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@Smurffing. Lets have a chat on gameplay impact, Veiwpoints, & Detection.

Kai Guy·2/1/2020, 11:21:29 PM·1 votes·2,164 views

Been a long time from when I last tried to run a discussion oriented thread. I'd like to request for a little community self moderation. Please take a moment to read thru comments to see if your views are represented then upvote that for visibility, comment as a reply if you wish to add on/modify something, Ideally this is going to make the most relevant comments achieve highest visibility. Disagreements are encouraged but please act in good faith as the starting point. Ideally people will use upvotes for agreement and downvotes for low quality responses rather then disagreement. I make this request to (hopefully) prevent an echo chamber where any unpopular view is scared off from participating.

I added a Poll to make it easy to express feelings with out needing to expend much energy for the general viewpoints on smurfing.

Personally I wanna chat with folks on impact and detection, Rather then put that in my OP and have my Bias impact the entire thread I will put a separate comment so it can stand or sink on its own merit.

8 Comments

Kai Guy2/1/2020, 11:42:36 PM1 votes

Personally I mostly just have issues with smurfing for Pubstomping. I think it sucks fun out of the game. Players looking to drop to a MMR they can dominate games often times require A lot of thrown matches to sink. After that if they want to remain there they have to throw matches periodically. So you see games with some one aiming for a loss and aiming for "easy" wins. At the cost of enjoyment for all other players. A teammate who wants you to fail sucks. An enemy you cant compete vs sucks. Having both being RNG just so 1 player can appease their ego? Not ideal. I am a bit harsher in my view then riot. If some one does this shit, and you can find their main. I would ban both accounts with pretty low tolerance before a Perma. I also am not a dev who has to worry about losing playerbase and I don't have the numbers on hand to really determine how frequent an issue pubstomp smurfing looks to be.

I am not sold on the "to learn"... you got normal games, you got the ability to play casually and not have a Try hard rating. Any game is a learning experience, the fear of underperforming on a new role or champion should not be so high that you need to make a fresh account imo. Worst case run a few AI games first to get the kit down. There's plenty of options that I just don't see any valid reason to require a "training" account unless you have tryharded 24/7.

So, Detection. Given roles and champion differences. I think statistical systems are a bit hard if not impossible to make. Escalations to subjective human review look like the fastest way to handle accounts. When its only automation for W/L then its pretty easy to manipulate in a competitive environment as any one can play for a loss. Most games are not designed to be played with the intent to lose, especially team games. An example this 149-0 game of soccer

Is there any other way to identify smurfs from the statistical noise? I think... yes? I don't have all the data required to say at max confidence its usable. Gold generation is one of the more impactful parts of a MOBA. The advantages made for a team by a single player and the disadvantage a player should stand out fairly clearly when you start applying the context of their impact. Still working out if its realistically viable. The best metric I came up with so far when trying to find something to use as other stats skew pretty dramatically. The nice thing about identification algorithms is they don't need to be used for MM so they can work on a champion to champion biases after lobbies are made. Love to have a chat with some one on this topic if they wanna flesh out issues or implementation.

Humb1e Rumb1e2/2/2020, 12:07:15 AM1 votes

Imo, in long run, their impact is low, at least for me, I never had real problem with them(maybe bcs gold/enter elo for new acc isnt my main elo?). I would say that afking, giving up, talking has much bigger impact.

Now playing vs smurf feels absolutely disgusting and demotivating, when you see "Kata is my hoe" lvl32 acc, you know you are probably going to lose 20+ mins. Ppl who are/was for smurfing, are/was most likely looking at it from smurfs perspective, bcs from the other side, it's just unfun, dreadful experience.

Many smurfs I encountered also don't have connection to their acc, why would they, they can just create new/hop on other. So they might go 0/2 and just bey bey. Or they will start shittalking everyone with classic "you are hardstvck", "dont talk to me p1at scrvb" etc.

Many ppl are using the "learn from them" argument, which is imo bullshit. You won't learn from LeBron destroying middle schoolers, he would have to stop and explain what he is doing in order to teach them.

I personally use smurf acc to learn(wish I could make it out of plat with my jngle acc...), I used flex for that before, but ppl don't take it seriously enough for me to learn it completely and dia isn't really place where I would feel comfortable.

I would like to have discussion with you about detection, but I'm not really a smart/math guy. I can hardly imagine system that wouldn't be foolable by softinting, which is in current system undetectable, at least as far as my personal testing went.

I wish Riot took it more seriously, since it is making experience worse.

WoonStruck2/2/2020, 12:10:02 AM1 votes

I do not believe smurfing has a large enough of an impact to be an issue, and the large majority of the issues it can cause are not directly because of smurfing, but because of riots matchmaking/placements and player behavior systems, with which minor improvements would drastically improve gameplay experience for everyone.

The extremely large majority of smurfs are plat or below, thus are not much better than their initial MMR if they're better at all (they're likely not).

This is speaking of it in a non-malicious context, not permabanned players, or people just wanting to stomp games.

Players intentionally tanking their mmr, being generally rude, or other misconduct should be better addressed by Riot in general.