Boards›Player Behavior

League's Problem with Smurfing

Trailsmix·10/23/2018, 7:43:59 PM·4 votes·2,374 views

This is just something I want to hear from other people who play this game and start a discussion. Smurfing is generally seen as a bad move by a great deal of people. Riot (to my knowledge) haven't done anything substantial to make smurfing less fun. While I don't know the best solution, I do believe smurfing is at some level, a form of trolling if it is a challenger against a Diamond, or a Diamond against a Silver. There are grand gaps between these groups and while riot has tried to fix boosting(a system that is still available if you hire the right people and know what the hell you are doing), smurfing is still a large issue, and the only solution I know is making the shorter queue times irrelevant(I.E. if someone is Challenger and smurf in Diamond, they get a Challenger queue time and if it is a Diamond in Silver they get a Diamond queue time). If Riot doesn't want to do anything to fix this issue, then they can continue to tick off thousands of their players. I look forward to starting some level of discussion with this.

10 Comments

Jacob10/23/2018, 7:54:49 PM3 votes

While I agree that smurfing is annoying, as long as it's impartial and not boosting/wintrading, I don't think it should be punished.
You'll hear it a thousand times that the few games that you lose because of a smurf won't matter in the end if you play enough games and it's true.
It sucks; I agree but just keep going my dude.

Trailsmix10/23/2018, 7:46:13 PM1 votes

I'm fine with multiple accounts, due to the banning of accounts unfairly.

AeroWaffle10/23/2018, 8:08:15 PM1 votes

Riot tries to match smurfs with other smurfs as it is. But on a large scale there's not much Riot can do to determine precise skill levels from accounts that have very few games played.

On an individual level, sure. They can research to see what IP the smurf is coming from and try to match the smurf to another account coming from the same IP's depending on how many accounts are playing from those external IP. Then try to judge if it's coming from the same person based on habits and champion choices.

But that level of investigation is not sustainable over the large-scale.

Kei14310/23/2018, 11:03:10 PM1 votes

Smurfing is more common at the end of season.

Either the good players are doing with their bad friends, or the good players are already done with their ranked goals and are logging onto their smurfs to just fk around.

RikudoAvenger10/24/2018, 4:01:09 AM1 votes

Do you complain when a smurf is on your team and gets you a win?

ModPeriscope4/25/2019, 5:22:48 AM1 votes

What is dead may never die...is something no one ever said about old threads. Since this thread's been White Walker'd, I'm locking it (due to it's old age).

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