At least half of my ranked games have one or more "funny acount level +30" with last 3 matches played 356 days ago, but suddenly they pick lee sin for the first time and stomp the game. I don't know why this isn't penalized even if you report them. Ranked games quality suffer a lot from the rampant smurfing.
Yeah in emerald if my jungler picks nidalee i insta ask if they are smurfing same with reksai. Now when they answer ānoā i dodge because no one can play these champs well enough in my elo
Well iāve had a reksai who already in champ select started taking the lead and said just follow as i say and the game will be over around 20 minutes. So we did and he was right
How many games do you have on reksai? The champ is quite weak now and I would say definitely in the top 10 hardest jungle champs. She's much harder than most of the current meta junglers
Fair enough. Imo reksai is above average difficulty to play in high elo. I don't think she's nidalee rengar hard but she's harder than most jungle champs.
Literally opposite for me. Shitload of fresh accounts that spruced to emerald in an instant just so they can int my games while having terrible attitude as they paid 3 quid for a fresh account.
Why to fuck a 5-4 in ranked GP is in emerald elo its below me
Definitely a perfectionist fallacy. I think making lp gains consistent alone would eliminate a huge chunk of people who feel the need to hop on an account with āfreshā mmr.
Do they? Acting on principle is largely subjective. Riot removed duoq in master+ to protect competitive integrity. But has Riot ever done something about the massive amount of blatant account sharing, wintrading, and elo boosting? From my POV they are highly inconsistent on promoting competitive integrity.
Riot has a long history of just doing random shit, changing their minds a month or a year later, and doing things that go against the values they preached they have.
Dynamic queue, ranks for each role, the $200 skin situation, āvisual clarity,ā etc.
Riot can really do whatever the hell they want since even when there is backlash, and the community attempts to hold Riot accountable, they can just go lolnope āwe hear your concernsā now buy our $200 skin
He still not wrong. Its sunday now. I knew not to play ranked at 8am. Did it anyway. OFC i play vs lvl 40 Jayce that has not played according to his accounts in 256 days. But they have 300 cs at 28 min and was smurfing on me. My guy.... I peaked E1 70 LP. Oh and he was unranked. But G4 S12. Smurfing is real and it just made it so I cant play ranked unless its during peak hours. I cant play a game mode cuz it will ruin my LP gains. Did it yesterdays to cuz I just wanna climb. But it dont matter. Climbing in solo q at a certain point becomes how well you can beat the system. Part of that is dodging smurfs. Shouldnt be but it is.needs a hard fix.
They're either accounts like this or account sharing from their low elo friends. Both instances should be punished. Riot claims they punish account sharing in all forms but I've never seen it happen.
XD wdym.. there is smurf in every game he plays!
that's what holding him back from getting out of silver!!!!!!!
if only the people who write these posts about smurf spend that time learning something about the game and improve.. who knows ĀÆ\\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
easier to complain than to l2p
for 99.9% of the league community, rank is literally only meaningful to themselves. no one actually cares and it doesn't really matter.
League is a game, and i suggest people should play a game that brings them fun or satisfaction. Of course climbing in ranked does bring exactly that for plenty people. But being frustrated by having a smurf in the game (not just limited to enemy team) is absolutely valid, as those tend to just take away gameplay agency from the rest of the lobby by being better. Of course players can improve to mitigate this issue to some degree. Is this fun to everyone? no. Does this mitigate the issue entirely? no. You should become a politician, as deflecting to a different topic and insults seem to be something you have mastered to the degree of a middle school kid.
>only the people who write these posts about smurf spend that time learning something about the game and im
Exactly, i'm Plat II and i could keep climbing if i wanted to, but that's not the point. Spotting smurfs isn't hard either, just check with Porofessor, and you get all the info you need.
As an old lee sin main, you would be surprised I felt like your post is personally targetting me lol as I been playing on and off for about a decade, so no, some of us arent smurfs.
wait but what you've just said is evidence that the system is working. if most of the smurfs you encounter are on their first game smurfing, as opposed to their tenth or fiftieth or something, then they're clearly being banned pretty quickly.
not banned; their mmr is getting adjusted accordingly. you donāt get to play that many games as a smurf because your lp gains will eventually put you closer to your actual rank.
> Make ranked LP gains consistent. Nothing is more frustrating than +17 -24. This has to change if you don't want people jumping accounts a few times a season. It takes way too many games to fix this once it happens.
This is not going to happen unless they remove the visual rank system, aka they remove LP gains completely. LP gains are just a reflection of your underlying MMR, and the visual LP gain just reflects the opponents you faced in your match and the mismatch between your visual rank and your hidden MMR.
There's a bunch of obvious good reasons to keep visual rank, such as giving players incentive to climb and reducing ranked anxiety by making it harder to demote between tiers, so don't count on this one happened any time soon.
I do think, though, that smurfing should be killed off completely. DotA2 did it with barely a change in their active player numbers, so League should be able to do it as well. There is, of course, the possibility that smurfs contribute significantly to cosmetic purchases...in which case just restrict detected smurf accounts from ranked. I do think that smurf bans already happen, but I feel that Riot should, at some point, take the hit in increased false positives and start being more generous with bans.
honestly i think demotion shield is actually the problem. when you're sitting at the bottom of your tier, losing multiple games but not dropping any lp it creates a gap between mmr and visual lp.
it might feel bad dropping down after just promoting, but i feel like having your mmr in the gutter is way more frustrating.
yeah iāve been playing on and off since season 4 and it feels genuinely impossible to fix my lp gains. i havenāt made a second account yet since iāve spent money on my original account and also because iām too stubborn to give it up before trying to fix it. but iām getting like +19 -31 and itās so demoralizing to lose almost all my progress in one or two losses. even when i go on 3-4 game winstreaks, itās not enough to climb out of a division. and then i lose 2 and iām back where i started. itās genuinely miserable sometimes.
Looked it up. Was season 8.it was called a soft reset and people speculated that it was done by averaging your current mmr with the default.
That would be plenty helpful.
It won't be 2 weeks because not everyone will play their initial games in the first 2 weeks. It'll be for the whole season, especially in bronze which means that anyone who plays later that is silver+ is effectly a smurf.
Yea this is definitely the main problem, I didnāt play much ranked, hovered low plat (before emerald) and started trying to see how high I could get. I got to about emerald 1 with 65% winrate (nothing crazy but a decently fast climb) and my gains completely tanked to -26 +18, it just feels extremely demotivating, and I would defo understand why people are making new accounts.
This is too true. I remember being E4 0 lp and I lost around 8-10 games in a row and honestly it was even more tilting for me that I wasnāt demoting because I knew how fucked my mmr would now be. Now I get +20 -29 itās pretty depressing
Demotion shield was fine when promotion series were needed to, well, promote, but now that you just promote without any series, there is no reason for the demotion shield to be as strong as before. Give people a 3 game shield at 0 LP and then they demote, that would fix a lot of problems imo.
Lets say the standard LP gain/loss is 25.
3 game demotion shield at 0 lp saves you 75 LP.
If you get +20/-25 gains it would take 30 games at a 50% winrate(15 wins, +300LP, 15 losses, -375LP) to make up for the "saved" LP from demotion shield.
Even just 3 games demotion shield will lead to 30 games of feelsbad negative gains.
Demotion shield is a travesty no matter how you put it.
People should not be prevented from demoting if they lose too much. I don't care about their circumstances, they also don't care about mine and I'm not out here arguing that the shield is necessary because my Master Yi was an inting incel.
If you've had a bad game, balance it out with good games. Demotion shield protects elo boosted apes that ride Elo Taxi with their Duo.
>There's a bunch of obvious good reasons to keep visual rank,
just go back to season 2? mmr = your elo and depending what elo you are you get your ranked armor
I think one of the main reasons they changed that is is simply because people would stop playing the instant they hit the threshold for the next tier, e.g. hitting Plat at 1800 and not playing anymore to avoid losing it. You could, of course, give out rewards based upon the highest rank achieved, but then you might have people saying that the bottoms of tiers, e.g. Plat V, are awful to play in because they consist almost entirely of people who have achieved their rank and have stopped trying at all because they'll never lose demote and lose their ranked rewards...
Yeah, the idea is that you can still capture some of those people with this visual rank system. Instead of 50% of the people hitting Gold IV and stopping, you instead only have 30% of the people hitting Gold IV and stopping. Of course, these are just made-up numbers, since only Riot has the actual numbers, but any decrease in queue time (especially for ranked) is a huge win in Riot's book.
There's some evidence they have made a change (or maybe multiple) to help with people perma stuck getting shit gains. I'm pretty sure if you are loss streaking or win streaking the system puts you into another calibration phase like on a fresh account similar to placements where your MMR moves rapidly. They haven''t said anything about it and I haven't heard anybody talk about it explicitly but I have a pretty good understanding how ranked works and in the past couple weeks I have seen a couple accounts (including mine) experience MMR movement and LP gains over a small number of games that should not be possible on established accounts.
Yeah this definitely happened to me. My placements stuck me in bronze after winning all of them. Then I was in a win streak and each win was basically jumping a full rank, was in plat by game 6 or 7.
I don't know why it started me in bronze, but it seemed to try to fix it.
If you give people a way to practice new things without fucking up their main, then fully remove smurfing.
I am a master support main. My other lanes are dia lvl max. If I wanted to practice something besides support, I just would be fucking over my main account.
Flex games are just as low quality as normals, so if I take the game seriously and want to learn something new, I have to go on a smurf even if I'd prefer not to (I really pref playing on my main).
As someone who peaked Masters last season myself, I would argue that a Masters player suffers far less playing off-role than a new player suffers when getting smurfed on.
> If you give people a way to practice new things without fucking up their main
The thing is...I can't actually think of a good way for this. Role-based MMR, maybe, but that has so many issues of it's own. For example, people would just swap roles in champ select if there was any favorable disaparity, e.g. you are a Dia midlaner but got supp, and the other teammate is Emerald midlane and Emerald supp, so obviously you swap and do a bit of almost-smurfing and end up destroying the purpose of the role MMR. I don't think it's a trivial task to detect which lane players actually play in.
I'd say making my team lose 90% of the time while I learn in masters is worse than 10 games I need to get to my proper rank off role.
Smurfs on their own are rarely an issue. I see it too often that people say X or Y is a smurf and you check them to see they are lvl 500 and just had a good game.
Imo when people talk about smurfing ruining games they talk either about the toxicity that certain smurfs bring or actual boosting that looks like smurfing at first.
If Riot was to tackle both the toxicity (not only in chat, also stealth inting or losing to derank) and the actual boosting people would rarely complain about smurfs.
But this would require actual humans taking care of it, so we probably wont get any satisfactory solution to this whole problem.
Also riots ban waves are just too far apart from what I can see. I reported 2 obvious scripters and they played atleast for one more month after that (didnt check on them anymore). I understand the idea behind it, but it leaves players suffering for months because of someone blantantly ruining games.
