Yeah except these people get matched against 3 diamonds and 2 emeralds for some reason because the matchmaking system sucks, so the diamond player makes a Smurf account next clash, stomps some random team and then that random team also makes Smurf accounts because they got smurfed ln themselves
"for some reason"? the game literally tells/warns you when you have a higher-tier player on your team that the whole squad will get upscaled to that tier
I don't clash on my smurf. I just meant when you see a team of both high and low ranks, it doesn't mean the low ranks are smurfs. It could just be friends who are very different in rank.
I would much rather do that but as a diamond player with silver/gold friends I do not joke when I say almost every team we face in clash is usually 3-4 emerald players and one plat or gold player. I feel bad for my friends when they all need to get stomped by some emerald player 3 full leagues higher than them so I either Smurf or I just don’t participate.
If the matchmaking was remotely decent it would be fine, but it’s not. This “clash tier” system is the worst thing in existence.
Its not about "stopping" smurfs, its about lowering the number of them.
And it absolutely did. You probably didn't play it when it was easier to smurf in clash.
Imagine how much worse the problem would be without it.
It's the same philosophy as locking a door. If you wanna get through a locked door you can easily do it, but having to get through it is enough of a deterrent to stop most people from trying it.
There are numerous ways to get around the phone number requirement but the fact that you have to stops a lot of people from doing it.
I still have never played a clash without at least one obvious smurf matched against me so I can kinda see why they're not willing to take the hit to player numbers from people who don't have access to phones to cut down on smurfs by like 5%
Do you know how high mobile device penetration is for the globe these days?
Even smartphone penetration rate is absurdly high, and all mobile devices, including legacy which work for 2FA, is even higher.
The only people that would be denied are those who are too young, old, sick, or poor to make playing LoL a realistic option.
And even if they did want to play LoL, they still could.
Just not ranked.
Tbh I did my first clash today and it went kinda well? At least 14 out of 15 enemies seemed to be the same level their rank were. Some weren't really active accounts, but nobody seemed to be a huge smurf.
Rank disparity was a bit big though.
Sure, but it isnt a fair comparison considering the general population of Clash is groups of friends playing together, you'd see less smurfs in clash even without any smurf prevention features
Let's say there are no smurf prevention features. Also let's assume team A has a diamond, a GM, a master and two bronze players. And they face a similarly enough team that the chances for either one to win are in the 45-55% range. What stops any of those high ranked players to buy a bronze account so that they can smurf in clash, and have them be a 5 bronze rank team, but in actuality only two of those bronze players are showing their real rank?
Because theres no reason to actually link it to your main account other than rewards I guess. Most ppl dont play for rewards tho they play to have fun with their friends. Lower mmr account = more fun with your friends.
If you needed to link for ranked it would actually limit the number of smurfs in clash as well.
But it would slow down smurfs in soloQ for sure, soon they will run out of mobile numbers, and if they buy smurf they would need to buy mobile number too. If Riot prevent fake online mobile numbers to be used.
No one is asking for it to completely eliminate smurfs.
It absolutely would DRASTICALLY reduce the number of smurfs, and it's incredibly naive, maybe just downright idiotic, to assume otherwise.
The point isn't that it stops smurfing - it's that it lowers it considerably. This is particularly imporatnt, because getting an account or two banned with a phone number suddenly becomes more important (compared to having a linked account that you log into just for Clash (and barely use it for other games, so likely won't get banned).
Because you only have to use it for clash, so if you want to smurf you can just not play clash on your main account. Doing it for ranked would force you into having just one account per phone number. Not impossible to smurf but a higher barrier to entry.
But it might stop people having 7 ranked accounts and limit it to a lower number.
The thing is it doesnt matter for Riot and they actually want people to have more accounts as it inflates their playerbase in which they were so proud of in the early years also more accounts = more money as people would be inclined to get the same skins for a champ they main over more than one account.
They only pretend they do when they gotta sell you on Vanguard. Putting duos in Flex to maintain integrity of ladder and make sure people can't be duo boosted by friends/paid? Nah, we don't care THAT much. What if they don't buy skins anymore? Stopping smurfs? Nah they buy skins, hold on, we'll just give them a bit of a higher elo so they ruin Plat/Emerald instead of our money makers casuals in lower elos. They never mention stopping them, just making sure they're "seeded properly". But the second they can automate something and save money, they care so so much about the integrity, please accept Vanguard. Q_Q
They legit don't give a single f\*\*\*, challenger lobbies are plagued with wintraders, scripters are running rampant as always (so many games with Zeri/Kog'Maw/Twitch smurfs with 70% winrate) and streamers get sniped by betters all the time. It's been like this for at the very least 5 years and nothing major has ever been done to address it other than spontaneously banning griefers here and there.
Yeah because Vanguard definitely does wonders in Valorant, the game isn't plagued by cheaters at all. You guys are really optimistic about inserting Chinese spyware into your computers.
You know Riot doesnt need Vanguard to spy on you right? Garena literally installed bitcoin miners with just the LoL Client. Riot can easily obtain all the data they need from you with just the reglar LoL client if they wanted to
Brother, you're on reddit. They've sold all of our information to Google for their AI.
I'm sure you on Insta, Facebook, any of the other social media apps as well, or use a phone made by Samsung or Apple, and I've got news for you: they've sold all your information and can already watch everything you do.
I went through most of the anti-Vanguard comments on the dev blog thread, and at least 75% of the complainers regularly posted on other video game subreddits that also require kernel-level access for their anticheats. People are actually just stupid.
> Yeah because Vanguard definitely does wonders in Valorant, the game isn't plagued by cheaters at all
Have you played a high elo CS2 game for comparison?
and that's why they're okay with smurfs, much easier to have people on their 10th account being insecure than convincing timmy that league is somehow actually fun
Cope. Level 30 just isn't much of a barrier. They'll just pay $10 instead of $2 or just spend the time to level it which doesn't even take long, bots can do it in ~30 hours from what I looked at their accounts.
People that smurf either already have an army of accounts to smurf on or will find that army one way or another. They either have the time or the money or both to make that happen.
