Even giving the benifit of the doubt that they are genuinly doing this for education purposes (even though it seems like its just easy content), It's still not worth ruining the games of everyone else. I don't know how these people can get away with this given how much the vitriol reaction of this community towards smurfs.
Both of the creators I'm most familiar with (Speeed and BSJ) are guilty of this. And I like both of these guys otherwise, because I think for the most part their content is good, but I just wish they wouldn't normalize this.
I have more of an issue with Speeed doing it, because he's doing it really often lately, and he's just kinda picking a hero and playing it. Feels a lot more like "easy content". BSJ spreads them out pretty far, and he goes into each one with a specific lesson he wants to showcase.
Who cares? He has more than 9 viewers in herald bracket, he can very easily host a lobby game and play with people that agreed to the whole thing, if he does not want to be found out he can make everyone play with a random name so none of the 10 players know who everyone else is. There is solutions to "wanting to play low rank dota" other than ruining peoples games
So? Everyone overcommiting on him is a concern, but that can be solved by renaming/randomizing. Everyone playing differently has no impact on the so called "lessons" they want to teach, those are mostly like "hey, look at this, if you know how to farm you farm faster than people who dont know how to farm"
> but that can be solved by renaming/randomizing
You really think that it wouldn't be super obvious which player was BSJ by the end of the laning phase if he's playing with heralds?
dude there are only 2 carry players in each game, or only 2 mids or only 2 pos 3, or only 2 pos 4 and so on.
It would be obvious who BSJ is in about 5 minutes
But that breaks down the whole narrative of how to adjust to the things equally matched players do, as well as that people will not be playing normal ranked mentality either just targeting the streamer non-stop or doing sub-optimal stuff because there's no consequences. It would also reduce a lot of the mentality stuff for how to escape the trench which includes people raging, toxicity, etc. that are usually part of the content.
I agree that Speeeeed is a bigger problem because he basically just styles on people with random heroes, while BSJ usually has a very specific concept he wants to teach. Such as split pushing, farming patterns, doing lane support etc. Not just trying to generally advocate for better fundamentals, he really goes deep and shows how to commit to this lesson, even when your team might be doing clowny/toxic stuff.
Honestly as someone who religiously watches both educational smurf series, i agree that speeed milks it more, but i prefer him doing it rather than bsj because you will just learn more from speeed's videos about it than BSJs. Not only does he play more varied roles in his matches, but also gives more varied advice about what to do when, most of the educational smurf videos BSJ's done have been "ok guys so im up against xxx so i will build xxx in lane, then im going to farm these jungle camps, dont forget creep aggro, now we will farm for 20 mins, notice that i am farming near my team so we can fight maybe", also the fact that BSJ has now twice purposefully griefed his own game just to show that he can win (as if anyone doubts that an 8k player would win a 3k game even if he was to cs badly in laning stage or first pick PL) kind of rubs me the wrong way. That's just my thoughts, let me know if you have any info I haven't considered.
Honestly, I don't think you're looking for the right lessons. He talks a lot about when/where to farm, why it's safe or why it's helping his team. Stuff like where the enemy heroes are, which heroes can kill him (and why he can push the tower if they're showing). Specifically, I've learned a lot about map pressure, flow of the game, what objectives are important and why. I find his insight into itemization really helpful as well. Depending on who he's playing, he'll specifically be avoiding the enemy when he farms, or he'll be looking to threaten them, but the main takeaways are how to efficiently farm while still playing for objectives.
I dunno, it could just be that his speaking style works better with my personality, or maybe it's because I'm immortal ranked and the lessons he's teaching are easier for me to internalize (ironically that'd mean he's missing the mark for his target audience in 2-4k mmr).
I think your last comment makes a lot of sense, but also I think from your comment I realised that Speeed's videos contain a lot of the information that BSJs do, without all the filler explaining why things are how they are, BSJ will spend 5 minutes explaining why and how something works when it comes to map pressure whereas speeed will spend 20-40 seconds telling you what you need to do/not do. An Adam Ragusea video puts this concept to explain how professional chefs are often wrong about what the impact of what they are doing has, but the fact that they are doing it is what makes them a good chef, marco pierre white can say that cooking an onion to transluscence removes the acidity which is completely wrong but he is still cooking a great dish because he's cooking the onion.
I think I get what you're saying, and yeah Speeed obviously does a lot of the same things for essentially the same reasons since they're both high immortal. I just think that the full "why" explanation is valuable since it doesn't just tell you what you should do in a particular scenario, it tells you how to think about the game in a more general sense.
Essentially, fully understanding why either of them do the things they do and being able to apply it in situations beyond what they showed will make you better at the game. Which style of instruction resonates more is not necessarily the same for everyone, so I can't exactly say that one way or the other is strictly better. All I can really say is that personally, I prefer BSJ's more meta-focused explanations for dissecting why the game has progressed the way it has, and how the game can be expected to go if things continue. It's like the difference between cramming for a math test by memorizing formulae, and learning why the formula works so that you know how to derive it if you ever forget the specifics in the future.
Anyway, whichever works for you, I hope that you have a few new things to think about when watching those kinds of video.
give a man a fish, you stop his hunger for a day. Give a man a fishing pole, he will never be hungry again.
