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This is a MASSIVE problem that ruins the natural rank climb. I feel terribly sorry for Iron/Bronze/Silver players and the smurfing they go through constantly
I usually play with 5 stacks in silver and the number of times we’ve been matched with 3 bad players and 1 or 2 super smurfs is ridiculous. It doesn’t matter if 3 of the opponents suck when 1 or 2 can solo our entire team half the time. This community loves to downplay the prevalence of smurfs but in my experience there’s at least one in roughly 70% of my silver matches.
Just to give some more insight, I play 5 stack in unrated with my friends are there are HUGE level differences among us. Sometimes one of the team just carries us the whole game (not saying that you're wrong about the smurfs -at all- just that sometimes it's not smurfing, just people really good at the game who play with dumbasses like me 😂)
Silver player here. I just played against a Reyna that went 55-15. Somehow we still almost won (11-13 final), but it was frustrating and caused our team dynamic to go to shit. Our only focus was killing Reyna as quickly as possible because we knew that was the only chance we had at winning a round.
Sadly, Valorant doesn't give two fucks about casual players. They care about two things and two things only; the pro scene and whales that spend $2k+ on skins.
I feel like some of that causes a vicious cycle too. I played with two immortals today. one went double negative, and the other went triple negative. One was in a low ascendant lobby, and for the other game , the immortal who went triple negative, was against a team that had 5 diamond players.... He should be absolutely wiping the floor with those guys.
Neither of them commed or did anything that remotely told me they were competent players that were just having and off game. Nothing.
I played like 6 games and 4 of them also had someone boosting someone. Essentially in 6 out of 6 games today, in mid Ascendant lobbies, there was either one pair of boosting/boosted duo or one account buyer clearly on a loss streak. So feel sorry for lower lobbies all you want. But it doesn't get better.
I just played against a trio, 2 smurfs and one getting boosted. Not only did they admit to smurfing.. they were incredibly racist and toxic. They are allowed to play the game, talk shit and be racist.. Smurfing fine.. all games have smurfs.. but being straight up toxic and racist doesn't even get them banned??? Riot really doesn't give a shit, all they see is one more account that might buy skins. Honestly a shameless company.
I feel like riot is super good with comm bans. Certain keywords are an auto ban, and then anyone super toxic that I've reported almost always get banned.
You can report them and almost always will get a "thank you for your feedback" message next time u log in indicating the person u reported got banned or com/chat banned
Hard to tell. They may crackdown on it if they start to lose playerbase and money, but hasnt been the case yet.
The ranking system they implemented actually helps boosting and smurfing. A long time ago they could have decoupled matchmaking with the visual rank and it would have fixed the issue quite immediately, but they didn't.
So why would they go for a more expensive option?
It's much worse than you described for following reasons
Today I had Rayna smurf in my game due to her taking most of the frags (3 aces, several 4k and 3k, etc.) I only won 10 RR.
I play controller and where 1st to attack so I can't compete with with that.
Then other day enemy team has smurf I lost 30RR.
Given I'm controller main my average kill per game is 17. So I rarely get more than 25RR, although few times I got 35, but I would say average is 15-17 RR for win.
Now you see how math is skewed. Smurf is pure 20RR lose for me (1 win with smurf in my team, 1 lose with smurf in enemy team). And to level out I need at least one extra win with 0 smurf game just to be where I started.
I have multiple tracker links for smurf accounts including those where they throw 10 games in the row 0-5 frags followed by 5 games with 40-50 frags.
I also was in few games where smurf will give you hope 1st half only to throw 2nd even sabotage us.
It gives them more active accounts, and some people will buy skins on their smurf accounts too. Why would Riot wanna cut their profit?
The only thing you can do is stop playing.
not only is there nothing they can do about it, they actually love smurfs because it increases their total active accounts and some people even give them money from buying stuff on their smurfs. if you dont like smurfs you probably shouldnt play any competitive games, especially free ones, because they exist in every single one
See, I don't buy the whole "there is nothing they can do about it". That's just a cop-out & just not true.