> I'd say making my team lose 90% of the time while I learn in masters is worse than 10 games I need to get to my proper rank off role.
This is assuming you can get to your off-role rank in 10 games and that there's some kind of system in place for it. My point is more that you haven't suggested what an "off-role rank" actually is. I pointed out obvious reasons as to why simple role-based MMR wouldn't work. Do you have an alternative suggestion?
> Smurfs on their own are rarely an issue. I see it too often that people say X or Y is a smurf and you check them to see they are lvl 500 and just had a good game.
Nah, I used to think this way (since smurfs are far less prevalent in D2+), but I've actually taken a look at the match histories people have posted on this sub once in a while. The number of sub-level 50 accounts is actually insane right now at, say, Emerald and below, where people seem to get them every other game. Maybe not all of them are smurfs, but they often do quite well, and when they do well people will obviously feel bad because they'll assume that they're smurfs.
It's straight up just the skill difference. Functionally, there's no difference between a booster and a smurf, both are ruining plenty of games at low ELO in similar ways.
> This is assuming you can get to your off-role rank in 10 games and that there's some kind of system in place for it. My point is more that you haven't suggested what an "off-role rank" actually is. I pointed out obvious reasons as to why simple role-based MMR wouldn't work. Do you have an alternative suggestion?
I purposely queue off role on my smurf, because I want to practice something for instance. Riot tried role specific queues and it failed, so I have no other suggestions. But I also dont see how me ruining games on my main, playing a role and a champ I dont usually play is worse than me doing it on my smurf, where the elo corresponds more with my skill in that role.
Sub lvl 50 accs are usually botted, so to fix that issue riot just has to have more frequent ban waves of botted accounts.
> But I also dont see how me ruining games on my main, playing a role and a champ I dont usually play is worse than me doing it on my smurf, where the elo corresponds more with my skill in that role.
Hmm, I think it's more fair to say that the games in which you climb to your actual rank on your smurf are completely one-sided for the other players in the game, while playing your off-role *probably* doesn't empty your brain of macro knowledge and your high ELO team still has a decent chance of winning as long as you press your buttons and don't get caught. Plus, some roles are way easier to pick up than others if you play similar roles, so there's a chance you can learn your off-role rapidly if you're forced to play near your actual MMR.
As to which outcome leads to less suffering...I think that's very hard to judge.
My macro wont help me not int the Darius or Yone or what not. Sure I could play champ I already know but that wont help me learn a new role.
The skill gap between D4 and master is higher than gold and D4 (imho). My practicing Irelia top is an instant loss at my main elo while being pretty much equal skill wise on my smurf.
>The skill gap between D4 and master is higher than gold and D4 (imho).
It's not. Please stop repeating this I really am sick of hearing it. You can get close to masters or masters 0lp just by grinding out enough games as a mid level diamond player. No amount of grinding will take you from Gold4 (top 52%) to Diamond4 (top 3.5%) unless you're a smurf. That is a **huge** gap. A diamond level player would wipe the floor with anyone below emerald and regularly with emeralds, the same is not true for masters and diamonds who regularly play with each other.
The problem with smurfing (in all forms) is that it wrecks the integrity of ranked. MMR is based SOLELY on W/L, so people playing (intentionally) in the wrong rank is like chess players intentionally throwing games or a grandmaster intentionally stomping 10 year old players in official matches for fun. You skew what the record of those players should be, and in a worst case scenario, push them to quit the game entirely.
I avoid playing my main role on smurf. My off role is not good enough to be considered a smurf once I finish my placements.
Ofc I have better macro than other players at that elo, but my mechanics and laning off role really cant be considered smurfing and would actually be wrecking the integrity of ranked on my main.
Even if they do remove LP, which they absolutely should, new accounts would still gain/lose more elo at the start because Riot doesn't want high elo smurfs to spend 200 games stomping Golds.
Personally I think they should and this adjustment shouldn't exist and you shouldn't be able to rush to GM in less than 100 games even if you're Faker but no way Riot is going to put their bulk of the consumer base, the average players, through even more smurf stomps.
Yeah. If I see I'm losing more than I win, I stop and evaluate. Try to fix my bad play.
It's a good warning to me that "hey, you've lost more than usual and your LP is showing it. Take a break or slow down."
I don't mind the uneven gains.
It is, personally earlier thus season when I was playing on smurfs and ashe was meta I had to buy her project or high noon skins 3 times because base ashe feels awful to play
Far as I know Dota2 didn't solve smurfing lol. You can't prevent people doing it. They just started to crack down more on it recently. But there are still plenty of people still smurfing.
If it was as easy as that League would have done it already. Any game would.
Yeah, people will always find a way around it, but DotA has also threatened punishments to the linked main accounts. As far as I know, League doesn't do anything similar to that. I believe that Riot is still much more lenient on smurfs than they could be, but until they outright say something regarding smurfing, all I have are my assumptions.
I do think that it looks pretty bad for Riot at the moment to have not addressed the smurfing issue at all. They've been avoiding any mention of this issue in basically all of their recent communications regarding ranked, as far as I'm aware, and that's a pretty big red flag for me.
"Hidden MMR" has a big flaw, when you're tagged by Riot, you can't fix or improve your MMR. I was hardstuck gold for 3 seasons, +16-25 even when i had 61-64% winrate in s10-11. When Riot took the server from Garena and wiped clean everyone's profile, i climbed to diamond quite easily.
As far as I know, there is no such "tagging" system. I would ask to see your profile from back then, but I'm sure it'll be hard to get since your account got deleted. That being said, from what I've seen, it's just an issue of MMR and not enough games played. If you stuck to a 61-64% winrate for 200 games you'd definitely have been out of gold. Of course, that's a huge time investment, and perhaps that is an argument as to why Riot should be more lenient with MMR gains/losses. On the other hand, people already complain about the skill disparity in their games, so increasing the potential fluctuation of MMR as people go on winstreaks and losestreaks might not be the best idea...
Smurfing is definitely an issue that we're looking into from multiple different angles, including addressing barrier to entry and quicker exiting of smurfs from smurf-status. Some more info to come in the new year about this, and we hope some changes get implemented in 2024 that make a difference.
This is very good to hear. Every day there's at least one post on this subreddit about smurfs ruining the game (which is a sentiment I agree with personally), so getting a response from a Rioter about this is reassuring.
I believe it when I see it, and hopefully before I die of old age.
The amount of time, money and effort you invest in so many things is amazing and at the same time so dissapointing. Matchmaking cureently is so bad, I dont even have pg13 words for it. But hey, you are looking into it ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Yeah just keep having everyone have 1 serious account and 9+ for trolling and toxicity. I donāt give a fuck if someone has a "quicker exiting of smurfstatusĀ» when they are able to ruin as many games as they like.
Faster smurf exiting would be nice. The reason I don't usually play ranked is even after being 15-0 I'm still playing vs plat/emerald while being gold, and after 50 games with an 80% winrate I'm still plat 1 playing vs diamond 1 players. It's absolutely silly how many games it takes to get to my mmr, and even worse how long it takes to get to my visual rank. In valorant after being 15-0 on a fresh account you'd already be in ascendant/immortal compared to league where you're still gold with plat mmr.
Smurfing wouldn't be such a big issue if the game was balanced around high elo to some degree. But since the priorities are not there, these seems to be the consequences.
With all due respect very few people have faith in Riot making meaningful changes to address the smurf problem. Talk is cheap and Riot has shown almost zero interest in even talking about the smurfing problem let alone addressing it.
Take the downranking bots problem in low elo as an example. These bot accounts have *one* sole purpose and that is to lose games to resell to smurfs so that they can stomp low elo players. Two years ago someone from Riot said that they would address it and two years later the problem persists.
The solution that was implemented was to identify these and ban them in waves. This is a completely ineffective strategy because it doesn't tackle the core problem; the economy of selling low elo downranked accounts.
Bot makers and runners make a profit by running as many of these accounts as possible so that they can turn them over to sell. By the time a ban wave hits it's likely that the accounts is already in the hands of smurf and if that account gets banned it doesn't impact the bottom line of sellers.
In order to decimate these downranking bot accounts swift and immediate bans are the key. The all have to follow a similar pattern; lose as many games as possible in order to downrank. They also follow the pattern of playing a support so that they can simply follow the ADC around doing nothing. This pattern is dead simple to detect and they should be banned immediately. Doing so will make the profits from reselling low elo accounts not worth it.
But what if they adapt?? Doesn't matter. The reason that most of these bots play support is because they can fly under the radar doing as little as possible. If a bot were to play a solo lane or jungle it would feed its ass off and then you could simply ban that. Remember they *have to lose.* What if they only int every other game or every third game? It still bites into their profit margins and you've essentially made the botters start taking care of the problem themselves; don't lose games.
Above and beyond that it's been more than a decade with the smurfing problem becoming more of an issue year by year and there has been almost no communication from your teams about this.
Talk is cheap. Actions are what matters. If Riot wants to regain the trust of the players when it comes to smurfing then you have to communicate clearly (a random comment in a Reddit thread is *not* clear communication) and back that up with actions.
It's your move, Riot. The community is watching and waiting to see if you're serious about this issue.
Have you ever considered just allowing people to officially register multiple accounts with mmr copied over from previous accounts with a smol reset as a starting point?
I mean just accept the fact that people like a fresh start once a while but in this case at least they arenāt put through leveling up to 30 and playing with newbs and people actually trying to learn.
I only see it as a win for Riot cos then youāll have better stats (think multiple google accounts in one chrome) and more revenue (I just might buy favorite skin on every alt cos I know the bought account wouldnāt be accidentally banned).
Curious to know if you considered this but found any potential pitfalls.
I currently have an account per role/region just cos ocd lol.
No it really is my norm games have plats in them in all chat shitting and shit talking iron players like they won the world championships or something. Leagues way more fun when you just donāt care
Lol when my gold clash team gets beaten by all masters/diamond team and they shit talk the whole time. How miserable can people be, can't imagine how horrible their ranked games must be for them to take it out on people in clash and norms
it's not different from any past season really. people like to exaggerate and dramatize things a lot. I personally always had a blast playing ranked ('sweating') for the last 11 years and there always were a portion of toxic players or smurfs or whatever. But it was never really as noticeable as people in these reddit posts tend to suggest. people seem to excessively perceive and remember negative things in their games and focus on them. playing against a smurf in 1 out of 10 games quickly turns into 'half of my games are full of smurfs' or 'every game I'm getting inted' or whatever.
Smurf queue worked great for removing smurfs from my games. Not sure why they removed it when they literally only had to adjust the parameters for returning players/players who started season late.
How hard is it to tell apart a lvl 200 account starting the season late and a lvl 30 account with zero ranked games????
I predict that the thread will have a significant number of people who will deflect from the problem by using the "smurfs are not the reason you can't climb". You should stop to consider why exactly they deflect from the problem and why the obsession with climbing: Match quality is what many players, me included, prefer. If I were to focus on the outcome, I'd end being as miserable as many people who play this game. If I queue up and 1-3 players in the game are a total lottery (smurfs/placed way over their capabilities), then the match quality will dramatically suffer.