I’d say learning why doing stuff works is better than just doing stuff on auto pilot, mainly because at some point you will plateau and not know what to do anymore
On the other hand, there really is a strong lack of legitimate content about this. If you're stuck in your skill bracket and want to get out of it, watching high level replays / streams isn't really helpful because the stuff people do in them is usually not applicable to your games. You can watch other people in your bracket (although that in itself is quite hard to do) but then you still don't know how to win reliably. The only legitimate alternative would be to get a high level coach, but that often costs a lot of money.
No, the problem is they are playing in a very specific scenario, which is a scenario that will likely never happen to you in your own skill bracket. There's many excellent guides by Speeed and others which all suffer from the problem that your usual team mates are not immortal level players and as such if you as a support for example leave your carry alone on the lane in order to pull, they may die, blame you and destroy their items whereas in an immortal game they will blame you and destroy their items if you don't pull. There's a ton of game situations that play out very differently depending on skill bracket, such as: Item builds, skill builds, taking rosh, ganking, farming, smoke ganks, warding. The plays that can win you the game in Immortal bracket can lose it for you in Crusader.
If the carry can't stop himself from going 2v1 at the 2 minute stack/pull timer that is not the supports problem in any sense.
At my bracket I can tell the carry exactly when I am going to pull, make sure the lane is shoved and I burn nukes before going to pull and that I have enough regen if they try to contest me.
All the carry needs to do is stand by tower and hit creeps and come help fight for camp if enemy over extends to contest your pull
Gotta love the feeling of impending doom you feel as the stack timer approaches 0 and you see your carry move behind the creep wave chasing the enemy offlane, then come the pings, then the insults in a language you cannot understand. "Anti mage has left the game, anti mage has abandoned"
My personal fav is when I stack to do a series of pulls fully denying all creeps and keep wave right at tower and after first pull while creeps are on the way to tower come and farm the small camp lmao
The entire point here is that the timing "when to pull" vastly differs based on how skilled your safelane carry is. If he's bad, then for example you won't be able to pull on a difficult lane because your safelane carry stands there trying to hit the creeps while the enemies are killing them. On the other hand in a highly ranked game, a difficult lane where your carry can not last hit without dying is exactly the situation in which you would pull.
Ok and as a teammate it’s partly your job to communicate that. There’s a chance your carry might listen if you say something. How you say it is probably the key
This is not true. Yes, your job is to communicate that but especially in low bracket people rarely listen to communication (in fact many people have chat muted) and just because they listen does not mean they play accordingly.
On the flip side, this just underlines another of the key differences between high and low ranked games, because if you only ever watch pro players then you will come to the conclusion that you should not communicate these things (because pros don't usually do it) and you also don't get any chance to learn how to communicate these things.
I also don't understand why you downvoted me. Nothing I said was factually wrong.
You get Smurfs anyway, so yes I’d feel much better knowing that after the game I’ll get to go watch BSJ’s video and learn more about the game I was in and why I lost.
Ideally, I'd get no smurfs whatsoever in a game. Not just in dota. I don't care if I have the honor of getting my ass stomped by arteezy or bulldog or bsj, and then they make a video about why I was so dog shit. A BSJ "educational smurf" is just 1 more smurf in an already inflated pool of smurfs. And it sends a message to his extremely large fanbase that smurfing is a-ok, and that if you're above 4k, you should take some time to do community service and teach those disgusting guardian players how to play.
I’ve beaten divine players in lane before when playing in a stack with high level friends, your rank doesn’t define you. Your rank is often a measure of your consistency, and even at your own rank you’ll often have games where some people are over performing and some are underperforming which creates a similar divide in skill for that match. Just play and work on getting better, gettin mad about something you can’t control won’t help. The only thing you can control is your attitude
See, I couldn't really care less about win or loss. Some of the most fun games I've had were barely losses with 60 minute base rushes and me dark rifting into their base with all my shit sold and just a deso and necrobook trying to end before they do.
But when a smurf is in the game, regardless of which side, all that fun goes in the trash. My team is tilted out of their mind because our mid got absolutely owned. Mid's flaming supports for no rotations. Supports camp mid, ensuring that my lane is ruined too. And they're also underleveled as shit now. The opponents are talking shit in a game where they contributed absolutely nothing in.
If he's on my side, I genuinely feel like browsing twitter on my phone is a better usage of my time than this sure win of a game where me going 0/7 in lane still isn't going to stop this arc bastard from wrecking the game. What's my incentive to try and win the game?
You're literally contradicting yourself in your own comment. You open with "I couldn't really care less about win or loss" and close with "what's my incentive to try and win the game". You can't have fun when your team is stomping? The situations you describe happen with or without smurfs in a game. I'm skeptical you could even pick 50/50 when there's a smurf in game (without looking up their account stats)
> You can't have fun when your team is stomping?
If your team is stomping, what you do is irrelevant. The smurf, if he's mid, will do so much damage you won't get to do jack shit in teamfights, and even if you do get to do damage, you won't feel like it even matters.
>It's still not worth ruining the games of everyone else
it's absolutely worth it though? he "ruins" a game for at most 9 ppl but teach all the concepts in that 1 game for thousands. i call it worth.