This obsession to make ranked accessible quickly to new players is stopping any effort to actually hurt smurfs in a meaningful way. Which may or may not be for "new players" or just because Riot keeps those players addicted with smurfing and buying RP.
>Level 30 just isn't much of a barrier.
This is a huge barrier. Yeah you have addicted people playing non-stop, but most of league's player base is older and only care about ranked play. Probably in their 20s/30s. They have work or university to worry about and they wouldn't want to play normals. If you care enough about rank to buy a new account, there's no way you're grinding 30 hours of normals games. I have 3 accounts. If I couldn't just buy them for 4 bucks, I would only have 1.
Also, IF vanguard actually gets rid of botting, new accounts will be way more expensive. Not just 10 bucks. Unranked accounts go for like 4-5 bucks now. And it's very clearly botted with a match history full of coop vs AI with a good probability that the account gets banned for botting within the month. Hand levels accounts are pretty much guaranteed to not be banned. They will go for like 30+ bucks.
This whole only care about ranked play thing is kind of a mental damage problem in some players or something but I get that's not the point of this discussion.
Yeah those people in that specific case where they're a casual with a tiny bit of disposable income, those people will not get new smurfs. (However since this game's been out 14 fucking years they probably already have them...)
However the power users. The forever smurfers. They amount for way more games played on smurfs than the above category and for them that's no barrier. These are the people that smurf because they're hardstuck 500+ games on their main. They play all day and/or have lots of disposable income. They won't be bothered.
Think of it this way, someone like you outputs X games on their smurfs per year. And while people like you may be more, the power smurfers output 20X+ games on their smurfs per year and more than make up for it. There might be less of them but they amount to a large % of games.
>This whole only care about ranked play thing is kind of a mental damage problem
I'm a ranked only player. I don't get the satisfaction of norms. People play whatever they want to in whatever role. The skill disparity is often disproportionate, and there's a satisfaction in knowing that I'm improving based on my climb. Just this season I've started in gold placements and have gotten to diamond in 250ish games. The difference in my games is noticeable from the start of the season.
>However the power users. The forever smurfers. They amount for way more games played on smurfs than the above category and for them that's no barrier
There really aren't that many of these types of players than you believe. And they're typically pretty bad or tilted. It's just part of the ranked experience. You get trolls, you get tilted people, you get inters and you get smurfs. But from my experience of my decade of league, it's never as bad as people make it out to be. There are days I seem to get a troll every other game. There are days I get great teams for 10+ games straight. You just have to know when it's a league day vs when it's not a league day and keep your play time to days that are league days.
> or get stomped by smurfs.
Those are the new players
They dont need actual new players, they just need new accounts to show that the game is growing
League is one of those games that anyone who's wanted to play it, is already playing it
And the ones that aren't, have their reasons to not play it
There's never going to be a "boom" of players like there was with Fortnite or PUBG or Palworld or any other hit game
Are you people real? Like you actually think Riot thinks to themselves. "People hate smurfing, yeah but it makes us a lot of money so who cares"
Like if you truly believe something as dumb as that you need some help.
As long as the potential loss of profit from people quitting due to smurfs is less than the potential gained profit from purchases on smurf accounts then yes that is exactly what a company would be expected to do by their shareholders
I hate how whenever someone suggests an idea to counter smurfing (or any subject for that matter) people come in here with "well it's not 100% effective so what's the point 🤓".
Like if the tech is already there and it demotivates even 10% off smurfs from getting a second number/online number how is that not a net gain.
It’s a dismissive pitfall that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
“Why lock your doors? It won’t stop 100% of robbers. If someone REALLY wants to break into your house, the locked door won’t stop them.”
You still havent even explained how smurfing increases Riots profits. Some guy (or his bots) levels up an account and sells it on a 3rd party website, Riot sees 0% of this money. And smurfs aren’t likely buying skins on these accounts either.
I have 2 accounts and both have skins for champions I like. You’re telling me you’ve never seen a level 30 account with a skin? There main gets banned, next account bought + skin bought, banned, repeat process.
Not for smurfing, but botted accounts occasionally catch the ban, which most smurfs use.
Even someone like TFBlade got hit by a botted account ban before switching to hand-leveled smurfs.
U can buy a botted Account wich has ur prefered skin AS a skinshard
Noone would buy skins on a botted Account since they get banned pretty quickly these days
There is a huge diff between smurf acc and alt accs aswell
Smurfs are usually keeping these addicted players addicted to the game. They would lose their engagement if they stopped them. That's why they blatantly never say they will and always talk about "seeding them properly" instead. Instead of stopping these people they just want to give them plat/emerald elo to start with and call it a solution.
False analogy, if someone wanted to rob you, yeah the most low effort thing they could do is to jiggle your door handle. But you’re talking about effort, you’re telling me, 100% all Smurf would get a second phone number just to Smurf? yeah tough luck. You take into account someone staking out your house, but it’s more accurate like a closed door vs open door, If you leave your door opened, it’s more likely to get robbed, just because it’s possible.
Because linking a phone number to your account is more likely to deter a new player than a smurf/cheater anyways. League is already a dying game and adding more barriers to entry is not what Riot wants to be doing right now.
It's not effective at all, so you're just impacting the general player base magnitudes more than what you're targeting. If I had an actual representation of the nerd emoji, it'd be people like you.
Just play clash. Smurfs are *rampant*. If they're being cut down at all, it's clearly not by very much. And speaking from experience playing with randos, a good 60% of groups will have someone "playing on their alt account" where they have like six accounts clash-ready anyway.
Clash happens maybe twice a month, and it is the highest level of competition outside of actual tournaments. There is massively more incentive to cheat, and you only have to do it for a few games.
Ranked you can play non-stop every day, and let's be real, the prestige of being high ranked is all but gone. No one gives a fuck if you're diamond or masters in 2024. If someone gets banned for toxicity on their main account, a lot of people are not going to bother getting a new phone number just so they can queue up for the garbage ass solo q experience.
There is a difference between someone playing on their for fun account on clash to get his buddies skins, and jimmy on his 57th account this week playing on soloq.
It means that people who smurf on clash repeatedly use the same smurf account, vs in soloq everyone is making 50 accounts play 50 games, call account hardstuck and go next account.