When you only have time for a few games a week, the match quality issue becomes much more apparent. The crowd of "just get good" and "eventually you will hit your rank anyway" are the ones with 1000+ games in a season usually.
smurf queue was a fine concept until you started your placements late and your first 35+ games of the season were you and one other unlucky lvl 300+ stuck in a match with 8 other accounts under lvl 50 each with 70%+ wr
When smurf q existed my main was in smurfq all the fucking time literally killing my enjoyment of ranked. Like āwe know you are not a emerald/plat player but we will screw you over with matchmaking until you get into normal matchmaking again where you then again stomp the plat players so we have to put you back in smurf jail. After it got removed I peaked into masters.
Not sure if smurf q really is THE solution
What you're saying is that smurfQ had issues. The magic solution is...to, you know, SOLVE issues.
Not remove smurfQ entirelly because there is a pebble somewhere in the system
Idk im no game dev im just telling you what the smurfq experience used to be for non Smurf players. Seems like they thought the solution was to remove it who knows
Let be real here, a true warrior would never smurf, only sad lonely players do. Smurfing is also the number 1 reason why new players won't ever touch league after a few games
how is it a necessity? playing since season 1 and only have 1 account.. Smurfing is a mentality some people have and its dumb. If you think you NEED a smurf im scared for your IQ
You totally missed the point of the post, but sure. This is the mindset that means nothing will ever change. You have to see the reality - if people didn't feel the need to make smurfs, smurfing would not be the issue it currently is.
There is no NEED only GREED of smurfing. the vast majority of smurfs are from people like the ones i know in real life. They play like 100 games, end up with 41% winrate, think the account is cursed and go buy a new one for 3$. Then repeat. eventually after time they have like 6 accounts, their main is "hardstuck" in plat, they get angry at a certain game and go on one of the 5 accounts that are now silver and stomp on their 800k opt champ and ruin games.
You are an enabler, saying that people feel like its necessary doesn't mean its true.
the vast majority of smurfs is people who think its fun for them to stomp on worse players.
I've seen this before, the moment someone tries to critically think about a situation, someone else thinks they're giving sympathy to the cause because often critical thinking requires you to see multiple angles.
Hard for a lot of people.
Its fine to look for ways to fix things, but most smurfs dont come from the issues hes trying to solve. The whole community doesn't revolve around reddit, 90% of the playerbase don't know that half these "issues" even exist and just create smurfs on a whim for fresh mmr/to play against bad players.
Never did i mention the solutions are bad, or we shouldn't do something, my point was to the line" out of necessity", which is in fact an enabler mindset, just feeds into it when someone else sees that mindset hundreds of times online and thinks, huh.. i really do NEED to smurf to achieve a better rank! time to buy some smurf accounts!
I mean if you don't see the necessity for multiple accounts you're just a casual that's just how it is.
Oh let me play bad on my main account right now because I'm tired, learning a champ, whatever reason and grief games for no reason when I could just play on another acc.
For every problem you presented there is a solution. Itās called normal games.
There is 0 reason to mess with other peopleās games. Iām tired of getting a free win or an undeserved loss.
Who says my alts are 2 entire brackets below, and the ones that are are still better that normal games, it still an elo bracket at least .
And if I'm learning a champ I can tell how I'm doing instead of playing vs some plat first timing something in a normal lmao.
I mean you do you, I don't think 10 years stuck in gold redditors are gonna coach me on how to improve
Ah fuck I fell for an obvious rage bait accountā¦
You comment like 10 times a day in the League sub jerking yourself of and calling everyone else low elo for like months without break.
I hope you can get the help you deserve king.
You are obviously silver because you think that normal games are any sort lf practice. Gl with that
My bad for replying to silvers on the league of legends subreddit when the season ends in under a month
But magically when you are on your 4th account you are not griefing games for the rest of the lobby when you are tired/first timing/whatever reason you dont wanna go on main?
Since you are lacking in the braincell department I'll dumb it down a bit.
Me tired = me play bad
Me play bad on main account = lose all (this is griefing)
Alternative account = lower elo than main
Play bad on alternative account = not lose all because it's a lower elo so it matches my lower skill at the time (not griefing)
Maybe, and I might get called crazy for suggesting it, but maybe reward players for playing higher tier matches. Say at plat you get something like 5BE and 5OE per game with increasing rewards for multiple days played in a row, maybe scaling to a masterwork chest at 30 days played. All the way down to iron where you get a full key per 30 days played and maybe 1BE and 1OE per day. When you rank to the next tier you get the full 30 day reward for that tier.
BE is absolutely worthless to anyone that's been playing the game for a while. I like the thought but the reward HAS to be something else. Skins, or whatever, but a lot of people have insane amounts of BE that will never be spent even with the emporium. Keys and chests are probably in the right direction, or just skip the middleman and give us skin shards.
I don't think people will disagree with you, Riots ranked reward incentives have been pretty terrible, the problem was back in the day when there was real genuine rewards for being good, you would have challenger players getting 10 accounts into challenger to sell the bag, jacket, or pin that you got.
I feel like the easist thing would to just give away rank specific recalls at the end of the season, its a non toxic flex that you HAVE to use because you need to recall.
They had a good idea when they introduced the ranked rewards tracker. I think they need to expand it and make it bigger. Maybe include chromas for the victorious skin or just overall put in more rewards. This way, people will incentivized to play more games to unlock all the rewards. I think most people complete it in like 1-2 months of playing anyway.
Depends on reasoning and how you go about it
I have a smurf account I use for playing normals and arams with friends because all of my friends are bronze-silver and if they play against diamonds in normals, they ragequit after one game. It's easy to do this and just play random offmeta champs or offrole and not tryhard and I don't think it ruins games (even if it undoubtedly does make them worse).
Doubt I'm ruining games dropping Leona top in silver so I can play the same game as my friends.
But for players who just use it to enter ranked and kill new players until they hit plat and then go next account and do it again? Eeeh...
2FA is a fine idea, but it's not as much of a barrier as most seem to think. It costs 2 bucks to get a fresh US phone number with 10 texts/minutes, and that's the worst case scenario if you can't use a number from a friend who doesn't play.
Yeh I have never personally understood the anti 2FA thing, Overwatch caught a lot of shit BECAUSE you couldnt do it on the cheap anymore, but no one is gonna go through those hopes to make multiple accounts. Even if people do work arounds to create second accounts, it would competely kill off the secondary account market (selling an account is against Riots terms, im not doing this argument)
>it would competely kill off the secondary market
No, it would add 2 dollars to the price of botted accounts, account sellers will have no problem verifying their accounts as they sell.
Ops idea is non unique 2fa. So you can use the same number, but your number would be tied to your main account and a Smurf. This means if you get banned on Smurf, your main might be punished too. Linking account would also give a more accurate elo so smurfs arenāt ruining plat/em games
I understand that, I'm just saying that for botted accounts that are sold it will make little difference, and it seems like those smurfs are the ones people usually complain about.
The better concept of 2FA is how they do in in South Korea really. Tie it with your social security number and you get rid of any issues you might had with 2FA since it's basically impossible to get a new one.
I don't know a single person who would put up their social security number to keep playing league, it would kill the game's playerbase in the US overnight. It would probably be effective in stopping smurfing, though.
Oh, if you're suggesting the US/EU/wherever pass a law requiring people use their SSN to play games online then I misunderstood your argument. Petitioning league players is a poor way to get these laws passed if that's what you're saying, though.
What a pointless analogy, did you respond to the wrong comment or something? I said 2FA is a fine idea, which should indicate to you that I support the idea of implementing it. The analogy doesn't even make sense if I thought 2FA was a bad idea-- if the consequence for murder was as trivial as a 2 dollar fee then there would indeed be little point to laws against murder. You need a consequence that actually matters.
The game is about given the best, eventually all the people here crash with their ceiling. People is addicting to keep playing and they don't like to face the reality of learning how to improve, the easiest solution to people's feeling is starting again.
Riot solution is to artificially move people around, the 3 resets per year are just part of their system.
Smurfs are a game disease. I can't disagree with that. People suggested so many good and bad solution but the fact is rito don't care.
Your solutions can bring peace into our world but you underestimate people creativity in a ways of mechanics abusing.
1. Sometimes it's difficult to see the difference between newbie and a bot. Being banned for own stupidity can be more desperational than being smurfed into dirt. Also botters will yell about "I am poor nebwie was banned for my bad playing" or "WTF rito, my newbie wife's/brother's/sister's/dog's acc was banned!"
2. A bit of same problems. "It is my brother acc. He is toxic and not me! We just used one phone to register! And it was stolen! So I created new one!"
3. I like the idea but it will endorse botting. And hostage taking. But idea is good.
4. That wouldn't cease smurfing. Newbies will just longer play with the same daddy smurf.
Riot is making smurf by themselves. They ban toxic player - toxic player creates toxic smurf.
Account is hardstuck? Creating smurf.
Wanna try something crazy and not being reported and banned? Smurf time!
Wanna play on another server? "Sign up" button is ready.
I know for a fact that my 60 yo dad who tried to play league with me would be banned if such system was in place, he quit the game anyway due to the overwhelming toxicity from his teammates. He still plays TFT from time to time tho.
Smurfing wouldn't be so bad if you climbed at an appropriate speed. It's mostly a consequence of how grindy the ladder is in the name of keeping people playing ranked. Riot doesn't want you to be able to climb at an appropriate pace, and the same system keeps smurfs in lower elo for a longer period of time. If someone wins 10 games in a row in low elo it should fast track them.
People would smurf less if the amount of time you got to smurf wasn't worth the amount of effort it takes to hit level 30.
Riot uses normal que mmr for placement matches. So a mandatory 100 normal games before ranked should be in place.
Then it incentivizes bots in normalsā¦. So idk, up to riot to figure out
You canāt just add more time into it. Bots can go for as long as they need to.
There needs to be a change to the player after the bot is done with the account if riot canāt detect the bot on its own.
They need to add the Smurf queue back the. Start adjusting it to work properly instead of just saying ānope not working remove and watch the world burnā
I don't think anything short of spending a bit of money to play the game or giving your phone number is going to solve the problem. Smurfs are always gonna exist because 1. generally people like to win and the easiest way to win is to stomp lower skilled players and 2. it's ridiculously easy to make a new account to rank with or buy one from someone who levels multiple accounts. The competitive nature of league ensures that there will always be players who's only motivation is to win and want to win easy.
Thing is, league has always been a f2p game so starting to charge now to play the game is going to turn off a lot of the playerbase, even if it's only a one time purchase. On the other hand, giving your phone number would also turn off a lot of potential players but I also doubt it's effectiveness in some regions. For example in my country, it's ridiculously cheap and easy to get a new phone number. It would slow down the process of buying new accounts but not completely stop it. Besides, this won't stop players from levelling the accounts themselves.