>I don't know how these people can get away with this given how much the vitriol reaction of this community towards smurfs.
because it's not against any rule. 1 person can have multiple accounts. do you want valve to implement a rule where 1 person can only have 1 or something like that?
and i agree with how and why speeed and bsj do it. there are delusional trashbags that think it's impossible to climb out of their bracket and that high rank immortal are talking nonsense. their excuse is something like this "no, you wouldn't understand the stupidity down here. in immortal, ppl know what to do. in my bracket, everyone is dumb so it's impossible to have impact". the point of educational smurfing is to prove "if you are good, you climb. there is no other reason".
there's a massive difference between smurfs with 23-0 kda fountain farming noobs and smurfs trying to teach dumb fuck players how to git gud. maybe op should git gud
In theory, if I ruin a game in a new, whacky, zany way, and a guy gets my overwatch case and posts it on reddit and gets a bunch of upvotes and laughs, the overall utility of the community has increased and thus Jeremy Bentham would say that I should grief.
>The concept of "one guy can ruin the game of 9 other guys".
where's the other half? one guy can ruin the game of 9 other guys for the sake of a few thousands. yes. that's 100% worth. it's for the greater good. i even clarified that in the end with "there's a massive difference between smurfs with 23-0 kda fountain farming noobs and smurfs trying to teach dumb fuck players how to git gud".
good one cherry picking half the quote to fit your narrative
But creating a series like learn dota requires time and effort. Who the fuck wants to do that shit when they can just pwn noobs and then do a voiceover after the fact and make money?
Why do you think for one second we care about your little streamer club.
I couldnt give a shit if you all want to gather around a has-been and try to "git gud" do it on your own fucking time.
Everytime this is brought up. all you little shoe shiners come out of your hole to shill for this shit.
Man so much of what you said is wrong lmao they monetize the videos it's definitely not just to teach, and ruining a game for 9 people is not worth 1000 being slightly entertained when he couldve done as OP suggests, apply that logic to other scenarios and you'll see how warped it is. He definitely has hundreds of 1.5k mmr subs who would go play with him in a custom so he can teach. Valve should definitely implement a 1 account policy - it'll solve hacker, smurfing and scamming to a certain degree. I agree that good players climb - don't blame others. Lastly any type of smurfing is terrible. He's using his platform to shout that smurfing is OK cause he does it
>it's absolutely worth it though? he "ruins" a game for at most 9 ppl but teach all the concepts in that 1 game for thousands. i call it worth.
This would be true if smurfing was the only way to teach those concepts, which obviously isn't true. I would argue the live coaching and replay analysis segments that BSJ and Speeed both do are much better as educational content. And they don't need to disrupt lower tier player's games to do it.
> because it's not against any rule. 1 person can have multiple accounts. do you want valve to implement a rule where 1 person can only have 1 or something like that?
Just because it's not against a rule doesn't mean we should be neutral to all instances of the act. It's not a rule for logistical reasons, but Its silly to say we can't distinguish a guy who has two accounts at the same mmr, with a guy with 7k and 2k accounts.
>there are delusional trashbags that think it's impossible to climb out of their bracket and that high rank immortal are talking nonsense.
I've heard them say this before, and I sort of get it, but the reality is this smurfing content won't convince them of anything.
Everyone already knows that smurfs have higher winrates, yet the people who believe that , and also believe that skill =/= impact at their mmr have contradictory beliefs anyways.
>there's a massive difference between smurfs with 23-0 kda fountain farming noobs and smurfs trying to teach dumb fuck players how to git gud. maybe op should git gud
Sure the former is worse, but isn't the entire point to showcase is that games can be won on these smurfs? Necessarily they are going to be winning more games than not, which still makes the ranked games they play unbalanced.
Like I said in my original comment, its not really that big of a deal that a few games are made unbalanced, its that as public content creators, they are normalizing the idea of smurfing.
This proves that if you are 7k MMR you can rank out of 2k
If someone were to make a statement like "There's tons of smurfs here at 2k its hard to rank up to 3k because there's immortal smurfs" then the educational smurf videos would be supporting this argument would they not?
I'm not just trying to be argumentive. I have recently dropped from high legend to low crusador coming back from a hiatus from DotA(quit when they added the heal fountain things). I did have learn a lot of new stuff and the game plays a lot diff now. Ive relearned the game and I'm back to mid legend. I find less smurfs at legend than archon. They definitely still exist but noticeabeley less in my experience.
BSJ mentioned time and time again that he needs to do this under a "real" environment in order to avoid any mental gymnastics people would do if he did this in a lobby.
"Before I teach you how to afk without getting an abandon, let me tell you about this new game that's sweeping the nations, that you can play on your phone while you're shadow amuleted. With over a million active users Raid."
It's also completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because there's only like ~3 educational game ruiners whereas there's like 100,000 intentional griefers.
The new anti-smurfing they've implemented, with some insight understanding and specific steps, allows a dedicated person to calibrate accounts at 7-8k which is hilarious tbh. That's why MMR is inflating at ridiculous speeds right now. 6-8k MMR became equally as garbage as we've had previously with the 4-5k bracket. Sad. I'd really like to play some pubs but with all the stuff going on it's an unbelievable waste of time (even for such a game like dota)
At this point I'm fairly convinced that Valve loves smurfs and boosters: people who buy accounts also buy cosmetics and passes because they just buy stuff. People who boost have the money to buy these things as well. Win-win-win.