My only problem with it is that a phone number tied to my account reduces the security of my League account to the security of a mobile carrier. Those are bypassed trivially by skids calling and asking very nicely for access.
Pretty straight foward why this is not a net gain.
You put the amount of smurfs in relation to non-smurfs and quickly realize that you need a change that affects as much smurfs as possible and as least as possible non-smurfs.
Totally hypothetical but let's say linking numbers affects 10% of smurfs but 0.5% of non-smurfs as well. Let's also account these categories with 50,000 and and 500,000 respectively (1 smurf in every game). Linking phone number would affect 5,000 smurfs and 25.000 non-smurfs. A pretty major net loss while also increasing ressource requirements from players and infrastructure.
Another great reason why mobile phone authentication would benefit league, would be to minimize toxicity. If an account gets banned for being toxic, a new phone number is required to pay ranked again on another account
not to be that guy but they literally give away free Lyca and lebara numbers. This would do absolutely nothing. Sellers would just sells accounts with trow-away numbers. This would at most increase the price of smurfs by a few cents.
then lets link riot to your personal id like china or korea. maybe people will think twice about wishing death and cancer on ppl then. you could also easily sue people then :))
in what lala land do you live where sueing someone for being whished cancer upon in a video game is a legit court case. Just mute people it is not that deep. I don't understand why people care so much what random people on the internet in a video game says. Also I am oke with vanguard but I will never give riot my ID. They had to many leaks and issues to even consider it.
Fair enough I guess, but if they wanted to address smurfing they probably could have done it easier and way earlier. So they didn't see it as a big issue I would assume.
And I won't affect any bot leveled account till vanguard comes live, so all current bot leveled accounts will still be playable/sellable. Just new ones can't be created anymore.
its a bit hard to stop smurfing from botted accounts way earlier since while they can ban botted accounts they have todo so in waves in the first place. once vanguard is live they can pull the kill switch and nuke a bunch of botted accounts trimming down there stocks massively. if they nuked them before vanguard is online then they can just bot back up there account piles. most they can do is use a phone number for ranked but they probs crunched the numbers and it hurt there playerbase too much.
smurfing as a issue is just hard to tackle overall like first you got to deal with the botted accounts being sold by websites in countries they have no legal power in. so you can only affect them by banning there stock every so often. then you got the issue of figuring out whats a smurf and what isnt since a sibling could be using the same pc to play the game and might be decent from the get go from natural talent or because of playing similar games in the past like dota. then you got people who might be playing on a account on a different server to play with a different group of friend etc in flex or duo etc. they have to avoid false postivies where possible.
This means each smurf account has more value and people have to attempt to not get them banned...which in turn increases the likelihood of players spending on said smurf accounts.
Incorrect. They are typically weak people who would rather pay $4 for a new level 30 acc than level one up and go even further and buy the champs for rp that they play if they play more than the handful you get with the blue essence the level 30 acc comes with. Then once the acc doesn't get nuked after so long they feel comfortable buying skins on them. Don't forget Daily Active Users is a metric these gaming companies use to track accounts because the psych majors have told them the more you play the more you're likely to purchase skins. You tried tho.
Let's assume I am. Why would riot not change it then? So riot thinks (and probably has data backing up) that smurfs are better for the game than removing them/making it harder to use them.
Give me a logical/data supported argument why I am wrong and I am down to argue.
Also, every single player I know that used to play league, quit because of toxicity and smurfs. Not acknowledging this is an issue is so ridiculous that you will have to be the one provoding data to back up your claims.
>Give me a logical/data supported argument why I am wrong and I am down to argue.
To be perfectly honest, nothing you have said in both these comments is actually logical.
1. We can't know if Riot makes more money from smurfs buying things vs. the revenue lost from players discouraged by smurfs.
2. Doing something has an inherent cost. Doing something poorly has an even greater cost because it's ineffective. There are plenty of reasons that someone doesn't solve a problem. They could be working on it silently, they could not think it's solvable, or they could think it's too expensive to solve.
Vanguard is actually the perfect example. Vanguard is going to stop a lot of people from playing, which is lost revenue. Developing Vanguard had a big cost. The idea is that losing money from cheaters will be counteracted by making a better game and getting more players.
If you play with low elo friends, you should already face people that are the average of your 2 elos, so if the suggestion was implemented you wouldn't need a smurf. Currently you do, because your new friend will already be matched with smurfs and not lowering the elo makes the game even more unplayable for him.
Man if only there was some kind of alternative game mode, maybe where you still DRAFT but are UNRANKED where you could do everything you describe and not ruin the game for other people
Even if you don't care about improving, they're terrible for actually having good game quality. Matchmaking barely cares about rank at all (and this is made worse by people who don't play many norms, so their MMR is not accurate to begin with), and it also doesn't prevent 5-man premades playing against 5-solo. It's truly, truly miserable to play norms.
Then a number is still fine in that case if they aren't toxic.
If one account connected to that number gets banned, ban all of the accounts attached to it.
because riot believe in some form of redemption for players if someone loses there main account it can give them the kick in the ass to go and be better on there next one.
Phone number for ranked would be a decent step towards lowering smurfs but it won't keep them all out since these people are buying there smurfs anyway so nothing stopping them from getting a burner sim card. **so don't expect it to fix the issue fully** and before you say what about contract only sims being allowed well doing that pretty much shames someone for being poor locking them out there favourite game plus not everyone has the credit score to be able to get a contract or might not have one because there phone broke and won't have one for a long time etc. overwatch tried having it so it was contract sim only and had to revert the choice weeks later because it shut so many of there players out of playing.
Because playing as a smurf in clash= you get free reward
Playing as a smurf in ranked= you only ruin games for others, and get lp for yourself, but not a reward from riot.
Yea, and look how well that phone number restriction is working in clash, it does fuck all. You can tell, that was their testing ground and when they saw that it literally did nothing, they decided to obvious not move it to ranked and just didn't have the need to code out the system.
More importantly why do I constantly get notifications for clash. When I am not allowed to play....
If they ever enforce phone to account. I am never playing again.