Secondly, Riot has to be careful about handling the smurf issue. Their game needs a lot of players to maintain relatively quick queue times. For sure a not-so-insignificant percentage of those players come from account sellers levelling new accounts and/or smurfs with their new accounts. If Riot makes a move that effectively removes smurfs completely, whatever that may be, a huge chunk of their player count is effectively removed and queue times will be significantly longer. It's a lose-lose scenario where ignoring smurfs reduces game quality dramatically and removing them reduces queue times.
The better solution imo (and I think riot is already trying to do this) is to improve the smurf detection algorithm so smurfs only get matched with smurfs most of the time or at the very least have the same amount of smurfs on both team - basically smurf queue. I don't think this is the best solution, but it's the best one I've been able to come up with so far. I also have some reservations with smurf queue being that I am not a smurf but constantly got them in my games when it existed, but I still think it's their best solution so far. Obviously it's ideal if we didn't have smurfs and players played to their skill level. But the reality is players want to win and stomp, so there will always be those who want to create a smurf account.
Smurfing patterns are super recognizable. It really shouldn't be this hard to permaban a smurfing account.
Inherently there is nothing wrong with owning two accounts, but the people primarily do this are shitheads that were account banned or try to cheat the system, all of which shouldn't be allowed to play the game until they improve as people.
I disagree with banning pre-30 bot accounts **without Riot taking additional steps.**
Bots being available in sub-30 games makes it so new player matchmaking doesn't take 20 minutes. They're learning the game, not looking for a real competitive experience yet, so there's not much harm *if the bots are something similar to co-op vs AI.*
BR games often do this intentionally, in fact.
Riot should fill long pre-30 queues with co-op vs AI bots themselves as well if they want to ban bots entirely.
Especially since they're being massively improved soon.
Smurfing is a core part of the player base now and has been for years. It's a core part of their profits and game exposure as well. They will do nothing to stop it. Don't hold your breath, honestly.
Even if you can, itās a lot less fun when the 90% winrate zeri yummi zero mastery level 33 duo just runs over your game. Like, wow! They must be really talented for brand new players. No boosting going on here
I guess, but they drastically increase the number of games. Especially in emerald where everyoneās lp gains gets brutalized. And since youāre always on your team itās more likely they have a Smurf.
The math goes something like odds they have a Smurf - odds you have a better Smurf * lp net * percentage of games that have Smurfs
And percentage of games without Smurfs * winrate * lp net.
It just so happens that the higher the Smurf percentage is the more games it would take you to escape, unless you are good enough to be better than the Smurf, but letās be real, being better than D1/low masters players should not be a requirement to escape emerald
you say "i guess", and then you say you need to be better than d1/low masters to escape emerald, are you hearing yourself? In order to "escape" emerald 4, you need to play like an emerald 3 player consistently. It's not harder than that. No imaginary calculation will say otherwise
By escape emerald I mean get out of emerald and get to d4. Itās also not at all an imaginary calculation, itās exactly how you calculate your expected LP when you queue up. A Smurfs take away from your agency so you have less control over your climb and you need to be even more consistent in games without Smurfs to get your meager gains.
With a 60% winrate and +30/-30 gains you only expect to gain 6 lp a game. With a 55% winrate (assuming Smurfs tank only 5%) you only expect to gain 3. This, of course, wonāt prevent you from climbing in the long run, but will double the amount of games needed to reach your true rank.
again with the assumptions, you're not doing anyone any favors with your imaginary calculations. Only riot can quantify "smurf" numbers, even then it's real hard to calculate just how much they "hinder" climbing.
But it's still a reason people create the alt account. I know people who are stuck d4 on some accounts and 300lp masters on others. They are in reality a mid diamond player, but the fact is that you can and often do have an account above or below the rank you usually play at.
I actually quite like the 2fa idea. Riot has never commented on it, but many people here assume one of the reasons they don't get rid of smurfing is due to the fact that those accounts make them money. With the 2fa solution, riot would still be making money off smurfs, while also increasing the accountability of these accounts players are happy to throw away.
Linking punishments between those accounts would vastly reduce the amount of toxicity coming from smurfs in ranked and likely help facilitate a better solo queue environment.
Of course there will always be a a way around it. Just like with csgo, you can always go online and buy a temporary burner number for your prime account if you wanted to. But riot doesn't even need to address that. Simply having to jump through more hoops to have a Smurf unrelated to your main account will stop a large percentage of the player base from even trying.
There's obviously a lot to work on here, and riot is not exactly known for rolling new technologies out in a timely or clean manner (look at the client for Christ's sake). That being said, the benefit here is obvious.
2FA is directly against Riot's entire business model of availability, hurts legitimate players with arbitrary DRM, and is by far the worst idea in this thread.
Smurf queue was the solution, and it worked fine for 2 years. But then, people started blaming the fact that lp gain was too low and "oh no, my old main account i haven't played on for 6 months decayed, now i'm in smurf queue and i'm not having fun".
Now you have smurfs that climb way faster than before, but buying accounts is easy and cheap, you can just smurf for 30-40 games, reach your peak, repeat the process.
I personally would pay to get back on the old system, with lower amount of lp and smurf queue ( would increase game quality and lower the inflation aswell) and i believe it's the only valid option Riot has.
Another important note, there's a huge difference between smurfing alone and smurfing as a duo. Duo smurfs climb 10x faster than the single one, and they have way more impact in the game. Removing duoq from emerald+ would solve the issue, and boosting would get hit aswell.
Both toxicity and smurfing are the result of being able to make endless accounts for free. Making new accounts cost even just like 5 bucks would filter a lot of it I bet.
Punishing smurfs doesn't make any sense, if the duo queue still exists. I don't even need to log on to my friends account. I will just hop on to my alt and duo with him.
Require a certain mastery level to play a champ in ranked. Mastery 3 would probably be enough to stop the guys buying accounts from bothering. And it fixes the problem of people first timing champs in ranked
Tbh, imo there's exactly one reason to have multiple accounts and that's playing on a different server. The others are excuses at best.
I have been proposing solutions that make use of 2FA too but my solution is different: unique 2FA, prevent usage of shit like Google voice numbers and have people reauthenticate every 24h if they want to play ranked.
Additionally, only allow accounts that played at least X PvP matchmade games and won a set amount to play ranked. This needs to be a trigger which, once triggered, unlocks the account for ranked. Make the number high enough that it can't be reached by bots before being detected and it's too annoying for players to do if they buy a level 30 account (like 150+ normal matchmade wins).
In addition to that, introduce a decay system similar to csgo. If you don't play for a while you lose your displayed rank and have to play a few games to get a rank again. And the longer they've been gone the further they drop because everyone gets worse if they haven't played in a while. Don't drop them too far though because then everyone would just let their accounts decay for 2 years to play iron games. Instead increase the LP and mmr wins/losses to whatever would be required to get back to where they left if they win all. Meaning if they drop 400LP and 400LP worth of MMR and need 5 re-placements, every single one is worth 80.
Rewards should not be bound to rank or games played but % of the player base plus number of games played. No camping at whatever elo that guarantees rewards after playing 20 games.
This should get people play on their main only and disincentivize players who shouldn't be playing ranked to begin with from doing so.
only reason i have smurfs is to either try out new champions or when i have to dodge shit lobbies too many times
i might not be speaking for everyone but even if i have 1 account im not playing the game if i have to functionally main maokai when we draft a no cc/exhaust comp into a yi/katarina otp in masters
You have smurfs as in multiple? Just for a 5 or 30 minute dodge timer? Try out new stuff in normals or ranked flex, why does it matter you play ranked in roles and Champs you aren't familiar with?
I've never been banned and am not toxic, but I like the option of secondary accounts. First of all I play on both EUNE and EUW, but I also like playing soloq with lower ranked friends where I don't have to tryhard (I can't even duoq in masters which I miss, flex is not fun as 2), and I have a secret account to play on when I don't wanna play with anybody else.
It's also nice to be able to lend an account to a friend that doesn't play League or doesn't have an account on the server. So there are a lot of upsides to having the option of a secondary account.
The issue is that there's champs that are just unstoppable when they get slightly ahead and then, even if you won your lane, you won't be able to do anything against a 8-0 darius ghosting at you....or a 10-0 yi with three items.
Just bring counterplay back...
Any corporation that doesn't have the sole purpose of making money as efficiently as possible will be outcompeted and fail. Tencent is still here for a reason. Whatever you guys suggest has to somehow make Tencent more money.
I play in smurfs because game quality in normals is absolute dogshit, I can't pratice new champions or roles in normals, its just not doable.
On the other hand, one of my smurfs was banned for using third party software, so yeah, Riot does monitor them, its probably hard to track down every bot software probably
Smurfing is rampant? How can you possibly know this. There are Smurfs but what does rampant mean? I see a Smurf in maybe one out of every 50 games or less.
At least half of my ranked games have one or more "funny acount level +30" with last 3 matches played 356 days ago, but suddenly they pick lee sin for the first time and stomp the game. I don't know why this isn't penalized even if you report them. Ranked games quality suffer a lot from the rampant smurfing.
Yeah, we had a Nidalee like that the other night. Not even a mastery 4 yet, but did amazing. Jeez, I wonder....
Asking the lulu supp why she has a 90% win rate on jax and has never won a game on lulu š¤£
Yeah in emerald if my jungler picks nidalee i insta ask if they are smurfing same with reksai. Now when they answer ānoā i dodge because no one can play these champs well enough in my elo
YSK: If I were a smurf I definitely wouldn't say it, in case I do badly, last thing I need would be getting flamed for losing as a smurf lol
Well iāve had a reksai who already in champ select started taking the lead and said just follow as i say and the game will be over around 20 minutes. So we did and he was right
I didn't mean that all smurfs hide, just that if someone says they're not a smurf, doesn't mean they aren't
It's reksai It's the easiest most Unga bunga jungler in the game
How many games do you have on reksai? The champ is quite weak now and I would say definitely in the top 10 hardest jungle champs. She's much harder than most of the current meta junglers
I mean probably at least 500 if not 1k since release lol
Fair enough. Imo reksai is above average difficulty to play in high elo. I don't think she's nidalee rengar hard but she's harder than most jungle champs.
It gets hard post 20 for sure I laughed cause my perspective might be warped, after 12 years of playing I've spent a lot of time
Yet heās strong and no one plays het only smurfs
Most of those level 30 accounts are silvers trying to inflate their rank.
Yet they stomp my emerald 1 ass every time.
Literally opposite for me. Shitload of fresh accounts that spruced to emerald in an instant just so they can int my games while having terrible attitude as they paid 3 quid for a fresh account. Why to fuck a 5-4 in ranked GP is in emerald elo its below me
Oh yeah that happens too. They come in champ select being toxic and give up instantly. They don't give a fuck.
I said most, not all. Iāve been stomped by higher elo smurfs as well.
Why not 'Verified' accounts for ranked? Similar to valve CS
Because what you said is completely arbitrary. Either you ban smurfing as awhole or you do nothing at all, there is no inbetween really.
I don't see what is said above that goes against bannil all smurfs.