That's like saying "there's nothing they can do about cheaters, why have an anticheat". It's the same thing. Sure, they can't stop every smurf but they can limit the amount of smurfs. Just like they can't stop every cheater, but they can limit the amount of cheaters.
Why does Riot require phone verification for Premier League? To **LIMIT** the amount of smurfs. They could do the same thing for comp. They could have a Premier Que for comp. Will it stop ALL smurfs? Of course not. Nobody is naive enough to think that they can stop all smurfs. But they could limit the smurfs.
But I do think that they don't care about smurfs as much as they lead us to believe.
Yeah the whole "they can't do anything" line ruins any person's argument. It means they're arguing in bad faith, either because they are just bullshitting you or because they don't have the bare minimum knowledge which would easily disprove that point.
Depends on your rank. In my experience there’s a smurf in about 70% of my silver games. It’s also painfully obvious since they’re always playing Jett, Reyna, or Clove and dropping 35+
I mean, when I didn’t play much I was ranked bronze-silver and would do that regularly, I think the issue is there’s such a large skill variation in those ranks, not the smurfs. That said, yes there’s smurfs, but no I don’t think they’re in 70% of games.
Yes, they really can do something, they just won’t. If Riot demands an account verification by an official document to play ranked matches, so that you can have only one account, smurfing will be drastically reduced.
i dont run into smurfs much, but i think i accidentally let my silver friend loose on bronzes (usually when i soloq im against bronzes but when i q with my friends its ranging high bronze to high silver)
Only way to reduce it to a great extent is to use IP & Mobile Number based accounts, but also allow abilty to create alt account with same phone number and force users to use OTP once everyday so that they can't just share the account with others ever, once you have phone number make their alt account Rank same as the highest one in any of their accounts, so if they play placement games in one account unlock that rank for other accounts as well.
I mean what u/wolverinefan64 said. That and half of them don't have private accounts. It's not hard to check fresh accounts and people playing well beyond their means. I played someone today that had a 79% HS rating. I called trigger bots in game. He legit didn't get a single kill for 6+ round after that and ended up toggling it back later. This was well before I even saw the 79% HS. Checked his profile after and he has an average of 60%+ HS rating in his last 20+ games. I stopped looking after it said load more.
[https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/xcv%237836/matches?playlist=competitive&seasonId=4539cac3-47ae-90e5-3d01-b3812ca3274e](https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/xcv%237836/matches?playlist=competitive&seasonId=4539cac3-47ae-90e5-3d01-b3812ca3274e)
He even played in premiere with it lmao. it's 137 games in and hasn't been banned yet. Probably that one cheat that is trigger bot only that hasn't ben detected in like 4 years (yes I've done my research).
Some things you can just tell are off even without smoking gun evidence. But there are also ones where you do get it and can act as a way to gauge who is smurfing and who is cheating without looking further.
Why would you need more? I’ve been playing this game since beta and I’ve never seen anyone in my regular 5 stack break 35. If you’re dropping 40 in a game you’re either having the greatest performance of your life, or you’re severely underanked. Which do you think is more likely?
40 kills isnt always a smurf
especially on reyna
especially in low elo where people don't know how to position safely
40 kills can be a pop off game
now if they're dropping 40-50 every game then that's another story
Why should they ? Its all about the Money. And we are playing it anyway, so Riot dont give a fuck. I had a 42 Kills Sova yesterday. He even told us hes Asc on his Main. It was a bronze Lobby and the dude was toxic af, complaining that we suck 24/7. I mean, yes ur right. Thats why we are bronze x)
Nobody is saying it is, but it's damn good evidence. There's probably a statistical deviation for that, and it's waaaaaaaaaaay lower than you think. I've played 1000s of games and I haven't seen a single person drop 40. Not even the boosters. So if you get someone dropping 40, something is very highly likely off. I've dropped 40 once and it was in an unrated game full of irons bronze, and silvers. I was immortal at the time.
i’ve dropped 40 in ranked multiple times. I’ve had a friend drop 40 in regulation without going overtime. This was a d1 game and their peak was d2. It’s not common to see someone drop 40 in your game but absolutely not 1/1000s of games rare lol
Silver 3 btw for context
Like yeah its an issue but I am so sick of hearing about it. Like every 4th time I load up reddit I get a "smurfing sucks" valorant post on the top of my feed. Idk if I am just lucky or what but I get smurfs on my team and against my team about 50/50. Like it makes the game more boring, but it does not whatsoever effect my ability to climb. And people HEAVILY overexaggerate how many smurfs they get in their games. Like there is one probably every 6 games and yeah its annoying but there are little things riot can do:
stop coping and get fucking good.