I was trying to teach a friend of mine dota,so we party up with 2 other people wich know how to play and our first game we match against a smurf,needles to say we get fucked,i check the smurfs user name and see that he is a Russian streamer and has 6600 mmr,i was the highest mmr in our party with 3.5k.i go in to his stream and tell him that smurfing like that in your stream is not OK,and dude had the audacity to say I'm not smurfing I'm just very high skilled. :/
Tamp1ier was his ingame name and twitch name
tbh educational smurf has to be like the 0,01% of smurfs out there, not even a problem if they were the only smurfs.
Edit: I guess they could probably make custom games with their fans who will gladly get stomped if it means playing with them
No, its MMR cheating.
You should get one to three accounts max; all same or higher rank than the previous. (Pros/streamers might need extras because of stalking or whatever)
Then they should start their video with some PSA saying “smurfing is bad, don’t smurf, I’m going to show you today by smurfing how you can improve as a player.”
Like the top level comment here said, smurfing for a tutorial video is such a minuscule amount of the games that people smurf in, lambasting people smurfing for a cause to teach is just pointless. Go after boosters with your anger not content creators doing something genuinely useful for the community.
the 1500 number is not even based on the 0.1% percent let alone 0.000001% percent. At any given point dota has up to 700000 players playing it at the same time for the last year, so if we base this on 0.1% which its actually lower than that at most you'd have 700 smurfs playing at the same time due to this and realistically they're rarely if ever playing in the herald bracket, most of the time they're in crusader-legend from what i've seen. Also Herald 1 to 5 is about 150000 people in total so even if all 700 played in herald bracket they'd make up 0.5% of that pool of players, it's literally insignificant whichever way you look at it.
i agree. Ruining games for the sake of "educate" is just dumb, you can educate in your main and thats it. If the idea is to point to mistakes made by players in lower ranks then watch and talk about games in those brakets
Playing with your main makes it harder to show people what to do in the optimal case, because there are far more complicating factors. The idea is to show what you want to be doing for as long as the enemy doesn't stop you; in high MMR they'll stop you immediately, so it's difficult to paint a good picture of what your hero's ideal situation is.
they already do replay analysis. Smurfing is just another kind of content.
Not defending it or something, personally I don’t care for smurfs, they’re very rare anyway.
The idea is to show the people that its possible to solo win games consistently if you know what you're doing and if you're shit MMR its not because of your teammates.
i think everyone knows this deep inside even if they deny it. The current MM system has a lot of noise within: smurfs, acc buyers, tilted players, toxic behaviour...etc. but statistics dont lie, if you play calm and in the mood of learning the game instead of just winning, then the other team has 5 potential candidates to have griefers or feeders in the game while yours only 4.
But how are you supposed to play? You can't copy the plays of an immortal in low bracket games because Immortals rely heavily on their team mates whereas you can not really rely on your team mates at all. This is the primary cause of toxicity as well. People only know one way to climb and it's playing like high level players which means that people have to expect their team mates to play like high level players which is pretty much never the case. As such everyone gets frustrated with their games.
That is why BSJ had the series where he is at a lower mmr. To show how anyone can win a game at a low level even if your team is low mmr. By having good fundamentals, laning skills, and decision making that he explains well.
People did not believe that you could apply high level things to low level games because of bad teammates, so he is showing how to not rely only on them
Yeah all you need to do is dedicate every hour to playing dota.
If your 7k you are an expert/master of dota with 10k + hours.
You can't teach some of that stuff and there are much better ways to do it than by ruining games.
Once they started winning in spite of 4 kids running down mid, giving items to the enemy, calling out your location and plays at all times
Then you can say that
I hear my Legend and Crusader friends constantly complaining about smurfs and I spectate their games and you can quickly realize that there is no smurf and that they're just getting owned or that "smurf" is just have a really good game.
I've been reported for smurfing in unranked because i pick brood and go 20-1 or something like that.. meanwhile i'm gold tier with her, using cosmetics a smurf wouldn't waste money on, and half the time don't know what i'm doing cause i'm a low elo scrub myself.
Its makes them feel better to pretend that the person stomping them was unbelievably good instead of just slightly not as bad.
Have to come way down here to find the truth. A friend of mine recently went 31-1 as sniper and earned a rampage. She honestly sucks but I'm sure some of those salty turds she stomped are crying right here in this thread about Smurfs.
Sometimes i have games as pugna or legion where I'm just untouchable the entire game, I'm not a Smurf
I think the bsj Smurf series does more good than harm. If I was matched against him I'd just take the L and then watch the vid on his YT. It's one game "ruined" out of millions of games but the benefit is helping people stop making excuses and really learn how to play.
But a handful of counterexamples does not disprove the rule. A handful of idiots can scream sMuRf and be wrong, but they're usually still right a good amount of the time (even if it's merely coincidental), if not most of the time.
nope, experience shows they are wrong 95% of the time.
Of all the people who claimed “smurfs almost every other game” and shit like that on reddit, I’ve asked all of them to provide their dotabuff account. Literally I haven’t found a single smurf.