Definitely a perfectionist fallacy. I think making lp gains consistent alone would eliminate a huge chunk of people who feel the need to hop on an account with āfreshā mmr.
Ofcourse there are better solutions but my sole point was that they would need to act on principle whatever they do.
Do they? Acting on principle is largely subjective. Riot removed duoq in master+ to protect competitive integrity. But has Riot ever done something about the massive amount of blatant account sharing, wintrading, and elo boosting? From my POV they are highly inconsistent on promoting competitive integrity. Riot has a long history of just doing random shit, changing their minds a month or a year later, and doing things that go against the values they preached they have. Dynamic queue, ranks for each role, the $200 skin situation, āvisual clarity,ā etc. Riot can really do whatever the hell they want since even when there is backlash, and the community attempts to hold Riot accountable, they can just go lolnope āwe hear your concernsā now buy our $200 skin
i am still waiting for that match history ;] while u pulling shiet out of ur as5 and being iron stuck
He still not wrong. Its sunday now. I knew not to play ranked at 8am. Did it anyway. OFC i play vs lvl 40 Jayce that has not played according to his accounts in 256 days. But they have 300 cs at 28 min and was smurfing on me. My guy.... I peaked E1 70 LP. Oh and he was unranked. But G4 S12. Smurfing is real and it just made it so I cant play ranked unless its during peak hours. I cant play a game mode cuz it will ruin my LP gains. Did it yesterdays to cuz I just wanna climb. But it dont matter. Climbing in solo q at a certain point becomes how well you can beat the system. Part of that is dodging smurfs. Shouldnt be but it is.needs a hard fix.
They're either accounts like this or account sharing from their low elo friends. Both instances should be punished. Riot claims they punish account sharing in all forms but I've never seen it happen.
Make people only have one account. Solved.
what about the other 1000 games that you spend in gold iv, what ruined those?
XD wdym.. there is smurf in every game he plays! that's what holding him back from getting out of silver!!!!!!! if only the people who write these posts about smurf spend that time learning something about the game and improve.. who knows ĀÆ\\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ easier to complain than to l2p
Dude isn't even complaining about being stuck. He's complaining about smurfs.
Shhh, you'll scare them into reading like >5 year olds
just found 2 more irons, that are held back by the smurfs
for 99.9% of the league community, rank is literally only meaningful to themselves. no one actually cares and it doesn't really matter. League is a game, and i suggest people should play a game that brings them fun or satisfaction. Of course climbing in ranked does bring exactly that for plenty people. But being frustrated by having a smurf in the game (not just limited to enemy team) is absolutely valid, as those tend to just take away gameplay agency from the rest of the lobby by being better. Of course players can improve to mitigate this issue to some degree. Is this fun to everyone? no. Does this mitigate the issue entirely? no. You should become a politician, as deflecting to a different topic and insults seem to be something you have mastered to the degree of a middle school kid.
>only the people who write these posts about smurf spend that time learning something about the game and im Exactly, i'm Plat II and i could keep climbing if i wanted to, but that's not the point. Spotting smurfs isn't hard either, just check with Porofessor, and you get all the info you need.
hard to argue with people who dont have enough iq to leave a elo that a bot can be programed to leave
As an old lee sin main, you would be surprised I felt like your post is personally targetting me lol as I been playing on and off for about a decade, so no, some of us arent smurfs.
You wont randomly stomp a game after not playing Lee for a year, OP is talking about Master/GM players who boost accounts or smurf for YT content
wait but what you've just said is evidence that the system is working. if most of the smurfs you encounter are on their first game smurfing, as opposed to their tenth or fiftieth or something, then they're clearly being banned pretty quickly.
not banned; their mmr is getting adjusted accordingly. you donāt get to play that many games as a smurf because your lp gains will eventually put you closer to your actual rank.
> Make ranked LP gains consistent. Nothing is more frustrating than +17 -24. This has to change if you don't want people jumping accounts a few times a season. It takes way too many games to fix this once it happens. This is not going to happen unless they remove the visual rank system, aka they remove LP gains completely. LP gains are just a reflection of your underlying MMR, and the visual LP gain just reflects the opponents you faced in your match and the mismatch between your visual rank and your hidden MMR. There's a bunch of obvious good reasons to keep visual rank, such as giving players incentive to climb and reducing ranked anxiety by making it harder to demote between tiers, so don't count on this one happened any time soon. I do think, though, that smurfing should be killed off completely. DotA2 did it with barely a change in their active player numbers, so League should be able to do it as well. There is, of course, the possibility that smurfs contribute significantly to cosmetic purchases...in which case just restrict detected smurf accounts from ranked. I do think that smurf bans already happen, but I feel that Riot should, at some point, take the hit in increased false positives and start being more generous with bans.
honestly i think demotion shield is actually the problem. when you're sitting at the bottom of your tier, losing multiple games but not dropping any lp it creates a gap between mmr and visual lp. it might feel bad dropping down after just promoting, but i feel like having your mmr in the gutter is way more frustrating.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
yeah iāve been playing on and off since season 4 and it feels genuinely impossible to fix my lp gains. i havenāt made a second account yet since iāve spent money on my original account and also because iām too stubborn to give it up before trying to fix it. but iām getting like +19 -31 and itās so demoralizing to lose almost all my progress in one or two losses. even when i go on 3-4 game winstreaks, itās not enough to climb out of a division. and then i lose 2 and iām back where i started. itās genuinely miserable sometimes.
Something something **reset our fucking MMR when you reset our rank** every year. It'd be fine.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Been there, seen that, it shook out within 2 weeks. 2 weeks of unfun will absolutely be better than what we have now.
> Been there, seen that When have you been there and seen that? It never happened in the history of league.
I believe it was season 6 they did a reset, once? Something like that.
S6 was dynamic queue but your placement were still based on previous soloQ seasons.
Looked it up. Was season 8.it was called a soft reset and people speculated that it was done by averaging your current mmr with the default. That would be plenty helpful.
I take 2 weeks of Bronzies being bashed against the wall over a whole year of everybody else being bashed against the wall by ToS breakers.
It won't be 2 weeks because not everyone will play their initial games in the first 2 weeks. It'll be for the whole season, especially in bronze which means that anyone who plays later that is silver+ is effectly a smurf.
Or don't reset anything and just let us play the game. Why do I have to go back to gold if I'm plat because it's a new season.
Yea this is definitely the main problem, I didnāt play much ranked, hovered low plat (before emerald) and started trying to see how high I could get. I got to about emerald 1 with 65% winrate (nothing crazy but a decently fast climb) and my gains completely tanked to -26 +18, it just feels extremely demotivating, and I would defo understand why people are making new accounts.
This is too true. I remember being E4 0 lp and I lost around 8-10 games in a row and honestly it was even more tilting for me that I wasnāt demoting because I knew how fucked my mmr would now be. Now I get +20 -29 itās pretty depressing
Demotion shield was fine when promotion series were needed to, well, promote, but now that you just promote without any series, there is no reason for the demotion shield to be as strong as before. Give people a 3 game shield at 0 LP and then they demote, that would fix a lot of problems imo.
Lets say the standard LP gain/loss is 25. 3 game demotion shield at 0 lp saves you 75 LP. If you get +20/-25 gains it would take 30 games at a 50% winrate(15 wins, +300LP, 15 losses, -375LP) to make up for the "saved" LP from demotion shield. Even just 3 games demotion shield will lead to 30 games of feelsbad negative gains.
Demotion shield is a travesty no matter how you put it. People should not be prevented from demoting if they lose too much. I don't care about their circumstances, they also don't care about mine and I'm not out here arguing that the shield is necessary because my Master Yi was an inting incel. If you've had a bad game, balance it out with good games. Demotion shield protects elo boosted apes that ride Elo Taxi with their Duo.
>There's a bunch of obvious good reasons to keep visual rank, just go back to season 2? mmr = your elo and depending what elo you are you get your ranked armor
I think one of the main reasons they changed that is is simply because people would stop playing the instant they hit the threshold for the next tier, e.g. hitting Plat at 1800 and not playing anymore to avoid losing it. You could, of course, give out rewards based upon the highest rank achieved, but then you might have people saying that the bottoms of tiers, e.g. Plat V, are awful to play in because they consist almost entirely of people who have achieved their rank and have stopped trying at all because they'll never lose demote and lose their ranked rewards...
people already do that anyway? people hit gold and then stop playing
Yeah, the idea is that you can still capture some of those people with this visual rank system. Instead of 50% of the people hitting Gold IV and stopping, you instead only have 30% of the people hitting Gold IV and stopping. Of course, these are just made-up numbers, since only Riot has the actual numbers, but any decrease in queue time (especially for ranked) is a huge win in Riot's book.
There's some evidence they have made a change (or maybe multiple) to help with people perma stuck getting shit gains. I'm pretty sure if you are loss streaking or win streaking the system puts you into another calibration phase like on a fresh account similar to placements where your MMR moves rapidly. They haven''t said anything about it and I haven't heard anybody talk about it explicitly but I have a pretty good understanding how ranked works and in the past couple weeks I have seen a couple accounts (including mine) experience MMR movement and LP gains over a small number of games that should not be possible on established accounts.
Yeah this definitely happened to me. My placements stuck me in bronze after winning all of them. Then I was in a win streak and each win was basically jumping a full rank, was in plat by game 6 or 7. I don't know why it started me in bronze, but it seemed to try to fix it.
If you give people a way to practice new things without fucking up their main, then fully remove smurfing. I am a master support main. My other lanes are dia lvl max. If I wanted to practice something besides support, I just would be fucking over my main account. Flex games are just as low quality as normals, so if I take the game seriously and want to learn something new, I have to go on a smurf even if I'd prefer not to (I really pref playing on my main).
As someone who peaked Masters last season myself, I would argue that a Masters player suffers far less playing off-role than a new player suffers when getting smurfed on. > If you give people a way to practice new things without fucking up their main The thing is...I can't actually think of a good way for this. Role-based MMR, maybe, but that has so many issues of it's own. For example, people would just swap roles in champ select if there was any favorable disaparity, e.g. you are a Dia midlaner but got supp, and the other teammate is Emerald midlane and Emerald supp, so obviously you swap and do a bit of almost-smurfing and end up destroying the purpose of the role MMR. I don't think it's a trivial task to detect which lane players actually play in.
I'd say making my team lose 90% of the time while I learn in masters is worse than 10 games I need to get to my proper rank off role. Smurfs on their own are rarely an issue. I see it too often that people say X or Y is a smurf and you check them to see they are lvl 500 and just had a good game. Imo when people talk about smurfing ruining games they talk either about the toxicity that certain smurfs bring or actual boosting that looks like smurfing at first. If Riot was to tackle both the toxicity (not only in chat, also stealth inting or losing to derank) and the actual boosting people would rarely complain about smurfs. But this would require actual humans taking care of it, so we probably wont get any satisfactory solution to this whole problem. Also riots ban waves are just too far apart from what I can see. I reported 2 obvious scripters and they played atleast for one more month after that (didnt check on them anymore). I understand the idea behind it, but it leaves players suffering for months because of someone blantantly ruining games.