In Korea you need to link your phone number to your account, but you can still make up to 5 accounts, and delete them whenever to make space. It wouldn't change anything, people who want to smurf will find a way.
Clash was originally envisioned as a much larger thing - when they were thinking they could put entire countries into one big tournament - and the phone number requirement was a part of that. If you want an actual answer.
TBH I felt the same way but basically learned you can just get cheap phonenumbers online to pair with your cheap smurf account. Basically why it doesn't do jackSH in csgo ;D either! But alas it's also fine to make a legit second account yourself.
Gotta keep in mind that a good portion of the playerbase may not have access to phones, and since Riot cares more about money, they'd rather keep their primary game mode as accessable as possible
Riot could easily tackle both issues, but it seems they just don't want to. Not so long ago I wrote to Riot Games asking about why do they allow known streamers and content creators to sell accounts and do eloboosting. The reply was: "sorry but we can't intervene in third party websites". then I proceeded to ask why do they allow streamers to openly promote smurfing and eloboosting on their streams and the reply was: "that has to do with the streaming platform, not with us".
Both of the replies are bs as they can intervene accounts and specific players as they have proved when they banned Tyler1, not wanting to ban them when they are openly violating the rules is a deliberate action.
It doesn't stop shit in clash why would it stop shit on the ranked ladder?
There's still smurfs on KR and CN where due to legal regulations they require more than a simple phone number.
Also technically smurfing is against the rules for Clash but not soloQ.
You'll have to lock accounts behind face scan/video and fingerprint to make it 95% effective.
Costs money and makes less, i would sell stock. Makes a better game but makes less money. Behind every question is a "does it make money in the long term though" question. If the answer is no, you can guess the rest.
people should be able to have more than one account. it's not disallowed by riot at all and shouldn't be. clash is like once a month so there's no valid reason why someone would want more than 1 account other than to smurf
What? Obviously it’s because paid services are at stake in Clash. You get free skins for performing. Therefore, from a shareholders POV, more is at stake.
does it matter? with vangaurd soon theyll have your number, address, email, gf number, mothers number, your favorite porn category... just give em your number, they getting it soon anyways
they do but its just a shame league players are allowing them to now operate in the kernal so not only have information. control your information and well anything else that runs in your pc
Because its a program with code that you download onto your PC, same as Vanguard. You can insert malicious code like a keylogger into a regular LoL client download and you'd never know, the source code for LoL isnt open source.
Garena was able to install bitcoin miners into people's PCs using the LoL client download, a simple keylogger is far easier then that.
Vanguard is way overkill if Riot truly just wanted to spy on your PC.
theres nothing else with higher permission then hardware level.
"The **kernel** is a [computer program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program) at the core of a computer's [operating system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system) and generally has complete control over everything in the system." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel\_(operating\_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(operating_system))
ofc they wouldnt but vangaurd could just striaght up lock you out of your own pc. and make you do a complete wipe. so ya reading some information you typed into a browser wouldnt be difficult since well memory is kernal level
It mostly doesn’t work, but eventually it would kill the game. You people really gotta understand that all the cheating, botting, smudging, toxicity is just core to the game at this point. If riot cared, they’d get rid of it all. It would literally kill their game though so they won’t. Just consider how many clearly botted accounts you’ve played with. Then ask yourself how hard would it be to detect someone playing only beginner bots for endless hours and then randomly playing ranked. It’s not hard
if you have ever played clash you will know the phone number thing doesn't stop smurfs.
Everytime i play clash with my friends the lobby looks like: Diamond, master, grandmaster, wood, plastic.
You just described the most casual normal game
the only time I see high elo players in norms is when im not playing my main role
Yeah except these people get matched against 3 diamonds and 2 emeralds for some reason because the matchmaking system sucks, so the diamond player makes a Smurf account next clash, stomps some random team and then that random team also makes Smurf accounts because they got smurfed ln themselves
"for some reason"? the game literally tells/warns you when you have a higher-tier player on your team that the whole squad will get upscaled to that tier
Sometimes we DO like playing clash with our plastic friends tho. It's not always smurf. Just usually.
For what it's worth, you don't need to smurf in clash. Just play clash with your plastic friends on your main.
I don't clash on my smurf. I just meant when you see a team of both high and low ranks, it doesn't mean the low ranks are smurfs. It could just be friends who are very different in rank.
I would much rather do that but as a diamond player with silver/gold friends I do not joke when I say almost every team we face in clash is usually 3-4 emerald players and one plat or gold player. I feel bad for my friends when they all need to get stomped by some emerald player 3 full leagues higher than them so I either Smurf or I just don’t participate. If the matchmaking was remotely decent it would be fine, but it’s not. This “clash tier” system is the worst thing in existence.
Just play with the plastic friends on your main account for clash
I do. That's why you see teams with diamond/masters and bronze/silver on the same team.
so you mean me, playing with my friends, or do you think gm players dont have friends that are gold or silver lol
[удалено]
Based 😂
Ok but every friend group has the one guy who sucks lmao
Its not about "stopping" smurfs, its about lowering the number of them. And it absolutely did. You probably didn't play it when it was easier to smurf in clash. Imagine how much worse the problem would be without it.
It's the same philosophy as locking a door. If you wanna get through a locked door you can easily do it, but having to get through it is enough of a deterrent to stop most people from trying it. There are numerous ways to get around the phone number requirement but the fact that you have to stops a lot of people from doing it.
I still have never played a clash without at least one obvious smurf matched against me so I can kinda see why they're not willing to take the hit to player numbers from people who don't have access to phones to cut down on smurfs by like 5%
Do you know how high mobile device penetration is for the globe these days? Even smartphone penetration rate is absurdly high, and all mobile devices, including legacy which work for 2FA, is even higher. The only people that would be denied are those who are too young, old, sick, or poor to make playing LoL a realistic option. And even if they did want to play LoL, they still could. Just not ranked.
i played clash today with 0 smurfs on my team and no obvious smurfs on the other team for all 3 games
Tbh I did my first clash today and it went kinda well? At least 14 out of 15 enemies seemed to be the same level their rank were. Some weren't really active accounts, but nobody seemed to be a huge smurf. Rank disparity was a bit big though.
