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[Clash] Players are playing in their smurfs. Should it be punished?

AromaticSesame·12/9/2019, 6:54:28 AM·2 votes·3,853 views

Sorry about posting this discussion in player behavior, but the clash board is just filled with "looking for team" posts.

I've seen quite a few lfm/lft posts that mentioned they have smurfs on their team in the Discord channel associated with League subReddit. Today I actually met a team where their jungler is absolutely higher than his elo during the practice game. As they alleged, that's his smurf account. His resource control is great, but I can't tell which elo it belongs to (because I'm not extensively exposed to high elo competitive gameplays).

I didn't play clash with them tonight, but I am just wondering how possible it is , if any likely, that Riot is able to detect players participating in clash with their alt accounts (lower elo than the main account).

Riot's article about smurfing in clash: https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001259787

In the article it says you are playing within 2 divisions of your highest-ranked account you will be fine; however it is vague about how/whether they are enforcing the punishment if any players did not follow the guideline:

We don’t endorse it because it can ruin the game for other players, like getting stomped by a smurfing player in Bronze. Tackling it on a massive scale is difficult due to the number of players in League and the ease of account creation—in most cases we won’t proactively remove smurfs from the game.

For example, if we find a player using a smurf to intentionally hurt the game and other players, we’ll take direct action on that account, and in some cases their main account as well.

How is "hurting" defined? What about simply winning? Do you think there should be punishment to smurfs in clash even they are not intentionally hurting the game?

16 Comments

Summoner SpeII12/9/2019, 7:02:09 AM2 votes

if you had your main under honor lvl 2, and you had all your hommies playing clash, there is no way you could miss out, It ain't their fault for smurfing when riot locks clash behind honor levels, unless their main is honor lvl 2+ and they are just being a douche bag.

AromaticSesame12/9/2019, 7:00:57 AM1 votes

And for some background please also refer to this post, where players could just be playing on alts of the same rank but showing inaccurate champion pool information: https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/gG2dKwOn-clash-abusing-player-infochampion-pool-system Is this allowed according to the official guidelines, if they are borrowing accounts of the same skill level?

Beerstein12/9/2019, 7:20:14 AM1 votes

Yes. When I created teams in the past I had to boot/reject almost half applicants for being smurfs. People should stick to their mains or be punished pretty harshly. That said, performance in clash will bump your clash rating regardless of rank. But they'll just create more, they always do.

Riot said they'd enforce it but as yet I haven't seen much evidence of that. We'll see I guess. Would like to see their main stripped of all rankings and unable to play ranked for a season. It'd at least make people think twice.

Kei14312/9/2019, 12:22:38 PM1 votes

You report them so Riot can do a review and then dish out proper enforcement under their discretion.

That's what a report does, flag a review. Not start a player punishment.

AJStarhiker12/9/2019, 1:20:37 PM1 votes

I didn't try to play clash, so I'm not sure what the process was, but didn't the last 2 tests require linking a phone number? Somehow I thought I read that the phone number had to be linked to a single account and there was a 'cooldown' period if the player wanted to switch accounts for clash.

Deô2/24/2020, 5:02:49 AM1 votes

as far as i know, rito wont do anything. simple as that's i just got crushed by a team that had 100% winrate, all of them with acc at lvl 36~40 with the same summoner name with just an extra letter D at the end, and they won all the games. our game didnt eve last more than 25mints. and smurf punishment is something, yet they got with the whole event winning till the last game. [zombie-brand-clap]