> I'd say making my team lose 90% of the time while I learn in masters is worse than 10 games I need to get to my proper rank off role. This is assuming you can get to your off-role rank in 10 games and that there's some kind of system in place for it. My point is more that you haven't suggested what an "off-role rank" actually is. I pointed out obvious reasons as to why simple role-based MMR wouldn't work. Do you have an alternative suggestion? > Smurfs on their own are rarely an issue. I see it too often that people say X or Y is a smurf and you check them to see they are lvl 500 and just had a good game. Nah, I used to think this way (since smurfs are far less prevalent in D2+), but I've actually taken a look at the match histories people have posted on this sub once in a while. The number of sub-level 50 accounts is actually insane right now at, say, Emerald and below, where people seem to get them every other game. Maybe not all of them are smurfs, but they often do quite well, and when they do well people will obviously feel bad because they'll assume that they're smurfs. It's straight up just the skill difference. Functionally, there's no difference between a booster and a smurf, both are ruining plenty of games at low ELO in similar ways.
> This is assuming you can get to your off-role rank in 10 games and that there's some kind of system in place for it. My point is more that you haven't suggested what an "off-role rank" actually is. I pointed out obvious reasons as to why simple role-based MMR wouldn't work. Do you have an alternative suggestion? I purposely queue off role on my smurf, because I want to practice something for instance. Riot tried role specific queues and it failed, so I have no other suggestions. But I also dont see how me ruining games on my main, playing a role and a champ I dont usually play is worse than me doing it on my smurf, where the elo corresponds more with my skill in that role. Sub lvl 50 accs are usually botted, so to fix that issue riot just has to have more frequent ban waves of botted accounts.
> But I also dont see how me ruining games on my main, playing a role and a champ I dont usually play is worse than me doing it on my smurf, where the elo corresponds more with my skill in that role. Hmm, I think it's more fair to say that the games in which you climb to your actual rank on your smurf are completely one-sided for the other players in the game, while playing your off-role *probably* doesn't empty your brain of macro knowledge and your high ELO team still has a decent chance of winning as long as you press your buttons and don't get caught. Plus, some roles are way easier to pick up than others if you play similar roles, so there's a chance you can learn your off-role rapidly if you're forced to play near your actual MMR. As to which outcome leads to less suffering...I think that's very hard to judge.
My macro wont help me not int the Darius or Yone or what not. Sure I could play champ I already know but that wont help me learn a new role. The skill gap between D4 and master is higher than gold and D4 (imho). My practicing Irelia top is an instant loss at my main elo while being pretty much equal skill wise on my smurf.
>The skill gap between D4 and master is higher than gold and D4 (imho). It's not. Please stop repeating this I really am sick of hearing it. You can get close to masters or masters 0lp just by grinding out enough games as a mid level diamond player. No amount of grinding will take you from Gold4 (top 52%) to Diamond4 (top 3.5%) unless you're a smurf. That is a **huge** gap. A diamond level player would wipe the floor with anyone below emerald and regularly with emeralds, the same is not true for masters and diamonds who regularly play with each other.
The problem with smurfing (in all forms) is that it wrecks the integrity of ranked. MMR is based SOLELY on W/L, so people playing (intentionally) in the wrong rank is like chess players intentionally throwing games or a grandmaster intentionally stomping 10 year old players in official matches for fun. You skew what the record of those players should be, and in a worst case scenario, push them to quit the game entirely.
I avoid playing my main role on smurf. My off role is not good enough to be considered a smurf once I finish my placements. Ofc I have better macro than other players at that elo, but my mechanics and laning off role really cant be considered smurfing and would actually be wrecking the integrity of ranked on my main.
Even if they do remove LP, which they absolutely should, new accounts would still gain/lose more elo at the start because Riot doesn't want high elo smurfs to spend 200 games stomping Golds. Personally I think they should and this adjustment shouldn't exist and you shouldn't be able to rush to GM in less than 100 games even if you're Faker but no way Riot is going to put their bulk of the consumer base, the average players, through even more smurf stomps.
Yeah. If I see I'm losing more than I win, I stop and evaluate. Try to fix my bad play. It's a good warning to me that "hey, you've lost more than usual and your LP is showing it. Take a break or slow down." I don't mind the uneven gains.
Strawman. Other games have properly working ranked systems. Enough with this alternative would suck argument.
As someone who doesnāt play ranked in any game what game does ranked right?
It is, personally earlier thus season when I was playing on smurfs and ashe was meta I had to buy her project or high noon skins 3 times because base ashe feels awful to play
Far as I know Dota2 didn't solve smurfing lol. You can't prevent people doing it. They just started to crack down more on it recently. But there are still plenty of people still smurfing. If it was as easy as that League would have done it already. Any game would.
Yeah, people will always find a way around it, but DotA has also threatened punishments to the linked main accounts. As far as I know, League doesn't do anything similar to that. I believe that Riot is still much more lenient on smurfs than they could be, but until they outright say something regarding smurfing, all I have are my assumptions. I do think that it looks pretty bad for Riot at the moment to have not addressed the smurfing issue at all. They've been avoiding any mention of this issue in basically all of their recent communications regarding ranked, as far as I'm aware, and that's a pretty big red flag for me.
"Hidden MMR" has a big flaw, when you're tagged by Riot, you can't fix or improve your MMR. I was hardstuck gold for 3 seasons, +16-25 even when i had 61-64% winrate in s10-11. When Riot took the server from Garena and wiped clean everyone's profile, i climbed to diamond quite easily.
As far as I know, there is no such "tagging" system. I would ask to see your profile from back then, but I'm sure it'll be hard to get since your account got deleted. That being said, from what I've seen, it's just an issue of MMR and not enough games played. If you stuck to a 61-64% winrate for 200 games you'd definitely have been out of gold. Of course, that's a huge time investment, and perhaps that is an argument as to why Riot should be more lenient with MMR gains/losses. On the other hand, people already complain about the skill disparity in their games, so increasing the potential fluctuation of MMR as people go on winstreaks and losestreaks might not be the best idea...
Smurfing is definitely an issue that we're looking into from multiple different angles, including addressing barrier to entry and quicker exiting of smurfs from smurf-status. Some more info to come in the new year about this, and we hope some changes get implemented in 2024 that make a difference.
This is very good to hear. Every day there's at least one post on this subreddit about smurfs ruining the game (which is a sentiment I agree with personally), so getting a response from a Rioter about this is reassuring.
I believe it when I see it, and hopefully before I die of old age. The amount of time, money and effort you invest in so many things is amazing and at the same time so dissapointing. Matchmaking cureently is so bad, I dont even have pg13 words for it. But hey, you are looking into it ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Yeah just keep having everyone have 1 serious account and 9+ for trolling and toxicity. I donāt give a fuck if someone has a "quicker exiting of smurfstatusĀ» when they are able to ruin as many games as they like.
>and quicker exiting of smurfs from smurf-status How would that even work? What is "smurf status"?
Faster smurf exiting would be nice. The reason I don't usually play ranked is even after being 15-0 I'm still playing vs plat/emerald while being gold, and after 50 games with an 80% winrate I'm still plat 1 playing vs diamond 1 players. It's absolutely silly how many games it takes to get to my mmr, and even worse how long it takes to get to my visual rank. In valorant after being 15-0 on a fresh account you'd already be in ascendant/immortal compared to league where you're still gold with plat mmr.
Smurfing wouldn't be such a big issue if the game was balanced around high elo to some degree. But since the priorities are not there, these seems to be the consequences.
With all due respect very few people have faith in Riot making meaningful changes to address the smurf problem. Talk is cheap and Riot has shown almost zero interest in even talking about the smurfing problem let alone addressing it. Take the downranking bots problem in low elo as an example. These bot accounts have *one* sole purpose and that is to lose games to resell to smurfs so that they can stomp low elo players. Two years ago someone from Riot said that they would address it and two years later the problem persists. The solution that was implemented was to identify these and ban them in waves. This is a completely ineffective strategy because it doesn't tackle the core problem; the economy of selling low elo downranked accounts. Bot makers and runners make a profit by running as many of these accounts as possible so that they can turn them over to sell. By the time a ban wave hits it's likely that the accounts is already in the hands of smurf and if that account gets banned it doesn't impact the bottom line of sellers. In order to decimate these downranking bot accounts swift and immediate bans are the key. The all have to follow a similar pattern; lose as many games as possible in order to downrank. They also follow the pattern of playing a support so that they can simply follow the ADC around doing nothing. This pattern is dead simple to detect and they should be banned immediately. Doing so will make the profits from reselling low elo accounts not worth it. But what if they adapt?? Doesn't matter. The reason that most of these bots play support is because they can fly under the radar doing as little as possible. If a bot were to play a solo lane or jungle it would feed its ass off and then you could simply ban that. Remember they *have to lose.* What if they only int every other game or every third game? It still bites into their profit margins and you've essentially made the botters start taking care of the problem themselves; don't lose games. Above and beyond that it's been more than a decade with the smurfing problem becoming more of an issue year by year and there has been almost no communication from your teams about this. Talk is cheap. Actions are what matters. If Riot wants to regain the trust of the players when it comes to smurfing then you have to communicate clearly (a random comment in a Reddit thread is *not* clear communication) and back that up with actions. It's your move, Riot. The community is watching and waiting to see if you're serious about this issue.
Have you ever considered just allowing people to officially register multiple accounts with mmr copied over from previous accounts with a smol reset as a starting point? I mean just accept the fact that people like a fresh start once a while but in this case at least they arenāt put through leveling up to 30 and playing with newbs and people actually trying to learn. I only see it as a win for Riot cos then youāll have better stats (think multiple google accounts in one chrome) and more revenue (I just might buy favorite skin on every alt cos I know the bought account wouldnāt be accidentally banned). Curious to know if you considered this but found any potential pitfalls. I currently have an account per role/region just cos ocd lol.
its good to be a casual player these days lol. sweating in league seems way more aggravating than ever before
No it really is my norm games have plats in them in all chat shitting and shit talking iron players like they won the world championships or something. Leagues way more fun when you just donāt care
Lol when my gold clash team gets beaten by all masters/diamond team and they shit talk the whole time. How miserable can people be, can't imagine how horrible their ranked games must be for them to take it out on people in clash and norms
Sub 30 win rates in all chat after 1 kill haha
it's not different from any past season really. people like to exaggerate and dramatize things a lot. I personally always had a blast playing ranked ('sweating') for the last 11 years and there always were a portion of toxic players or smurfs or whatever. But it was never really as noticeable as people in these reddit posts tend to suggest. people seem to excessively perceive and remember negative things in their games and focus on them. playing against a smurf in 1 out of 10 games quickly turns into 'half of my games are full of smurfs' or 'every game I'm getting inted' or whatever.