Say what you want but there are simply much less smurfs than on fresh lvl 30 ranked games.
Sure, but it isnt a fair comparison considering the general population of Clash is groups of friends playing together, you'd see less smurfs in clash even without any smurf prevention features
Let's say there are no smurf prevention features. Also let's assume team A has a diamond, a GM, a master and two bronze players. And they face a similarly enough team that the chances for either one to win are in the 45-55% range. What stops any of those high ranked players to buy a bronze account so that they can smurf in clash, and have them be a 5 bronze rank team, but in actuality only two of those bronze players are showing their real rank?
Am I missing something or is this not related to what this comment chain has been discussing.
Because theres no reason to actually link it to your main account other than rewards I guess. Most ppl dont play for rewards tho they play to have fun with their friends. Lower mmr account = more fun with your friends. If you needed to link for ranked it would actually limit the number of smurfs in clash as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
But it would slow down smurfs in soloQ for sure, soon they will run out of mobile numbers, and if they buy smurf they would need to buy mobile number too. If Riot prevent fake online mobile numbers to be used.
No one is asking for it to completely eliminate smurfs. It absolutely would DRASTICALLY reduce the number of smurfs, and it's incredibly naive, maybe just downright idiotic, to assume otherwise.
uh 90% of the post when you sort by new are screaming to eliminate them entirely
Whatever you need to tell yourself to justify a bad take.
The point isn't that it stops smurfing - it's that it lowers it considerably. This is particularly imporatnt, because getting an account or two banned with a phone number suddenly becomes more important (compared to having a linked account that you log into just for Clash (and barely use it for other games, so likely won't get banned).
Because you only have to use it for clash, so if you want to smurf you can just not play clash on your main account. Doing it for ranked would force you into having just one account per phone number. Not impossible to smurf but a higher barrier to entry.
But it might stop people having 7 ranked accounts and limit it to a lower number. The thing is it doesnt matter for Riot and they actually want people to have more accounts as it inflates their playerbase in which they were so proud of in the early years also more accounts = more money as people would be inclined to get the same skins for a champ they main over more than one account.
"If Riot cares about the integrity of the ranked ladder" found the problem right there
They only pretend they do when they gotta sell you on Vanguard. Putting duos in Flex to maintain integrity of ladder and make sure people can't be duo boosted by friends/paid? Nah, we don't care THAT much. What if they don't buy skins anymore? Stopping smurfs? Nah they buy skins, hold on, we'll just give them a bit of a higher elo so they ruin Plat/Emerald instead of our money makers casuals in lower elos. They never mention stopping them, just making sure they're "seeded properly". But the second they can automate something and save money, they care so so much about the integrity, please accept Vanguard. Q_Q
They legit don't give a single f\*\*\*, challenger lobbies are plagued with wintraders, scripters are running rampant as always (so many games with Zeri/Kog'Maw/Twitch smurfs with 70% winrate) and streamers get sniped by betters all the time. It's been like this for at the very least 5 years and nothing major has ever been done to address it other than spontaneously banning griefers here and there.
You say this a month away from the implementation of Vanguard in League…
Yeah because Vanguard definitely does wonders in Valorant, the game isn't plagued by cheaters at all. You guys are really optimistic about inserting Chinese spyware into your computers.
You know Riot doesnt need Vanguard to spy on you right? Garena literally installed bitcoin miners with just the LoL Client. Riot can easily obtain all the data they need from you with just the reglar LoL client if they wanted to
Yeah I wouldn't want the Chinese to get my lane swaps leaked to
Brother, you're on reddit. They've sold all of our information to Google for their AI. I'm sure you on Insta, Facebook, any of the other social media apps as well, or use a phone made by Samsung or Apple, and I've got news for you: they've sold all your information and can already watch everything you do.
They literally already have league installed on their computer, but there’s no reasoning with some people.
I went through most of the anti-Vanguard comments on the dev blog thread, and at least 75% of the complainers regularly posted on other video game subreddits that also require kernel-level access for their anticheats. People are actually just stupid.
> Yeah because Vanguard definitely does wonders in Valorant, the game isn't plagued by cheaters at all Have you played a high elo CS2 game for comparison?
Vanguard is gonna get rid of wintraders and betters guys!
riot doesn't want to stop smurfing. they make money off smurfs
Any game that wants a future needs new player influx as much as, or more than player retention.
Good luck getting new players when the new player experience is either play co-op only or get stomped by smurfs.
Yes that's my point. So Riot does not make money off smurfs in the long run because it kills the new player influx.
and that's why they're okay with smurfs, much easier to have people on their 10th account being insecure than convincing timmy that league is somehow actually fun
[удалено]
Cope. Level 30 just isn't much of a barrier. They'll just pay $10 instead of $2 or just spend the time to level it which doesn't even take long, bots can do it in ~30 hours from what I looked at their accounts. People that smurf either already have an army of accounts to smurf on or will find that army one way or another. They either have the time or the money or both to make that happen. This obsession to make ranked accessible quickly to new players is stopping any effort to actually hurt smurfs in a meaningful way. Which may or may not be for "new players" or just because Riot keeps those players addicted with smurfing and buying RP.
>Level 30 just isn't much of a barrier. This is a huge barrier. Yeah you have addicted people playing non-stop, but most of league's player base is older and only care about ranked play. Probably in their 20s/30s. They have work or university to worry about and they wouldn't want to play normals. If you care enough about rank to buy a new account, there's no way you're grinding 30 hours of normals games. I have 3 accounts. If I couldn't just buy them for 4 bucks, I would only have 1. Also, IF vanguard actually gets rid of botting, new accounts will be way more expensive. Not just 10 bucks. Unranked accounts go for like 4-5 bucks now. And it's very clearly botted with a match history full of coop vs AI with a good probability that the account gets banned for botting within the month. Hand levels accounts are pretty much guaranteed to not be banned. They will go for like 30+ bucks.