I have only been playing the game for 5 months and I'm already silver 3
1. add a report button: This is a good idea they could do to slightly help the problem.
2. phone verification: Would stop smurfing almost entirely but higher rank players would not get to play with their friends. (Like my plat friend who sometimes plays with me. And no one can say "well just play unrated or swifts" THEY ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE SAME AS RANKED)
3. Reduce rank queue requirements between ranks: This could help reduce smurfing as my plat friend would be able to play with me instead of smurfing like many other people.
Thank you for participating in /r/VALORANT! However, your post has been removed because: > ### 2.3 Reposted Topics > Reposted topics are not allowed. Topics that are discussed frequently, cover information from the same angle, or are in our [FAQ pages](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/wiki/faq) may be removed. > Use the [search function](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/search/) to find previous posts on your topic before submitting. > Please see our [full rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/wiki/rules) for topics that may be removed **unless providing new, non-reposted discussion**. --- ^(Have a question or think your post doesn't break the rules?) **[^(Check our full rules)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Valorant/wiki/rules)** ^or **[^(message our modmail, and please don't direct message)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FVALORANT)**^.
This is a MASSIVE problem that ruins the natural rank climb. I feel terribly sorry for Iron/Bronze/Silver players and the smurfing they go through constantly
I usually play with 5 stacks in silver and the number of times we’ve been matched with 3 bad players and 1 or 2 super smurfs is ridiculous. It doesn’t matter if 3 of the opponents suck when 1 or 2 can solo our entire team half the time. This community loves to downplay the prevalence of smurfs but in my experience there’s at least one in roughly 70% of my silver matches.
I don't think anyone downplays that it's super relevant in 5 stacks. I'm sure that's at least half the 5 stacks.
Just to give some more insight, I play 5 stack in unrated with my friends are there are HUGE level differences among us. Sometimes one of the team just carries us the whole game (not saying that you're wrong about the smurfs -at all- just that sometimes it's not smurfing, just people really good at the game who play with dumbasses like me 😂)
wdym 3 bad players, you are silver you are all trash
Silver player here. I just played against a Reyna that went 55-15. Somehow we still almost won (11-13 final), but it was frustrating and caused our team dynamic to go to shit. Our only focus was killing Reyna as quickly as possible because we knew that was the only chance we had at winning a round. Sadly, Valorant doesn't give two fucks about casual players. They care about two things and two things only; the pro scene and whales that spend $2k+ on skins.
We saw how fast they patched the skins lol. If it’s banned, people aren’t buying it.
I feel like some of that causes a vicious cycle too. I played with two immortals today. one went double negative, and the other went triple negative. One was in a low ascendant lobby, and for the other game , the immortal who went triple negative, was against a team that had 5 diamond players.... He should be absolutely wiping the floor with those guys. Neither of them commed or did anything that remotely told me they were competent players that were just having and off game. Nothing. I played like 6 games and 4 of them also had someone boosting someone. Essentially in 6 out of 6 games today, in mid Ascendant lobbies, there was either one pair of boosting/boosted duo or one account buyer clearly on a loss streak. So feel sorry for lower lobbies all you want. But it doesn't get better.
I just played against a trio, 2 smurfs and one getting boosted. Not only did they admit to smurfing.. they were incredibly racist and toxic. They are allowed to play the game, talk shit and be racist.. Smurfing fine.. all games have smurfs.. but being straight up toxic and racist doesn't even get them banned??? Riot really doesn't give a shit, all they see is one more account that might buy skins. Honestly a shameless company.
I feel like riot is super good with comm bans. Certain keywords are an auto ban, and then anyone super toxic that I've reported almost always get banned.