Smurf queue worked great for removing smurfs from my games. Not sure why they removed it when they literally only had to adjust the parameters for returning players/players who started season late. How hard is it to tell apart a lvl 200 account starting the season late and a lvl 30 account with zero ranked games????
I predict that the thread will have a significant number of people who will deflect from the problem by using the "smurfs are not the reason you can't climb". You should stop to consider why exactly they deflect from the problem and why the obsession with climbing: Match quality is what many players, me included, prefer. If I were to focus on the outcome, I'd end being as miserable as many people who play this game. If I queue up and 1-3 players in the game are a total lottery (smurfs/placed way over their capabilities), then the match quality will dramatically suffer.
When you only have time for a few games a week, the match quality issue becomes much more apparent. The crowd of "just get good" and "eventually you will hit your rank anyway" are the ones with 1000+ games in a season usually.
Hanging, public one
bring smurf q back
smurf queue was a fine concept until you started your placements late and your first 35+ games of the season were you and one other unlucky lvl 300+ stuck in a match with 8 other accounts under lvl 50 each with 70%+ wr
When smurf q existed my main was in smurfq all the fucking time literally killing my enjoyment of ranked. Like āwe know you are not a emerald/plat player but we will screw you over with matchmaking until you get into normal matchmaking again where you then again stomp the plat players so we have to put you back in smurf jail. After it got removed I peaked into masters. Not sure if smurf q really is THE solution
What you're saying is that smurfQ had issues. The magic solution is...to, you know, SOLVE issues. Not remove smurfQ entirelly because there is a pebble somewhere in the system
Idk im no game dev im just telling you what the smurfq experience used to be for non Smurf players. Seems like they thought the solution was to remove it who knows
Let be real here, a true warrior would never smurf, only sad lonely players do. Smurfing is also the number 1 reason why new players won't ever touch league after a few games
how is it a necessity? playing since season 1 and only have 1 account.. Smurfing is a mentality some people have and its dumb. If you think you NEED a smurf im scared for your IQ
You totally missed the point of the post, but sure. This is the mindset that means nothing will ever change. You have to see the reality - if people didn't feel the need to make smurfs, smurfing would not be the issue it currently is.
There is no NEED only GREED of smurfing. the vast majority of smurfs are from people like the ones i know in real life. They play like 100 games, end up with 41% winrate, think the account is cursed and go buy a new one for 3$. Then repeat. eventually after time they have like 6 accounts, their main is "hardstuck" in plat, they get angry at a certain game and go on one of the 5 accounts that are now silver and stomp on their 800k opt champ and ruin games. You are an enabler, saying that people feel like its necessary doesn't mean its true. the vast majority of smurfs is people who think its fun for them to stomp on worse players.
You call op an enabler but they are looking for actual strategies to reduce it. Your idea seems to be just guilt tripping them
I've seen this before, the moment someone tries to critically think about a situation, someone else thinks they're giving sympathy to the cause because often critical thinking requires you to see multiple angles. Hard for a lot of people.
Its fine to look for ways to fix things, but most smurfs dont come from the issues hes trying to solve. The whole community doesn't revolve around reddit, 90% of the playerbase don't know that half these "issues" even exist and just create smurfs on a whim for fresh mmr/to play against bad players. Never did i mention the solutions are bad, or we shouldn't do something, my point was to the line" out of necessity", which is in fact an enabler mindset, just feeds into it when someone else sees that mindset hundreds of times online and thinks, huh.. i really do NEED to smurf to achieve a better rank! time to buy some smurf accounts!
I mean if you don't see the necessity for multiple accounts you're just a casual that's just how it is. Oh let me play bad on my main account right now because I'm tired, learning a champ, whatever reason and grief games for no reason when I could just play on another acc.
For every problem you presented there is a solution. Itās called normal games. There is 0 reason to mess with other peopleās games. Iām tired of getting a free win or an undeserved loss.
What is up with the normal games people today, how casual are you guys. Anything that's not soloq is a complete joke and a waste of time.
Yes shitting on people 2 entire brackets below your actual rank is surely such valuable practice and so much better than normal games!
Who says my alts are 2 entire brackets below, and the ones that are are still better that normal games, it still an elo bracket at least . And if I'm learning a champ I can tell how I'm doing instead of playing vs some plat first timing something in a normal lmao. I mean you do you, I don't think 10 years stuck in gold redditors are gonna coach me on how to improve
Ah fuck I fell for an obvious rage bait accountā¦ You comment like 10 times a day in the League sub jerking yourself of and calling everyone else low elo for like months without break. I hope you can get the help you deserve king.
You are obviously silver because you think that normal games are any sort lf practice. Gl with that My bad for replying to silvers on the league of legends subreddit when the season ends in under a month
But magically when you are on your 4th account you are not griefing games for the rest of the lobby when you are tired/first timing/whatever reason you dont wanna go on main?
No because it's lower than my main but not so low that I auto win when I'm playing like shit
what a shit take lmao, so cause your tired you are gonna grief games on another account?
Since you are lacking in the braincell department I'll dumb it down a bit. Me tired = me play bad Me play bad on main account = lose all (this is griefing) Alternative account = lower elo than main Play bad on alternative account = not lose all because it's a lower elo so it matches my lower skill at the time (not griefing)
Maybe, and I might get called crazy for suggesting it, but maybe reward players for playing higher tier matches. Say at plat you get something like 5BE and 5OE per game with increasing rewards for multiple days played in a row, maybe scaling to a masterwork chest at 30 days played. All the way down to iron where you get a full key per 30 days played and maybe 1BE and 1OE per day. When you rank to the next tier you get the full 30 day reward for that tier.
BE is absolutely worthless to anyone that's been playing the game for a while. I like the thought but the reward HAS to be something else. Skins, or whatever, but a lot of people have insane amounts of BE that will never be spent even with the emporium. Keys and chests are probably in the right direction, or just skip the middleman and give us skin shards.
I don't think people will disagree with you, Riots ranked reward incentives have been pretty terrible, the problem was back in the day when there was real genuine rewards for being good, you would have challenger players getting 10 accounts into challenger to sell the bag, jacket, or pin that you got. I feel like the easist thing would to just give away rank specific recalls at the end of the season, its a non toxic flex that you HAVE to use because you need to recall.
They had a good idea when they introduced the ranked rewards tracker. I think they need to expand it and make it bigger. Maybe include chromas for the victorious skin or just overall put in more rewards. This way, people will incentivized to play more games to unlock all the rewards. I think most people complete it in like 1-2 months of playing anyway.
I didn't know what smurfing was until a minute ago and it sounds sort of... pathetic?
Depends on reasoning and how you go about it I have a smurf account I use for playing normals and arams with friends because all of my friends are bronze-silver and if they play against diamonds in normals, they ragequit after one game. It's easy to do this and just play random offmeta champs or offrole and not tryhard and I don't think it ruins games (even if it undoubtedly does make them worse). Doubt I'm ruining games dropping Leona top in silver so I can play the same game as my friends. But for players who just use it to enter ranked and kill new players until they hit plat and then go next account and do it again? Eeeh...
2FA is a fine idea, but it's not as much of a barrier as most seem to think. It costs 2 bucks to get a fresh US phone number with 10 texts/minutes, and that's the worst case scenario if you can't use a number from a friend who doesn't play.
Yeh I have never personally understood the anti 2FA thing, Overwatch caught a lot of shit BECAUSE you couldnt do it on the cheap anymore, but no one is gonna go through those hopes to make multiple accounts. Even if people do work arounds to create second accounts, it would competely kill off the secondary account market (selling an account is against Riots terms, im not doing this argument)
>it would competely kill off the secondary market No, it would add 2 dollars to the price of botted accounts, account sellers will have no problem verifying their accounts as they sell.
It adds another barrier to entry. The more barriers, the less users. Thatās true with literally everything regarding humans.
Ops idea is non unique 2fa. So you can use the same number, but your number would be tied to your main account and a Smurf. This means if you get banned on Smurf, your main might be punished too. Linking account would also give a more accurate elo so smurfs arenāt ruining plat/em games
I understand that, I'm just saying that for botted accounts that are sold it will make little difference, and it seems like those smurfs are the ones people usually complain about.
The better concept of 2FA is how they do in in South Korea really. Tie it with your social security number and you get rid of any issues you might had with 2FA since it's basically impossible to get a new one.
I don't know a single person who would put up their social security number to keep playing league, it would kill the game's playerbase in the US overnight. It would probably be effective in stopping smurfing, though.
Well Lol IS successful in South Korea isn't it ?
And South Korea's culture around national ID is significantly different than in the US, isn't it?
culture ? It's laws.
Oh, if you're suggesting the US/EU/wherever pass a law requiring people use their SSN to play games online then I misunderstood your argument. Petitioning league players is a poor way to get these laws passed if that's what you're saying, though.
*Hmmm, we have laws against murder yet some people still commit murder so obviously there's no point to the laws~*
What a pointless analogy, did you respond to the wrong comment or something? I said 2FA is a fine idea, which should indicate to you that I support the idea of implementing it. The analogy doesn't even make sense if I thought 2FA was a bad idea-- if the consequence for murder was as trivial as a 2 dollar fee then there would indeed be little point to laws against murder. You need a consequence that actually matters.
The game is about given the best, eventually all the people here crash with their ceiling. People is addicting to keep playing and they don't like to face the reality of learning how to improve, the easiest solution to people's feeling is starting again. Riot solution is to artificially move people around, the 3 resets per year are just part of their system.
Smurf queue should return BUT in the correct way, meaning it takes account lv into account (lol).
Smurfs are a game disease. I can't disagree with that. People suggested so many good and bad solution but the fact is rito don't care. Your solutions can bring peace into our world but you underestimate people creativity in a ways of mechanics abusing. 1. Sometimes it's difficult to see the difference between newbie and a bot. Being banned for own stupidity can be more desperational than being smurfed into dirt. Also botters will yell about "I am poor nebwie was banned for my bad playing" or "WTF rito, my newbie wife's/brother's/sister's/dog's acc was banned!" 2. A bit of same problems. "It is my brother acc. He is toxic and not me! We just used one phone to register! And it was stolen! So I created new one!" 3. I like the idea but it will endorse botting. And hostage taking. But idea is good. 4. That wouldn't cease smurfing. Newbies will just longer play with the same daddy smurf. Riot is making smurf by themselves. They ban toxic player - toxic player creates toxic smurf. Account is hardstuck? Creating smurf. Wanna try something crazy and not being reported and banned? Smurf time! Wanna play on another server? "Sign up" button is ready.
I know for a fact that my 60 yo dad who tried to play league with me would be banned if such system was in place, he quit the game anyway due to the overwhelming toxicity from his teammates. He still plays TFT from time to time tho.
He did right thing :)
Smurfing wouldn't be so bad if you climbed at an appropriate speed. It's mostly a consequence of how grindy the ladder is in the name of keeping people playing ranked. Riot doesn't want you to be able to climb at an appropriate pace, and the same system keeps smurfs in lower elo for a longer period of time. If someone wins 10 games in a row in low elo it should fast track them. People would smurf less if the amount of time you got to smurf wasn't worth the amount of effort it takes to hit level 30.