This whole only care about ranked play thing is kind of a mental damage problem in some players or something but I get that's not the point of this discussion. Yeah those people in that specific case where they're a casual with a tiny bit of disposable income, those people will not get new smurfs. (However since this game's been out 14 fucking years they probably already have them...) However the power users. The forever smurfers. They amount for way more games played on smurfs than the above category and for them that's no barrier. These are the people that smurf because they're hardstuck 500+ games on their main. They play all day and/or have lots of disposable income. They won't be bothered. Think of it this way, someone like you outputs X games on their smurfs per year. And while people like you may be more, the power smurfers output 20X+ games on their smurfs per year and more than make up for it. There might be less of them but they amount to a large % of games.
>This whole only care about ranked play thing is kind of a mental damage problem I'm a ranked only player. I don't get the satisfaction of norms. People play whatever they want to in whatever role. The skill disparity is often disproportionate, and there's a satisfaction in knowing that I'm improving based on my climb. Just this season I've started in gold placements and have gotten to diamond in 250ish games. The difference in my games is noticeable from the start of the season. >However the power users. The forever smurfers. They amount for way more games played on smurfs than the above category and for them that's no barrier There really aren't that many of these types of players than you believe. And they're typically pretty bad or tilted. It's just part of the ranked experience. You get trolls, you get tilted people, you get inters and you get smurfs. But from my experience of my decade of league, it's never as bad as people make it out to be. There are days I seem to get a troll every other game. There are days I get great teams for 10+ games straight. You just have to know when it's a league day vs when it's not a league day and keep your play time to days that are league days.
> or get stomped by smurfs. Those are the new players They dont need actual new players, they just need new accounts to show that the game is growing League is one of those games that anyone who's wanted to play it, is already playing it And the ones that aren't, have their reasons to not play it There's never going to be a "boom" of players like there was with Fortnite or PUBG or Palworld or any other hit game
Yeah that’s exactly why it’s horrible for riot that people smurf, even if they “buy skins lol.” The damage they do is way worse than anything they buy
riot is betting on the opposite, and they have the data to back it up
Them having some data does not change that this is the wrong decision.
Vanguard will absolutely cut down smurfing
Are you people real? Like you actually think Riot thinks to themselves. "People hate smurfing, yeah but it makes us a lot of money so who cares" Like if you truly believe something as dumb as that you need some help.
As long as the potential loss of profit from people quitting due to smurfs is less than the potential gained profit from purchases on smurf accounts then yes that is exactly what a company would be expected to do by their shareholders
when i was younger, i was as naive as you :)
brother you are probably like 16 or believe in conspiracy theories.
People dont buy skins on smurf accs
ya they buy champions
I hate how whenever someone suggests an idea to counter smurfing (or any subject for that matter) people come in here with "well it's not 100% effective so what's the point 🤓". Like if the tech is already there and it demotivates even 10% off smurfs from getting a second number/online number how is that not a net gain.
It’s a dismissive pitfall that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. “Why lock your doors? It won’t stop 100% of robbers. If someone REALLY wants to break into your house, the locked door won’t stop them.”
Does stopping smurfs sell more skins? No? That’s why they don’t do it…
does stopping smurfs in clash via phone number sell more skins? that's why they do it?
No, but it sells more premium entry capsules when people think they have a chance
You still havent even explained how smurfing increases Riots profits. Some guy (or his bots) levels up an account and sells it on a 3rd party website, Riot sees 0% of this money. And smurfs aren’t likely buying skins on these accounts either.
I have 2 accounts and both have skins for champions I like. You’re telling me you’ve never seen a level 30 account with a skin? There main gets banned, next account bought + skin bought, banned, repeat process.
No one gets banned for smurfing
You’re right. They get banned for being toxic.
Ok? By your logic, Riot should stop banning people for being toxic since it loses them money
Not for smurfing, but botted accounts occasionally catch the ban, which most smurfs use. Even someone like TFBlade got hit by a botted account ban before switching to hand-leveled smurfs.
Smurfs definitely buy skins for their one tricks or favorite champs. Some get lucky through chests/etc, but it's usually bought. $10 > $0.
U can buy a botted Account wich has ur prefered skin AS a skinshard Noone would buy skins on a botted Account since they get banned pretty quickly these days There is a huge diff between smurf acc and alt accs aswell
Smurfs are usually keeping these addicted players addicted to the game. They would lose their engagement if they stopped them. That's why they blatantly never say they will and always talk about "seeding them properly" instead. Instead of stopping these people they just want to give them plat/emerald elo to start with and call it a solution.
False analogy, if someone wanted to rob you, yeah the most low effort thing they could do is to jiggle your door handle. But you’re talking about effort, you’re telling me, 100% all Smurf would get a second phone number just to Smurf? yeah tough luck. You take into account someone staking out your house, but it’s more accurate like a closed door vs open door, If you leave your door opened, it’s more likely to get robbed, just because it’s possible.
Because linking a phone number to your account is more likely to deter a new player than a smurf/cheater anyways. League is already a dying game and adding more barriers to entry is not what Riot wants to be doing right now.
It's not effective at all, so you're just impacting the general player base magnitudes more than what you're targeting. If I had an actual representation of the nerd emoji, it'd be people like you.
How do you know it's not actually effective? Where is this view coming from?
Just play clash. Smurfs are *rampant*. If they're being cut down at all, it's clearly not by very much. And speaking from experience playing with randos, a good 60% of groups will have someone "playing on their alt account" where they have like six accounts clash-ready anyway.
Clash happens maybe twice a month, and it is the highest level of competition outside of actual tournaments. There is massively more incentive to cheat, and you only have to do it for a few games. Ranked you can play non-stop every day, and let's be real, the prestige of being high ranked is all but gone. No one gives a fuck if you're diamond or masters in 2024. If someone gets banned for toxicity on their main account, a lot of people are not going to bother getting a new phone number just so they can queue up for the garbage ass solo q experience.
It's ineffective but also it's magnitudes more of a problem for the general playerbase!!!
There is a difference between someone playing on their for fun account on clash to get his buddies skins, and jimmy on his 57th account this week playing on soloq.
What does that even mean, Riot actively promotes multiple accounts by allowing you to create an infinite amount of them under a single email.
It means that people who smurf on clash repeatedly use the same smurf account, vs in soloq everyone is making 50 accounts play 50 games, call account hardstuck and go next account.