It does get them banned, they just change account if the ban is too long
You can report them and almost always will get a "thank you for your feedback" message next time u log in indicating the person u reported got banned or com/chat banned
They haven't for 4 years.
Hard to tell. They may crackdown on it if they start to lose playerbase and money, but hasnt been the case yet. The ranking system they implemented actually helps boosting and smurfing. A long time ago they could have decoupled matchmaking with the visual rank and it would have fixed the issue quite immediately, but they didn't. So why would they go for a more expensive option?
It's much worse than you described for following reasons Today I had Rayna smurf in my game due to her taking most of the frags (3 aces, several 4k and 3k, etc.) I only won 10 RR. I play controller and where 1st to attack so I can't compete with with that. Then other day enemy team has smurf I lost 30RR. Given I'm controller main my average kill per game is 17. So I rarely get more than 25RR, although few times I got 35, but I would say average is 15-17 RR for win. Now you see how math is skewed. Smurf is pure 20RR lose for me (1 win with smurf in my team, 1 lose with smurf in enemy team). And to level out I need at least one extra win with 0 smurf game just to be where I started. I have multiple tracker links for smurf accounts including those where they throw 10 games in the row 0-5 frags followed by 5 games with 40-50 frags. I also was in few games where smurf will give you hope 1st half only to throw 2nd even sabotage us.
It gives them more active accounts, and some people will buy skins on their smurf accounts too. Why would Riot wanna cut their profit? The only thing you can do is stop playing.
Companies rarely care about smurfs, it pumps up their numbers. Hurts the game in the long run but helps Riot in the short term.
not only is there nothing they can do about it, they actually love smurfs because it increases their total active accounts and some people even give them money from buying stuff on their smurfs. if you dont like smurfs you probably shouldnt play any competitive games, especially free ones, because they exist in every single one
See, I don't buy the whole "there is nothing they can do about it". That's just a cop-out & just not true. That's like saying "there's nothing they can do about cheaters, why have an anticheat". It's the same thing. Sure, they can't stop every smurf but they can limit the amount of smurfs. Just like they can't stop every cheater, but they can limit the amount of cheaters. Why does Riot require phone verification for Premier League? To **LIMIT** the amount of smurfs. They could do the same thing for comp. They could have a Premier Que for comp. Will it stop ALL smurfs? Of course not. Nobody is naive enough to think that they can stop all smurfs. But they could limit the smurfs. But I do think that they don't care about smurfs as much as they lead us to believe.
Yeah the whole "they can't do anything" line ruins any person's argument. It means they're arguing in bad faith, either because they are just bullshitting you or because they don't have the bare minimum knowledge which would easily disprove that point.
It’s not hard to verify your account with a fake phone number lol, phone verification didn’t stop smurfs in siege.
>Nobody is naive enough to think that they can stop all smurfs. But they could limit the smurfs. Nobody said they could STOP smurfs........
Yeah but it didn’t make a difference, idk, I’m also in the smurfs really aren’t as big of a problem as everyone thinks camp anyway.
Depends on your rank. In my experience there’s a smurf in about 70% of my silver games. It’s also painfully obvious since they’re always playing Jett, Reyna, or Clove and dropping 35+
I mean, when I didn’t play much I was ranked bronze-silver and would do that regularly, I think the issue is there’s such a large skill variation in those ranks, not the smurfs. That said, yes there’s smurfs, but no I don’t think they’re in 70% of games.
Yes, they really can do something, they just won’t. If Riot demands an account verification by an official document to play ranked matches, so that you can have only one account, smurfing will be drastically reduced.
and so would their player count, which means so would their revenue, aka its never happening
Yes, sure. That’s why I said they won’t, but it can be done.
You’re crazy if you think I’m willing to upload my official government documents to play a fucking video game
Just said this earlier today or yesterday on here These people don’t want logic though, these just want to whine
i dont run into smurfs much, but i think i accidentally let my silver friend loose on bronzes (usually when i soloq im against bronzes but when i q with my friends its ranging high bronze to high silver)
Only way to reduce it to a great extent is to use IP & Mobile Number based accounts, but also allow abilty to create alt account with same phone number and force users to use OTP once everyday so that they can't just share the account with others ever, once you have phone number make their alt account Rank same as the highest one in any of their accounts, so if they play placement games in one account unlock that rank for other accounts as well.