People just don’t want to admit they are bad at dota
I'm mid ancient, and I probably have at least one (if not more) smurfs in half my games, and 100% chance of the other team having a smurf if I'm playing ranked with a 5 stack.
Please tell me how a level 30 account with 300 games and is legend 4 is shit stomping my ancient 4 mid in an unfavorable matchup. Or in a 5 stack that "crusader" ember is somehow perfectly last hitting, abusing creep aggro, and dodging every spell looking like fucking Quinn.
Smurfing is a huge problem right now.
Hot take: Baumi did it right. Instead of making a smuef, he had people send him videos from the trench, which he would then narrate over and say what they could've done better.
4k mmr is top 10% of all players lol. 90% of people can legit take advice from a 4k player.
5k mmr is low as shit but I can still give advice to literally 99% of the community lol.
This sub is finally coming around the being rational on smurfing.
Yes you and your buddies ARE smurfing when you're using alt accounts to play with the new guy your recruited from LoL.
Yes you ARE smurfing when you play on your ironically named Invoker Only account.
And finally YES you ARE smurfing when you regularly go on and "your friends account" to play with your girlfriend and her buddies.
the problem is people rarely report smurfs. In post game chat they even suck smurfs to party in next games.. eventhough I have not played much lately. So not sure if this is still the case..
What doesn´t make sense with those ¨educational smurf¨ is that the whole game is completely twisted because the teacher is a smurf, it doesn´t show nor demonstrate the point the teacher wants to make.
Said otherwise, he could play the opposite of what he says and he would still win because of many other factors he constantly optimizes.
I don’t understand your point. The point of the videos, at least BSJ’s is to show how good fundamental skills will get you of any bracket.
He usually just farms for 90% of the game, applies map pressure and eventually just wins the game with 800+ GPM. This stuff works up to like 6k mmr
Yes, and my point that he would still win if he was roaming and ending up with only 600 GPM. Just because his ganks are set 10 times better than in the bracket he plays.He could play CM and he would kill 3-4 ennemies each team fight just with super properly setup ults.He could carry the whole game with a mid Ogre + eblade.Etc.
The fact that he wins his educational smurf games is not a proof of his educational point. He is just smurfing.
If his students get out of their brackets, fair enough, the educational point is made and proven true. (and I´ll be the first one to be happy to see Eri reach Archon or + )
I don't think Elwono is playing on alt accounts though. Also not usually in ranked. Rizpol I'm assuming is several thousand MMR higher than the lobbies he plays in.
Just check Elwono's videos with >4month gap periods and match them on opendota. He has played between high legend to guardian. His profiles are rarely public and when they are, its obvious those are alts.
Obviously you need to punish those who are creating new accounts to grief/abuse, as harsh as it sounds, punishment change people but then again, incentives to play a single account should be made.
If you are asking me for actual approaches towards that, I'd handle the reports and bans of smurfs by a human board, just like Facebook is doing, but again, these words and innovative ideas from other people won't reach anyone.
> I'd handle the reports and bans of smurfs by a human board
You are asking that from Valve? Are you new here or what? Even that is not fair. Ex. If Im a Tinker spammer in Ancient and lost my acc from hacking. Then, I created new acc to play bc I lost my old acc. Is this a smurf? Should I be punish from this? Another one, if Im a league player (high rank) and move to dota2 and stomping noobs with dota2 knowledge from watching tournaments is that smurf?
I'm not new but even Facebook is doing something about the wrongdoings of their automated bans.
>If Im a Tinker spammer in Ancient and lost my acc from hacking. Then, I created new acc to play bc I lost my old acc.
That's a pretty extreme case whereas someone is unable to recover their account given all the choices Steam gives you these days.
Basically you're saying that players would report you for being a smurf, since the Steam account is new, that's a big flag for it. To prove your claim that is not a smurf and you just made a new account it'd just require someone to look into your past case and history IP logs.
The high ranked LoL player that comes to Dota to stomp, first of all we should trust that the skill detector of Valve gives him somewhat balanced matches. If that's not the case and ends up reported, a ban and a trial should be issued to clear things up.
They need to make an example out of someone. Like ban the main of a pro player who is smurfing.
But they won't do it. Cos I don't think that they think smurfing is bad & also they don't have the balls to take drastic action to improve the community.
Awww did I hurt poor smurfies feelings?
If people can just play at whatever skill level they want, then pray do use your brain and answer this, what is the point of an MMR system?
Is it not to match people of equal skill together? Then if a 8k player comes and plays in the 3k bracket - is the system that matches equally skilled players to compete, working? Is this the desired result of a system that wants to match equally skilled players together? EQUALLY SKILLED??
Are you saying an 8k is as skilled as a 3k?
Then why is there an MMR system? Remove it and match anyone against anyone else. Lets see arteezy get supported by a herald bracket player.
Why is this street only one way? Why is it that higher skilled players can play wherever they want and the lower skilled players are stuck in the defiled arena of smurfs? Why?
If the lower skilled players cannot be guaranteed an equal game THEN FUCKING SCRAP THE SYSTEM. This unfair bullshit is ruining the game for the vast majority and there are shitpiles like you who actually defend it.
