Is smurfing for the purpose of carrying a friend Boosting?

The Ecdysiast·Nov 9, 2015·2 votes·1,584 views

I just want to clear this up. It is, right? I don't mean having a smurf account so that you can play with people in Normals and not have them get stomped by people in your rank. That's fair and okay.

I mean making the account for the explicit purpose of using it to carry a low-ranked friend in Duo Queue in order to get them the season rewards.

You can't queue up with someone more than one tier below you in order to keep the game fair. It's not any different if that same player is on a different account.

11 Comments

Icestar1186Nov 9, 20153 votes

Yes it is.

EndlessSorcererNov 9, 20151 votes

I don't believe so.

I think it only counts as boosting if you are actually playing on their account.

Though I may be wrong. I've never actually bothered to look into the rules very closely.

The EcdysiastNov 9, 20151 votes

The rules don't mention anything about this. But the rules against boosting are there to keep the game fair, are they not? I'd think the same principles should apply if you're Diamond and make an account to guarantee wins against Bronze and Silver players.

LegendaryLemurNov 9, 20151 votes

No that's allowed.

{quoted}

Nah, you're cool. Duoing with a friend is something we allow, even if they were the one doing the carrying. As long as you played on your own account you have nothing to worry about.

The EcdysiastNov 9, 20152 votes

I know it's allowed, but it shouldn't be.

It's still boosting if you're going against the tier restriction to carry a player.

LegendaryLemurNov 9, 20151 votes

{quoted}

I just want to clear this up. It is, right?

Oh okay, for some reason i thought you were asking :p

AloxNov 9, 20152 votes

{quoted}

No that's allowed.

This is the reason people have been calling for no Duo queue in ranked, if you want to play with friends and have fun that's what normals are for. If you are duo queueing in ranked with someone lower tier than you then you are 95% boosting players. I mean you could argue "thats just only a small portion of your games" but honestly this past month I've seen nothing but Silver 3-1s duo queueing with Bronze 5-1 in majority of my games either of them with 60-70% win rates if that doesn't sound a red flag I don't know what does.

Now for next season lets just make the problem worse by allowing a booster to queue with multiple players save the booster time and double-quadruple the money they make from boosting.

LegendaryLemurNov 9, 20151 votes

I'm not really sure what the solution is. It's impractical to disallow smurfs entirely (they can just use a proxy server so how do you identify them?), so what rule can you make that you can enforce?

I hear what you are saying about allowing larger groups potentially exacerbating the problem, but if it's become such a bugaboo that we are restructuring our whole matchmaking around it, i feel like we should try to find creative solutions to address the root cause (the boosting itself).

Or just admit defeat, give in to the fact that anything but 5s is going to be ... how you say... a quagmire within a quagmire?

AloxNov 9, 20151 votes

They say they are already doing "something" by catching people that are Boosting accounts via Logging into someone account and playing on it. Honestly I'm not sure since they don't give us numbers.

The only way left for people to boost "legally" is via Duo queue if you are lucky to have a friend that is higher queue you can duo with him and see if he can carry you up to where you want. There are even sites you can go on and pay a booster to duo with you on a smurf and get you to where you want. I checked last night, and for me It would cost me around $70 to get me to gold V if I wanted to pay for it.

Not only that it would try to even things up by making the Duo Queue's team harder than usual, this is fine for those two but the Three Solo Queue players that are chosen to fill out the team are going to be Victimized in that game. You'll most likely be laning against a player that is higher division than you because the matchmaking system boosts your team MMR to make up for a Duo Queue's advantages. If you loose your lane (which is likely since they are all going to be tougher) you're going to get flamed by your duo queue, worse if your Duo really doesn't belong in your division he's gonna get wrecked, feed, and be dead weight.

Duo Queuing the system as is now is fair for the DUO QUEUE ONLY, and it victimizes the 3 solo players that are forced to play with them. During the past month people are looking for any way to get to Gold V, litterally every game each team has a Silver/Bronze duo queue with a smurf boosting someone to Gold V. In these games it is not about you and if you can carry, it's about who's Duo Queue is better or who's smurf is better because the more skilled duo queue is going to carry and you as the player have little to no influence in the outcome of the game. You're basically forced to stand back and pray.

The EcdysiastNov 10, 20151 votes

I think that while the incoming changes are a step in the right direction, they're still wrong.

There shouldn't BE a solo rank at all. This is a team game. You don't see solo players in the LCS getting wins based on individual performance.

LegendaryLemurNov 10, 20151 votes

That makes a lot of sense, but at the same time i think the game would lose some players if it just cut out solo queue. There are a lot of players who just don't have the time and/or inclination to put together a full team, but who still like being graded/ranked/evaluated.

For myself, the only real point i see in solo queue is to try to get a general idea of my skill level for when i'm looking for teammates for 5s (even if it isn't a very good measurement since some of the most important skills (high level team coordination) are ignored, it's better than nothing i think).