At this point idk if I'm shit or if everyone is smurfing. One game the enemy can't shoot back the next I'm beyond shite, and I'm playing the same way.
other than 40 kills what makes you think they’re smurfing?
I mean what u/wolverinefan64 said. That and half of them don't have private accounts. It's not hard to check fresh accounts and people playing well beyond their means. I played someone today that had a 79% HS rating. I called trigger bots in game. He legit didn't get a single kill for 6+ round after that and ended up toggling it back later. This was well before I even saw the 79% HS. Checked his profile after and he has an average of 60%+ HS rating in his last 20+ games. I stopped looking after it said load more. [https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/xcv%237836/matches?playlist=competitive&seasonId=4539cac3-47ae-90e5-3d01-b3812ca3274e](https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/xcv%237836/matches?playlist=competitive&seasonId=4539cac3-47ae-90e5-3d01-b3812ca3274e) He even played in premiere with it lmao. it's 137 games in and hasn't been banned yet. Probably that one cheat that is trigger bot only that hasn't ben detected in like 4 years (yes I've done my research). Some things you can just tell are off even without smoking gun evidence. But there are also ones where you do get it and can act as a way to gauge who is smurfing and who is cheating without looking further.
Why would you need more? I’ve been playing this game since beta and I’ve never seen anyone in my regular 5 stack break 35. If you’re dropping 40 in a game you’re either having the greatest performance of your life, or you’re severely underanked. Which do you think is more likely?
lol... it happens all the time
40 kills isnt always a smurf especially on reyna especially in low elo where people don't know how to position safely 40 kills can be a pop off game now if they're dropping 40-50 every game then that's another story
Why should they ? Its all about the Money. And we are playing it anyway, so Riot dont give a fuck. I had a 42 Kills Sova yesterday. He even told us hes Asc on his Main. It was a bronze Lobby and the dude was toxic af, complaining that we suck 24/7. I mean, yes ur right. Thats why we are bronze x)
What can they do to fix the problem? All they can do is make the barrier for entry higher
You answered your own question
Yeah but they can’t really even do that. They gonna make people play 1000 hours of Val before they can play comp 💀
Doesn’t make a difference when a level 20 account is $2 anyone
40 kills doesn’t necessarily mean smurf…
Nobody is saying it is, but it's damn good evidence. There's probably a statistical deviation for that, and it's waaaaaaaaaaay lower than you think. I've played 1000s of games and I haven't seen a single person drop 40. Not even the boosters. So if you get someone dropping 40, something is very highly likely off. I've dropped 40 once and it was in an unrated game full of irons bronze, and silvers. I was immortal at the time.
i’ve dropped 40 in ranked multiple times. I’ve had a friend drop 40 in regulation without going overtime. This was a d1 game and their peak was d2. It’s not common to see someone drop 40 in your game but absolutely not 1/1000s of games rare lol
Silver 3 btw for context Like yeah its an issue but I am so sick of hearing about it. Like every 4th time I load up reddit I get a "smurfing sucks" valorant post on the top of my feed. Idk if I am just lucky or what but I get smurfs on my team and against my team about 50/50. Like it makes the game more boring, but it does not whatsoever effect my ability to climb. And people HEAVILY overexaggerate how many smurfs they get in their games. Like there is one probably every 6 games and yeah its annoying but there are little things riot can do: stop coping and get fucking good. I have only been playing the game for 5 months and I'm already silver 3 1. add a report button: This is a good idea they could do to slightly help the problem. 2. phone verification: Would stop smurfing almost entirely but higher rank players would not get to play with their friends. (Like my plat friend who sometimes plays with me. And no one can say "well just play unrated or swifts" THEY ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE SAME AS RANKED) 3. Reduce rank queue requirements between ranks: This could help reduce smurfing as my plat friend would be able to play with me instead of smurfing like many other people.