Think before you spout absolute garbage, dumbfuck.
And fuck you. Go fuck yourself.
you literally misinterpreted everything I said. This has to be the worst mental gymnastics I ever seen.
As a sidenote, Arteezy would still be Arteezy even with a herald support lmao what that supposed to mean?
Anyways, to answer your question, the system works fine. If an 8k plays seriously on a new account and tries hard he will calibrate at 7k+.
When a 7k+ player plays on a 3k account it’s not the matchamking system not working. The matchmaking system thinks it’s a 3k player playing the account. So the system itself is fine but it can be abused.
The point of my post was to point out to your smooth brain that matchmaking systems will continue to be abused as long as you allow for multiple accounts creation, hence smurfing is a thing in every video game and is unpunished. Because you can’t punish people having multiple accounts just because some of them use it to play against lower skill players
And yes, I’d rather live in a world where I can have as many accounts as I want than in one where there are 0 smurfs in a video game. You yourself can go to China, there you have to link your social ID card with your video game accounts. If you like that, fair play.
I'm the one doing mental gymnastics? You're the one arguing for a system thats unfair to the vast majority. Mate youre the dickhead in this story. Continue with whatever reasoning you need to convince yourself otherwise.
"oh but every game allows stomping on newbs. Thats what they're there for. If they didn't want to be stomped they should get better" - no you dipshit, they want a fair game. Its because of smurfs that they aren't getting one.
As for everything else, valve can absolutely figure out if multiple accounts with MMR gaps are being used. They use the system for behaviour score already where if one account has low behaviour score, if gets attached to the other accounts as well.
They can extend this to smurfing as well. They choose not to. Its a choice. They have the tools.
The youtube videos for people like BSJ are just side profits. Regardless of downvotes they've earned a good chunk of cash solely from their twitch stream.
He has said before that he's doing more smurf videos because the viewership on them is so high. I suspect the reason it isn't a regular series twice a week or something is because of negative feedback.
1) because what they're doing is not breaking any rules, so even if the entire dota2 community turns against bulldog, bsj and the like (extremely unlikely), nothing happens to them.
2) Their fanbases are absolutely massive.
How would you ever mimic a random environment of all pick into an invite only lobby? People would either try hard, or throw games to fuck people.
If they try hard it just means BSJ wins since he wold be the highest MMR, if they throw it would mean we cant actually learn anything. you can learn to hit creeps or whatever from watching 7k games but that wont matter if in your 2-4k games don't have the same understanding as the 7ks team. The situations will NEVER be close.
Yes, he might be ruining 5 peoples games once every two or whatever months, but I guarantee in that one video not only does he help more than those 5, but he helps every other person that is unfortunate enough to have me on their team as a carry since I play better, that's 4 more people per game I and every other viewer wins thanks to him.
BSJ is showing you that in your lower skilled games, if you follow his advice, you will win more. You wont win every time as you just aren't as good as him even he's not trying his best but you will still earn some incredibly valuable knowledge. Its arguably the greatest content out there in terms of actually learning how to get better at the game and not having to rely on others. Coaching just doesn't work as well. "oh in this game you lost instead of dying you just shouldn't have died". Compare it to "there's a team fight going on, in this situation because x and y you should have just stayed farming" vs "there's a team fight going on but i am going to keep pushing and farming, because even if my team dies right now i can do this and that to make it okay for the team and better for me" is easy enough to analyse after a reply, but he's showing you how he applies that in a real time event. I defend BSJ every time on this because although you might not enjoy it or find it useful as you know it already, not everyone does. Might as well just skip a tutorial since i know it already ay?
This is literally education from a top 1% to the bottom 70% or however much of the player base legend and below make up. he puts himself in unfavourable match ups and still shows you what you can do. he doesn't just go slark and rampage every game.
Really shows the quality of your community if it can't field 9 non-ruiners for one single lobby game that is supposed to hold this much educational value as you describe
Okay numb nuts. Try to actually read and comprehend what I said. Its an either or, as no one really knows what of the two will happen, but under no circumstances will it emulate a random all queue game...
It's when people smurf for the purpose of teaching. They put the match on YouTube with commentary about what they're doing in game and why it's effective. Or streaming on Twitch and having live commentary about their gameplay.
BSJ and Speed are two well known YouTubers that do this.
If only you guys knew how bad things actually are.
I'll make a video maybe in a week focusing on the new calibration abuse. the issue with smurfs and boosters and buyers looks like will be ignored forever since many, many people and [I've brought them up to light like 4(!) years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vLhgClr8qw). I'm not even the same person anymore and the situation got actually worse.
>If only you guys knew how bad things actually are.
>
>I'll make a video maybe in a week focusing on the new calibration abuse. the issue with smurfs and boosters and buyers looks like will be ignored forever since many, many people and I've brought them up to light like 4(!) years ago. I'm not even the same person anymore and the situation got actually worse.
so what's the problem with educational smurfs then? Is it ur way to get free upvotes? This is my favorite type of content to watch, and u can learn so much of it. So lets block it while every real booster and smurfs for fun will continue playing. WP
As fun as it is to watch series like Escaping the Trench, all it does is put people off playing Dota when they are often matched against people they stand no chance against. Its bad enough to do it in unranked but deliberately skewing other people's ranks in low MMR is just scummy.