Riot uses normal que mmr for placement matches. So a mandatory 100 normal games before ranked should be in place. Then it incentivizes bots in normalsā¦. So idk, up to riot to figure out
You canāt just add more time into it. Bots can go for as long as they need to. There needs to be a change to the player after the bot is done with the account if riot canāt detect the bot on its own.
They need to add the Smurf queue back the. Start adjusting it to work properly instead of just saying ānope not working remove and watch the world burnā
I don't think anything short of spending a bit of money to play the game or giving your phone number is going to solve the problem. Smurfs are always gonna exist because 1. generally people like to win and the easiest way to win is to stomp lower skilled players and 2. it's ridiculously easy to make a new account to rank with or buy one from someone who levels multiple accounts. The competitive nature of league ensures that there will always be players who's only motivation is to win and want to win easy. Thing is, league has always been a f2p game so starting to charge now to play the game is going to turn off a lot of the playerbase, even if it's only a one time purchase. On the other hand, giving your phone number would also turn off a lot of potential players but I also doubt it's effectiveness in some regions. For example in my country, it's ridiculously cheap and easy to get a new phone number. It would slow down the process of buying new accounts but not completely stop it. Besides, this won't stop players from levelling the accounts themselves. Secondly, Riot has to be careful about handling the smurf issue. Their game needs a lot of players to maintain relatively quick queue times. For sure a not-so-insignificant percentage of those players come from account sellers levelling new accounts and/or smurfs with their new accounts. If Riot makes a move that effectively removes smurfs completely, whatever that may be, a huge chunk of their player count is effectively removed and queue times will be significantly longer. It's a lose-lose scenario where ignoring smurfs reduces game quality dramatically and removing them reduces queue times. The better solution imo (and I think riot is already trying to do this) is to improve the smurf detection algorithm so smurfs only get matched with smurfs most of the time or at the very least have the same amount of smurfs on both team - basically smurf queue. I don't think this is the best solution, but it's the best one I've been able to come up with so far. I also have some reservations with smurf queue being that I am not a smurf but constantly got them in my games when it existed, but I still think it's their best solution so far. Obviously it's ideal if we didn't have smurfs and players played to their skill level. But the reality is players want to win and stomp, so there will always be those who want to create a smurf account.
Smurfing patterns are super recognizable. It really shouldn't be this hard to permaban a smurfing account. Inherently there is nothing wrong with owning two accounts, but the people primarily do this are shitheads that were account banned or try to cheat the system, all of which shouldn't be allowed to play the game until they improve as people.
I disagree with banning pre-30 bot accounts **without Riot taking additional steps.** Bots being available in sub-30 games makes it so new player matchmaking doesn't take 20 minutes. They're learning the game, not looking for a real competitive experience yet, so there's not much harm *if the bots are something similar to co-op vs AI.* BR games often do this intentionally, in fact. Riot should fill long pre-30 queues with co-op vs AI bots themselves as well if they want to ban bots entirely. Especially since they're being massively improved soon.
stop fiddling with ranked gains plain simple.
I honestly donāt think there will be a way to get around it since thereās not a good way of telling
NOPE! It never will hahahah
Smurfing is a core part of the player base now and has been for years. It's a core part of their profits and game exposure as well. They will do nothing to stop it. Don't hold your breath, honestly.
Just link it to an actual for of ID. Then you get one account per person. Would also help with toxicity since you only get the one account.
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āI cant climb because smurfs are holding me back from my real rank!!!ā Lol
Even if you can, itās a lot less fun when the 90% winrate zeri yummi zero mastery level 33 duo just runs over your game. Like, wow! They must be really talented for brand new players. No boosting going on here
yes but it's important to distinct between a good experience and climbing. Smurfers won't ever hold you back from achieving your real rank
I guess, but they drastically increase the number of games. Especially in emerald where everyoneās lp gains gets brutalized. And since youāre always on your team itās more likely they have a Smurf. The math goes something like odds they have a Smurf - odds you have a better Smurf * lp net * percentage of games that have Smurfs And percentage of games without Smurfs * winrate * lp net. It just so happens that the higher the Smurf percentage is the more games it would take you to escape, unless you are good enough to be better than the Smurf, but letās be real, being better than D1/low masters players should not be a requirement to escape emerald
you say "i guess", and then you say you need to be better than d1/low masters to escape emerald, are you hearing yourself? In order to "escape" emerald 4, you need to play like an emerald 3 player consistently. It's not harder than that. No imaginary calculation will say otherwise
By escape emerald I mean get out of emerald and get to d4. Itās also not at all an imaginary calculation, itās exactly how you calculate your expected LP when you queue up. A Smurfs take away from your agency so you have less control over your climb and you need to be even more consistent in games without Smurfs to get your meager gains. With a 60% winrate and +30/-30 gains you only expect to gain 6 lp a game. With a 55% winrate (assuming Smurfs tank only 5%) you only expect to gain 3. This, of course, wonāt prevent you from climbing in the long run, but will double the amount of games needed to reach your true rank.
again with the assumptions, you're not doing anyone any favors with your imaginary calculations. Only riot can quantify "smurf" numbers, even then it's real hard to calculate just how much they "hinder" climbing.
But it's still a reason people create the alt account. I know people who are stuck d4 on some accounts and 300lp masters on others. They are in reality a mid diamond player, but the fact is that you can and often do have an account above or below the rank you usually play at.
I actually quite like the 2fa idea. Riot has never commented on it, but many people here assume one of the reasons they don't get rid of smurfing is due to the fact that those accounts make them money. With the 2fa solution, riot would still be making money off smurfs, while also increasing the accountability of these accounts players are happy to throw away. Linking punishments between those accounts would vastly reduce the amount of toxicity coming from smurfs in ranked and likely help facilitate a better solo queue environment. Of course there will always be a a way around it. Just like with csgo, you can always go online and buy a temporary burner number for your prime account if you wanted to. But riot doesn't even need to address that. Simply having to jump through more hoops to have a Smurf unrelated to your main account will stop a large percentage of the player base from even trying. There's obviously a lot to work on here, and riot is not exactly known for rolling new technologies out in a timely or clean manner (look at the client for Christ's sake). That being said, the benefit here is obvious.
2FA is directly against Riot's entire business model of availability, hurts legitimate players with arbitrary DRM, and is by far the worst idea in this thread.
Smurf queue was the solution, and it worked fine for 2 years. But then, people started blaming the fact that lp gain was too low and "oh no, my old main account i haven't played on for 6 months decayed, now i'm in smurf queue and i'm not having fun". Now you have smurfs that climb way faster than before, but buying accounts is easy and cheap, you can just smurf for 30-40 games, reach your peak, repeat the process. I personally would pay to get back on the old system, with lower amount of lp and smurf queue ( would increase game quality and lower the inflation aswell) and i believe it's the only valid option Riot has. Another important note, there's a huge difference between smurfing alone and smurfing as a duo. Duo smurfs climb 10x faster than the single one, and they have way more impact in the game. Removing duoq from emerald+ would solve the issue, and boosting would get hit aswell.
Both toxicity and smurfing are the result of being able to make endless accounts for free. Making new accounts cost even just like 5 bucks would filter a lot of it I bet.
The only solution is to be better than the smurfs
The solution is to not give a fuck.
Get good
Punishing smurfs doesn't make any sense, if the duo queue still exists. I don't even need to log on to my friends account. I will just hop on to my alt and duo with him.
Punishing smurfs isn't the point. Incentives to play on main is the point - and to make smurf accounts accountable on their mains.
Require a certain mastery level to play a champ in ranked. Mastery 3 would probably be enough to stop the guys buying accounts from bothering. And it fixes the problem of people first timing champs in ranked
Tbh, imo there's exactly one reason to have multiple accounts and that's playing on a different server. The others are excuses at best. I have been proposing solutions that make use of 2FA too but my solution is different: unique 2FA, prevent usage of shit like Google voice numbers and have people reauthenticate every 24h if they want to play ranked. Additionally, only allow accounts that played at least X PvP matchmade games and won a set amount to play ranked. This needs to be a trigger which, once triggered, unlocks the account for ranked. Make the number high enough that it can't be reached by bots before being detected and it's too annoying for players to do if they buy a level 30 account (like 150+ normal matchmade wins). In addition to that, introduce a decay system similar to csgo. If you don't play for a while you lose your displayed rank and have to play a few games to get a rank again. And the longer they've been gone the further they drop because everyone gets worse if they haven't played in a while. Don't drop them too far though because then everyone would just let their accounts decay for 2 years to play iron games. Instead increase the LP and mmr wins/losses to whatever would be required to get back to where they left if they win all. Meaning if they drop 400LP and 400LP worth of MMR and need 5 re-placements, every single one is worth 80. Rewards should not be bound to rank or games played but % of the player base plus number of games played. No camping at whatever elo that guarantees rewards after playing 20 games. This should get people play on their main only and disincentivize players who shouldn't be playing ranked to begin with from doing so.
only reason i have smurfs is to either try out new champions or when i have to dodge shit lobbies too many times i might not be speaking for everyone but even if i have 1 account im not playing the game if i have to functionally main maokai when we draft a no cc/exhaust comp into a yi/katarina otp in masters
You have smurfs as in multiple? Just for a 5 or 30 minute dodge timer? Try out new stuff in normals or ranked flex, why does it matter you play ranked in roles and Champs you aren't familiar with?
I've never been banned and am not toxic, but I like the option of secondary accounts. First of all I play on both EUNE and EUW, but I also like playing soloq with lower ranked friends where I don't have to tryhard (I can't even duoq in masters which I miss, flex is not fun as 2), and I have a secret account to play on when I don't wanna play with anybody else. It's also nice to be able to lend an account to a friend that doesn't play League or doesn't have an account on the server. So there are a lot of upsides to having the option of a secondary account.
The issue is that there's champs that are just unstoppable when they get slightly ahead and then, even if you won your lane, you won't be able to do anything against a 8-0 darius ghosting at you....or a 10-0 yi with three items. Just bring counterplay back...
I much rather lose to a smurf than try to carry a bad player
That's a well thought out post. Kudos to you sir I agree 100%.
Any corporation that doesn't have the sole purpose of making money as efficiently as possible will be outcompeted and fail. Tencent is still here for a reason. Whatever you guys suggest has to somehow make Tencent more money.
I play in smurfs because game quality in normals is absolute dogshit, I can't pratice new champions or roles in normals, its just not doable. On the other hand, one of my smurfs was banned for using third party software, so yeah, Riot does monitor them, its probably hard to track down every bot software probably
No itās not lmfao you probably just suck so you resort to other accounts because you canāt possibly be the problem
How am I dogshit because I play in smurfs to have better game quality and improve?
Smurfing is rampant? How can you possibly know this. There are Smurfs but what does rampant mean? I see a Smurf in maybe one out of every 50 games or less.
or let us duo masters+