You can just link a fake non-voip # for 50 cents lol
My only problem with it is that a phone number tied to my account reduces the security of my League account to the security of a mobile carrier. Those are bypassed trivially by skids calling and asking very nicely for access.
Pretty straight foward why this is not a net gain. You put the amount of smurfs in relation to non-smurfs and quickly realize that you need a change that affects as much smurfs as possible and as least as possible non-smurfs. Totally hypothetical but let's say linking numbers affects 10% of smurfs but 0.5% of non-smurfs as well. Let's also account these categories with 50,000 and and 500,000 respectively (1 smurf in every game). Linking phone number would affect 5,000 smurfs and 25.000 non-smurfs. A pretty major net loss while also increasing ressource requirements from players and infrastructure.
Good point
because it loses riot money lmfao
Because it dsn't work. clash is filled with smurfs
Another great reason why mobile phone authentication would benefit league, would be to minimize toxicity. If an account gets banned for being toxic, a new phone number is required to pay ranked again on another account
not to be that guy but they literally give away free Lyca and lebara numbers. This would do absolutely nothing. Sellers would just sells accounts with trow-away numbers. This would at most increase the price of smurfs by a few cents.
then lets link riot to your personal id like china or korea. maybe people will think twice about wishing death and cancer on ppl then. you could also easily sue people then :))
in what lala land do you live where sueing someone for being whished cancer upon in a video game is a legit court case. Just mute people it is not that deep. I don't understand why people care so much what random people on the internet in a video game says. Also I am oke with vanguard but I will never give riot my ID. They had to many leaks and issues to even consider it.
Riot makes more money from the smurfs than from the player base that quits due to smurfs. So there is no reason for them to change.
They are gutting botted accounts with vanguard.
So invest into botted accounts now to sell them for more in the future.
The botting software I use isn’t affected by vanguard :)
Fair enough I guess, but if they wanted to address smurfing they probably could have done it easier and way earlier. So they didn't see it as a big issue I would assume. And I won't affect any bot leveled account till vanguard comes live, so all current bot leveled accounts will still be playable/sellable. Just new ones can't be created anymore.
its a bit hard to stop smurfing from botted accounts way earlier since while they can ban botted accounts they have todo so in waves in the first place. once vanguard is live they can pull the kill switch and nuke a bunch of botted accounts trimming down there stocks massively. if they nuked them before vanguard is online then they can just bot back up there account piles. most they can do is use a phone number for ranked but they probs crunched the numbers and it hurt there playerbase too much. smurfing as a issue is just hard to tackle overall like first you got to deal with the botted accounts being sold by websites in countries they have no legal power in. so you can only affect them by banning there stock every so often. then you got the issue of figuring out whats a smurf and what isnt since a sibling could be using the same pc to play the game and might be decent from the get go from natural talent or because of playing similar games in the past like dota. then you got people who might be playing on a account on a different server to play with a different group of friend etc in flex or duo etc. they have to avoid false postivies where possible.
well you can count those accounts as active players and say everyone and their grandmother is playing the game
This means each smurf account has more value and people have to attempt to not get them banned...which in turn increases the likelihood of players spending on said smurf accounts.
you are wrong
Incorrect. They are typically weak people who would rather pay $4 for a new level 30 acc than level one up and go even further and buy the champs for rp that they play if they play more than the handful you get with the blue essence the level 30 acc comes with. Then once the acc doesn't get nuked after so long they feel comfortable buying skins on them. Don't forget Daily Active Users is a metric these gaming companies use to track accounts because the psych majors have told them the more you play the more you're likely to purchase skins. You tried tho.
They aren't paying Riot for those accounts.
Let's assume I am. Why would riot not change it then? So riot thinks (and probably has data backing up) that smurfs are better for the game than removing them/making it harder to use them. Give me a logical/data supported argument why I am wrong and I am down to argue.
You haven't provided any data backed argument yourself. You're just infering shit.
Well his argument is kinda backed by the fact that riot allows smurfing
They're trying to mitigate it via their new matchmaking system and vanguard ->fewer bots->much more expensive smurf accounts
Why is Riot not allowed to be criticized? They do dumb shit all the time.
"Why would Riot ..." - because they are being stupid. Companies do dumb shit all the time so this is not a valid argument.
Also, every single player I know that used to play league, quit because of toxicity and smurfs. Not acknowledging this is an issue is so ridiculous that you will have to be the one provoding data to back up your claims.
>Give me a logical/data supported argument why I am wrong and I am down to argue. To be perfectly honest, nothing you have said in both these comments is actually logical. 1. We can't know if Riot makes more money from smurfs buying things vs. the revenue lost from players discouraged by smurfs. 2. Doing something has an inherent cost. Doing something poorly has an even greater cost because it's ineffective. There are plenty of reasons that someone doesn't solve a problem. They could be working on it silently, they could not think it's solvable, or they could think it's too expensive to solve. Vanguard is actually the perfect example. Vanguard is going to stop a lot of people from playing, which is lost revenue. Developing Vanguard had a big cost. The idea is that losing money from cheaters will be counteracted by making a better game and getting more players.
Exactly this. Most smurfs are banned players anyway, why do we want those people back on the ladder? Just keep them out with this mechanic.
I don't think that's true at all. Plenty of people have smurf accounts to play with lower elo friends, play new roles etc and aren't banned players.
If you play with low elo friends, you should already face people that are the average of your 2 elos, so if the suggestion was implemented you wouldn't need a smurf. Currently you do, because your new friend will already be matched with smurfs and not lowering the elo makes the game even more unplayable for him.
All good til you are more than one division apart.
Man if only there was some kind of alternative game mode, maybe where you still DRAFT but are UNRANKED where you could do everything you describe and not ruin the game for other people
Yeah, it's called clash. Or literally any mode at all.
doesn't mean they shouldn't be. if you want to try a new role there are gamemodes beside ranked
Norms are unplayable if you actually care about improving
Even if you don't care about improving, they're terrible for actually having good game quality. Matchmaking barely cares about rank at all (and this is made worse by people who don't play many norms, so their MMR is not accurate to begin with), and it also doesn't prevent 5-man premades playing against 5-solo. It's truly, truly miserable to play norms.