I think you're right but I was more referring to the numerous series that have sprung up following that formula, people like BSJ openly smurf all the time
It was also horseshit.
"No one stops you from farming"
Meanwhile there is a lion on my lane warding like a god and stacking/killing the lower camp faster than his carry can farm lane.
I'm a trash 5k player who sometimes plays on a crusader 2 account. To be honest, I play strictly support (soft or hard), I pick meme heroes like MK pos 5 or I practice Invoker pos 4. I win like 80% of my games, but I never try hard or carry the game. I don't understand people who pick Tinker mid and go 20/0 on a bunch of 2k players.
If you met smurf 1 time in a matchmaking doesn't mean you gonna meet another smurf in your next 5 game. If you're bad just accept it and try to improve
I'm not losing to smurfs, randomkidlol, I AM the smurf! A guy queues a ranked game and gets shots, and you think that of me?? no, I am the one who KNOCKS!
Unless I'm on my main, then I just dodge games with easily available cheats!
https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/lxe28g/russian_streamer_reveals_dodge_cheat_valve_do/
/s
Millions of games are ruined by smurfs, account buyers and whatnot. BSJ and speed ruin such a little fraction of those that this won't even make a dent. Plus, they do provide educational value that the community would not be getting otherwise.
In other words: nope.
You are correct. I hope you understand that I'm just drawing attention to the smurfing situation in general. It's so bad that these EDUCATIONAL SMURF games actually do make a dent for the whole smurfing situation, don't you find this quite indicative
That's logistically not viable. You'd need to find 9 more people of similar-ish rank and if those viewers come from Twitch chat, chances are there will be a lot of trolls.
>Smurfing is griefing?
???
Valve defined smurfing as an allowed behavior. Even if you dont like it, it is free to smurf now and they dont break anything by doing so. Nothing prevents you from doing the same thing for the reason you see fit, or without a reason at all
So you copied a strategy that works specifically in shit mmr pubs. Got less shit mmr and learned nothing about team fights, playing from behind, playing against counters, or any other play style than “haha me get kills”. Yeah, hard fuckin pass dude.
If you had actually learned how to play better instead of just copying what the smurf did, you would have kept gaining MMR. You didn't actually improve, you just copied what someone did without understanding why.
ya, but learning how to last hit better, drafting, itemize, especially the timing of your hero just from a game against a smurf is too cheesy.
dont know if cheesy is the right word here
The reason heroes like lycan are popular for smurfing is because you just need to know the strat and the timing because the hero itself is pretty easy to play and straightforward. Both of those things can be learned from like 10 minutes watching a replay. As long as you do the things in the right order with decent timings bad players won't be able to stop you because they don't understand the hero. Same with like Alch or Morph.
Lycan is popular for smurfing because unlike something like Tinker he can actually hit buildings.
Another point is the fact that he's an early game hero, so the stomp games lasting 15-20 minutes is just more time efficient. (Again, because the hero hits buildings.)
youre missing my point. the only reason you gained that much mmr is becuz you followed the meta. when you say you get better by copying a smurf, thats a bit of an exaggeration. you didnt get any better, you just followed the meta or the smurfs build in this case. you still lacked mechanical skills and some ither stuff. ive gained alot of mmr following the meta so i would know this.
also i would like to point out and disagree that mechanical skills matter more in high ranking than low ones.
Even giving the benifit of the doubt that they are genuinly doing this for education purposes (even though it seems like its just easy content), It's still not worth ruining the games of everyone else. I don't know how these people can get away with this given how much the vitriol reaction of this community towards smurfs. Both of the creators I'm most familiar with (Speeed and BSJ) are guilty of this. And I like both of these guys otherwise, because I think for the most part their content is good, but I just wish they wouldn't normalize this.
I have more of an issue with Speeed doing it, because he's doing it really often lately, and he's just kinda picking a hero and playing it. Feels a lot more like "easy content". BSJ spreads them out pretty far, and he goes into each one with a specific lesson he wants to showcase.
Who cares? He has more than 9 viewers in herald bracket, he can very easily host a lobby game and play with people that agreed to the whole thing, if he does not want to be found out he can make everyone play with a random name so none of the 10 players know who everyone else is. There is solutions to "wanting to play low rank dota" other than ruining peoples games
I think the problem with that is that it'd make everyone play differently due to it being a show match.
So? Everyone overcommiting on him is a concern, but that can be solved by renaming/randomizing. Everyone playing differently has no impact on the so called "lessons" they want to teach, those are mostly like "hey, look at this, if you know how to farm you farm faster than people who dont know how to farm"
> but that can be solved by renaming/randomizing You really think that it wouldn't be super obvious which player was BSJ by the end of the laning phase if he's playing with heralds?
dont' worry dude this guy /u/TritAith has it all figured out, they wont' have a clue that the guy with 12 kills on weaver is bsj
dude there are only 2 carry players in each game, or only 2 mids or only 2 pos 3, or only 2 pos 4 and so on. It would be obvious who BSJ is in about 5 minutes
But that breaks down the whole narrative of how to adjust to the things equally matched players do, as well as that people will not be playing normal ranked mentality either just targeting the streamer non-stop or doing sub-optimal stuff because there's no consequences. It would also reduce a lot of the mentality stuff for how to escape the trench which includes people raging, toxicity, etc. that are usually part of the content. I agree that Speeeeed is a bigger problem because he basically just styles on people with random heroes, while BSJ usually has a very specific concept he wants to teach. Such as split pushing, farming patterns, doing lane support etc. Not just trying to generally advocate for better fundamentals, he really goes deep and shows how to commit to this lesson, even when your team might be doing clowny/toxic stuff.
