Well, that was a long response.
Which might mean either that you wanted to get everything out because you don't want to return to this conversation, or that you'd like to start a debate on it. If it's the former I won't expect a response, if it's the latter I will oblige you, and if you're somewhere in the middle take your pick.
I'm going to number my paragraphs to match yours to keep track of what I'm replying to, instead of trying to reply to the whole thing at once.
1&3. Boredom is a nuisance, and self-challenge is great, but the intentions of the smurf do not change what the action they're taking is. THAT is looking at it objectively. On their way back up on their new account, they are noob stomping. It doesn't have to be their intention, it's still what they're doing. The player did it for a fun challenge, the streamers did it for that and for views, and some trolls blatantly do it out of desire to noob-stomp. Intentions are great and all, and personally I actually wish the worlds legal systems factored them into judgments more, but they only mean so much, and the action taken is still the same.
Sometimes good people do bad things for good reasons. This would be a small example of that.
- Whether it's on a new account or ones original, one's mmr will reach the same value. On the new account or old, one will end up earning/losing the same LP per win/loss in a given rank. It may take a bit longer to rank up, as you wait for your LP gains to return to normal, but you will rank up the same either way. Anything one might do on their second account, they could have done on their first, and they could have done it without leveling up again.
That's for your given premise to starting fresh, to respond to the words "Starting Fresh" themselves without the specific sub-reasoning you provided: There actually is one reason I currently know of that I consider a valid reason for starting anew, and per this reason I have started over in games myself, both single and multiplayer (will stick to multiplayer for the purposes of this discussion of course). The reason is simply having not played for a long enough time. Now of course that raises the question of how long you should have been gone before resetting yourself. I look at it as a factor of how much knowledge and skill decay you may have had. It would also vary with the person, so I couldn't give you a value. Apparently for me it's over a year, for some people it might not be.
For all it's potential skill difference, LoL isn't particularly complicated in it's mechanics. When I came back after that year I mentioned before, I just did some bot matches to check up on basic mechanics and get started relearning champions; and I really did consider starting over, but I felt the game was simple enough it wouldn't take 30 levels to get back into. If you go into my post history you'll actually see a thread upon return asking people for opinions about whether or not there should be level &/or elo/mmr decay if one is gone long enough. I was one of the people who voted yes, because just as I didn't want new players to have to play against me if I started over, I didn't want the people actually at the elo/mmr I had when I left to have to play with me. There are other, more complicated games, that I reset myself after only a few months gone. It's all relative to the game in that respect.
- Connects back my my second paragraph responding to your second one. There's nothing wrong with reacquiring everything, and it is indeed one of the premises to my restarting a game after being gone to long. For relearning a game you left, or if you simply really enjoying the feeling of unlocking stuff, the ability to reset and not have everything is great. All I meant in my original reply to your original comment was firstly that for most (I imagine) people it's a downside, and that if you haven't unlearned the game, then there isn't really a point to having to unlock things again.
5,9&10. I wasn't putting any attitude into my words. It's not that I hate smurfing or people for doing it, I plainly don't understand it. It doesn't make sense to me. If you look into my post history you'll find a thread where I asked the community why they do it; some of the responses had reasons like yours that don't seem applicable to me, and some of them actually provided reasons that make sense and seem valid to me.
For example, one guy says he keeps an extra account to buy & test champions on before getting them on his real account. He keeps that account under level 30 for the double IP gains. I suppose that would come with the unintentional noob stomping as well, but same as you he presumably doesn't play his best. He also has accounts that exist only for the purpose of clan tags.
Anyhow I can understand how my not-understanding why most people do it might come off as hatred and bias in a forum comment that doesn't come with the social ques of speech. All I can do for that is tell you I don't hate those people, I'm not mad or anything, I just don't get it. I'm not ignoring your reasons, I just can't see them as reasons in the first place.
To use an "extreme" comparison; by telling me those thoughts are valid reasons, it's like you're telling me 2+2=5. You could be from some other universe where it does indeed equal 5, but the concept goes against my understanding of everything.
6,7,&8. I didn't say anything about Ranked or boosting. I too, was talking about normals. Do you really think a cheating action is somehow less cheating in a normal match? (I'm assuming no, but similarly to how you thought I was all hatey this would be a case of typed words seeming like they held a connotation they didn't.) I responded to your words, and did not "twist" any of them. Not sure why you assumed I was talking about Ranked when you weren't.
Your aversion to dragging higher elo players into your friends enemies team shows that you understand that it's a bad thing to make them play with better players. Which shows that you understand it bad for you to force the players on the other team to play against you. The fact that you'd use a smurf just to play with them comes off as hypocritical. That said, I can respect you restraining yourself, more so if you actively attempt to match the skill level of your opponents, which I imagine would be it's own challenge to do without over/under doing it. I'll be honest, if I made a smurf, I might not have that self-control once in a match. I'd go in intending to match my opponents, but I'd probably end up playing normally and reduce their experience. Another reason for me personally not to smurf I suppose.
I suppose if we are going to make a debate out of this, we ought to move it to my thread asking people why they smurf.
http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/sogwikTg-why-do-people-have-multiple-accounts
