Make smurfing a bannable offense

I have a friend that's new that wants to play with me... so I play on my Silver account and he's level 15, he gets destroyed... is this game fun for him? Smurfing is a double edged sword. Teaches new players / punishes new players. Saying people should be banned for smurfing? Ok, new players want to play with their friends, they start to play, get tired of playing alone and stop playing.

Durp.

If you ban smurfs, that will just force them to smurf again.

GREAT PLAN, BART.

You do realize every single player ever had to go through smurf hell when learning the game? Right? Think of it like a gentle form of demoralizing hazing that keeps you humble until you graduate from n00b status. It also never stops and smurfs are everywhere at every mmr. Another thought, Riot can use smurfing in low mmr as a metaphor for what it's like to buy an account and play with diamond players

But money.

I'm pretty sure if it weren't for smurfs to play with or watch, I'd probably have been a worse player by the time I hit 30.

1. Given the ease of creating email addresses to register a new account it simply isn't worth the resources for Riot to attempt to ban smurfs. If they "ban" smurfs without enforcement, the rule-abiding players won't create smurfs, but the jerks still will, so it will only make the situation worse.

2)If you refer-a-friend, duoing with him/her with your main account will be very discouraging to the new player as they will be paired with opponents that outclass the new player in terms of runes, masteries, and experience. Thus, if you want to duo with a friend who just started, you need to be able to make a smurf.

Now, assuming toxic smurfs are actually a problem, what Riot could do is automatically review any account below 30 that is issued a ban, elevating it to a permaban and looking for potentially linked accounts and permabanning those as well. I'm not exactly sure how you identify linked accounts though if players use fake names and emails. You can't just do IP bans, because that would unfairly treat players who have toxic roommates that share an IP address.

Allow a player to purchase a level 30 account, and I'm all for this.

The problem is on Riot's side in not allowing an existing player to purchase an account that won't impact new players, not on the smurfers themselves.

Smurfs get MMR adjusted really fairly quick, making matchmaking not so problematic. I am fairly certain that smurfs aren't against Riot's TOS or acceptable use policy. There is an option at the beginning of the game to say 'highly skilled player' although I'm not sure how much impact that has.

What would be better to control for would be bans and people navigating around the bans with smurfs, because that creates a toxic leveling experience.

Read my $0.01 post in "The Player Learning Curve is D.E.A.D"

I see smurfing as the same as John Cena getting in the ring with children.

How would you tell a smurf from someone that just picked up the game quickly? For example, someone coming from a different moba? The mechanics of LoL are not difficult to grasp even being new to the genre, so someone coming in already knowing concepts such as last hitting, situational building, counter picking, etc. will have a clear advantage over a completely new player, but they still couldn't be considered a smurf.

So, how would you tell the difference between a smurf and a new player that happens to be good?

Riot can't punish it... I agree that smurfing sucks, but there isn't anything Riot can do. Unless you have a suggestion that no one else has thought of?

You forget that smurfs can intentionally feed a couple matches to keep their MMR low.

This thread is such a QQ. We've all dealt with smurfs in one way or another and they will never make that against the rules.

More than anything the idea of people getting around punishments by smurfing really bothers me

Do you think anyone gives a fuck about new players...if you don't want smurfs just go play bots, 99% of the players are already lvl 30, they're not gonna make changes just for newbies. Never seen any champion nerfs because they're OP when nobody has runes.

I have a smurf account but I get on there to help new players and I never destroy the team or take all the kills. I enjoy helping new players so that they have a better understanding of the game. I think more smurfs should be like that and not raging at the new people cause they aren't playing like. Lvl 30. I'm a player who would rather help my team understand the game/champ they are playing better, so that they can enjoy the game. So I don't think banning smurfs who do that is right, but to ban the smurfs who rage and destroy the other team yes, because new players aren't learning anything if you take over the game.

Has the new player experience really gotten this bad? I remember when I first started out, and how I would carry all the games I played in. Mostly because all my friends were near level 30 at the time, playing with me and my level 5 experience. So I learned and adapted quickly and was soon actually able to play with my friends without feeding, and I actually started to get fed. So, evidently, when I started playing by myself with people my level, it was a breeze. I guess my starting experience was a little different than others.

I just think riot should try re-working the whole introductory process in this game, and to not tell new players to build thornmail on Ashe.

There's a difference between smurfing and verbally abusing.

Before Season 1 there weren't smurfs that I was aware of. It wasn't until the Ranking system was designed where it really took off. Because people take it more seriously. They are letting Volibear rot in the mobility age with no gap closer; the people who love him are going to make a new account where they can play him without hurting their team. A bunch of characters are in the same boat, either poorly designed kits or just outdated. People still love them and seek out ways to play them even if they aren't meta or good.

Also if you're famous (or a Riot employee), it's way too sucky for the whole game to be fawning over you the whole time. I bet nearly every Riot employee has a smurf that they play with when they are away from work.

I made a smurf a few years back to play on the EU server when NA was broken (he's long gone now). After maybe 5 games I was fighting level 30's and they were about my skill level. I don't know why you'd want to ban someone out for just being more skilled than their opponents for a handful of games.

Bump

What riot should do, is make an alternate queue for blind pick.

This one grants more exp per match and is labelled as a queue for more advanced players. There is no level limit, but overall, it's meant to be more competitive and built for players who want to level their smurfs quickly instead of beating up new players. Then after this queue is made, allow players to report smurfs in the normal queue, which if one receives too many reports, then they get forced into the advanced player queue.

no what thats ridiculous

ok lol. so basically if i want to rank up a second account itll be impossible. there is no perfect solution for us. either give us a system where we verify that we are level 30 and wish to have another which would then automatically give us another level 30 account or we play normals as level 5-30. idk what u expect people to do .

From the perspective of someone who has been in this "hell" of being a new player for just over a year, Smurfs are not near as bad as everyone claims. By level 10-12, I basically stopped seeing surfs, because most people who surf have their mmr shoot up faster than those around them and they stop getting matched with totally new players. The real issue is that there is no sort of reward system for leveling up, which makes grinding to 30 a bore. If anything, Smurfs make sure that all of us "n00bs" learn more quickly, whether through being honestly helpful (rare) or for the trial by fire that you go through (much more common). It may not be totally pleasant at first (up until level 13 I regularly finished 4+ levels behind and didn't win more than 1 in 3 games) but after that point, if you actually stick with the game, you get a head start over what I can only assume would be the alternative for if you didn't ever interact with smurfs. I have a very high win rate on SR, and often get matched with people who are still 2-3 levels above me because I learned and embraced the difficulty of dealing with Smurfs. They are as much a tool to be used and gained from as any guide. Making smurfing ban-able would be momentarily satisfying for new players who wimp out and complain about the difficulty, but long term, it would make it so that people who do not inherently pick up all the random skills that you usually learn from a smurf (like how to jungle, got that at level 3 and mained it since) hit that wall when they start ranked instead of when they are still learning everything important to the game. This is important now more than at Leagues inception because when league was new, the meta was very malleable and abstract, but now that it has had several years to develop it requires much more comprehensive knowledge to play skillfully or to enjoy it at all.

TL;DR: Smurfs are actually incredibly beneficial to the game and help newer players learn more material more quickly, and simply shift the abrupt learning curve from hitting level 30 to an abrupt learning curve starting at the very beginning, where learning is easier and faster. Take it from somebody right in the middle of this "Toxic Smurfing environment".

P.S. This is my only account and I am not just defending smurfs as a smurf.