes games) brings to the community. Such a player is by their intention is working around the matching the system after all. It also seems to me the smurf accounts are easily detected through automated means, or at the very least could be reported, so the question is why are they not addressed by Riot (at the very least for Ranked, but ideally everywhere)? What am I missing here? Are there any positive aspects for the community in having player pretend to be lessor players via an alternate account?

1 Comments

Dediguise10/4/2015, 12:19:15 PM2 votes

Those are only some of the reasons that Smurf accounts are toxic to the game and I would agree that the community itself doesn't benefit much from their existence. The are a source of revenue for riot though, which is part of the problem.

I don't like defending smurfs. But for streamers their are advantages to having multiple accounts. And while riot does permaban accounts they don't forbid toxic players from starting all over with new accounts. This is part of the problem. Additionally Becoming a challenger player on one champion does not make you a challenger player on every champion, and there is a benefit to having an unranked smurf that you use for scrim matches with champs you are unfamiliar with.

There are elegant solutions to this issue.

I don't think your rank should appear in normal games. That would prevent people from knowing how "skilled" you are and from intentionally ruining your game. Hard resetting everyone's ELO would cause players who normally place in gold to start at the bottom of the ladder again, giving them less reason to want to climb it with their smurf accounts.

But I doubt that will happen.