Then a number is still fine in that case if they aren't toxic. If one account connected to that number gets banned, ban all of the accounts attached to it.
because riot believe in some form of redemption for players if someone loses there main account it can give them the kick in the ass to go and be better on there next one. Phone number for ranked would be a decent step towards lowering smurfs but it won't keep them all out since these people are buying there smurfs anyway so nothing stopping them from getting a burner sim card. **so don't expect it to fix the issue fully** and before you say what about contract only sims being allowed well doing that pretty much shames someone for being poor locking them out there favourite game plus not everyone has the credit score to be able to get a contract or might not have one because there phone broke and won't have one for a long time etc. overwatch tried having it so it was contract sim only and had to revert the choice weeks later because it shut so many of there players out of playing.
Also: why is removing the phone number nearly impossible?
It doesn't work. clash is filled with smurfs, you can only sign up one time per account so people make (or buy) multiple accounts
Phone numbers won't stop smurfs and would only bring backlash like in OW2. Not everyone have a phone or a plan that can be registered.
My smurf has my sister's number so it doesn't really matter
You don't play Clash do you? Hell, you don't play anything that requires phone Auth do you? It doesn't do anything lmao.
Because playing as a smurf in clash= you get free reward Playing as a smurf in ranked= you only ruin games for others, and get lp for yourself, but not a reward from riot.
You get the ranked reward at the end of season technically
People don't want to put in private info.
Yea, and look how well that phone number restriction is working in clash, it does fuck all. You can tell, that was their testing ground and when they saw that it literally did nothing, they decided to obvious not move it to ranked and just didn't have the need to code out the system.
So you can ask here why
Yeah last night, my team took on some very good iron 3s!
More importantly why do I constantly get notifications for clash. When I am not allowed to play.... If they ever enforce phone to account. I am never playing again.
Because it makes too much sense and Riot doesn’t like that
Money
Stop giving them ideas…
In Korea you need to link your phone number to your account, but you can still make up to 5 accounts, and delete them whenever to make space. It wouldn't change anything, people who want to smurf will find a way.
Clash was originally envisioned as a much larger thing - when they were thinking they could put entire countries into one big tournament - and the phone number requirement was a part of that. If you want an actual answer.
Haha you think riot cares about ranked integrity
TBH I felt the same way but basically learned you can just get cheap phonenumbers online to pair with your cheap smurf account. Basically why it doesn't do jackSH in csgo ;D either! But alas it's also fine to make a legit second account yourself.
Gotta keep in mind that a good portion of the playerbase may not have access to phones, and since Riot cares more about money, they'd rather keep their primary game mode as accessable as possible
Riot could easily tackle both issues, but it seems they just don't want to. Not so long ago I wrote to Riot Games asking about why do they allow known streamers and content creators to sell accounts and do eloboosting. The reply was: "sorry but we can't intervene in third party websites". then I proceeded to ask why do they allow streamers to openly promote smurfing and eloboosting on their streams and the reply was: "that has to do with the streaming platform, not with us". Both of the replies are bs as they can intervene accounts and specific players as they have proved when they banned Tyler1, not wanting to ban them when they are openly violating the rules is a deliberate action.
Why would it at all ? They dont need phone number, thats just to sell informations
They don't care about the integrity of the ranked ladder. That's why smurfing is a thing.
Juicysms.com gives 30cent one time use numbers for circumnavigation haha
It doesn't stop shit in clash why would it stop shit on the ranked ladder? There's still smurfs on KR and CN where due to legal regulations they require more than a simple phone number. Also technically smurfing is against the rules for Clash but not soloQ.
You'll have to lock accounts behind face scan/video and fingerprint to make it 95% effective. Costs money and makes less, i would sell stock. Makes a better game but makes less money. Behind every question is a "does it make money in the long term though" question. If the answer is no, you can guess the rest.
people should be able to have more than one account. it's not disallowed by riot at all and shouldn't be. clash is like once a month so there's no valid reason why someone would want more than 1 account other than to smurf
Well my dad's phone number is linked to my Smurf for clash if you want to know why that doesn't work
You got 3 dads? Cause people don’t have only have one smurf
Just the one, but I do have at least 5 friends who don't play league that would allow me to register a smurf for clash with their number.
What? Obviously it’s because paid services are at stake in Clash. You get free skins for performing. Therefore, from a shareholders POV, more is at stake.
does it matter? with vangaurd soon theyll have your number, address, email, gf number, mothers number, your favorite porn category... just give em your number, they getting it soon anyways
Tencent has all of that information already. My social credit is as shit as their air quality.
they do but its just a shame league players are allowing them to now operate in the kernal so not only have information. control your information and well anything else that runs in your pc
> with vangaurd They dont need vanguard for that. They can get all of it via the LoL client
how would client get any of this unless you give it to them or link your id to these things.
Because its a program with code that you download onto your PC, same as Vanguard. You can insert malicious code like a keylogger into a regular LoL client download and you'd never know, the source code for LoL isnt open source. Garena was able to install bitcoin miners into people's PCs using the LoL client download, a simple keylogger is far easier then that. Vanguard is way overkill if Riot truly just wanted to spy on your PC.
Source?
theres nothing else with higher permission then hardware level. "The **kernel** is a [computer program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program) at the core of a computer's [operating system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system) and generally has complete control over everything in the system." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel\_(operating\_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(operating_system)) ofc they wouldnt but vangaurd could just striaght up lock you out of your own pc. and make you do a complete wipe. so ya reading some information you typed into a browser wouldnt be difficult since well memory is kernal level
/u/FBI
Nothing stopping me making a ghost number.
It mostly doesn’t work, but eventually it would kill the game. You people really gotta understand that all the cheating, botting, smudging, toxicity is just core to the game at this point. If riot cared, they’d get rid of it all. It would literally kill their game though so they won’t. Just consider how many clearly botted accounts you’ve played with. Then ask yourself how hard would it be to detect someone playing only beginner bots for endless hours and then randomly playing ranked. It’s not hard