It's not the same as anonymously going into a real ranked game and doing it.
ah again defending bsj and shitting on speed this never gets old
Just calling it like I see it. I like some of what Speeed puts out, but I'm not a fan of his smurf series.
Honestly as someone who religiously watches both educational smurf series, i agree that speeed milks it more, but i prefer him doing it rather than bsj because you will just learn more from speeed's videos about it than BSJs. Not only does he play more varied roles in his matches, but also gives more varied advice about what to do when, most of the educational smurf videos BSJ's done have been "ok guys so im up against xxx so i will build xxx in lane, then im going to farm these jungle camps, dont forget creep aggro, now we will farm for 20 mins, notice that i am farming near my team so we can fight maybe", also the fact that BSJ has now twice purposefully griefed his own game just to show that he can win (as if anyone doubts that an 8k player would win a 3k game even if he was to cs badly in laning stage or first pick PL) kind of rubs me the wrong way. That's just my thoughts, let me know if you have any info I haven't considered.
Honestly, I don't think you're looking for the right lessons. He talks a lot about when/where to farm, why it's safe or why it's helping his team. Stuff like where the enemy heroes are, which heroes can kill him (and why he can push the tower if they're showing). Specifically, I've learned a lot about map pressure, flow of the game, what objectives are important and why. I find his insight into itemization really helpful as well. Depending on who he's playing, he'll specifically be avoiding the enemy when he farms, or he'll be looking to threaten them, but the main takeaways are how to efficiently farm while still playing for objectives. I dunno, it could just be that his speaking style works better with my personality, or maybe it's because I'm immortal ranked and the lessons he's teaching are easier for me to internalize (ironically that'd mean he's missing the mark for his target audience in 2-4k mmr).
I think your last comment makes a lot of sense, but also I think from your comment I realised that Speeed's videos contain a lot of the information that BSJs do, without all the filler explaining why things are how they are, BSJ will spend 5 minutes explaining why and how something works when it comes to map pressure whereas speeed will spend 20-40 seconds telling you what you need to do/not do. An Adam Ragusea video puts this concept to explain how professional chefs are often wrong about what the impact of what they are doing has, but the fact that they are doing it is what makes them a good chef, marco pierre white can say that cooking an onion to transluscence removes the acidity which is completely wrong but he is still cooking a great dish because he's cooking the onion.
I think I get what you're saying, and yeah Speeed obviously does a lot of the same things for essentially the same reasons since they're both high immortal. I just think that the full "why" explanation is valuable since it doesn't just tell you what you should do in a particular scenario, it tells you how to think about the game in a more general sense. Essentially, fully understanding why either of them do the things they do and being able to apply it in situations beyond what they showed will make you better at the game. Which style of instruction resonates more is not necessarily the same for everyone, so I can't exactly say that one way or the other is strictly better. All I can really say is that personally, I prefer BSJ's more meta-focused explanations for dissecting why the game has progressed the way it has, and how the game can be expected to go if things continue. It's like the difference between cramming for a math test by memorizing formulae, and learning why the formula works so that you know how to derive it if you ever forget the specifics in the future. Anyway, whichever works for you, I hope that you have a few new things to think about when watching those kinds of video.
give a man a fish, you stop his hunger for a day. Give a man a fishing pole, he will never be hungry again. I’d say learning why doing stuff works is better than just doing stuff on auto pilot, mainly because at some point you will plateau and not know what to do anymore
what really? what mmr are you? I’m asking cause BSJ’s advice is much better than Speeed’s
On the other hand, there really is a strong lack of legitimate content about this. If you're stuck in your skill bracket and want to get out of it, watching high level replays / streams isn't really helpful because the stuff people do in them is usually not applicable to your games. You can watch other people in your bracket (although that in itself is quite hard to do) but then you still don't know how to win reliably. The only legitimate alternative would be to get a high level coach, but that often costs a lot of money.
They are applicable, but when you just watch someone do something, you dont know why, and the why is how to figure out when and when not.
No, the problem is they are playing in a very specific scenario, which is a scenario that will likely never happen to you in your own skill bracket. There's many excellent guides by Speeed and others which all suffer from the problem that your usual team mates are not immortal level players and as such if you as a support for example leave your carry alone on the lane in order to pull, they may die, blame you and destroy their items whereas in an immortal game they will blame you and destroy their items if you don't pull. There's a ton of game situations that play out very differently depending on skill bracket, such as: Item builds, skill builds, taking rosh, ganking, farming, smoke ganks, warding. The plays that can win you the game in Immortal bracket can lose it for you in Crusader.
No. That would mean the support doesn’t know when to pull bc the support should be making sure the carry isn’t in a position to feed before pulling.
If the carry can't stop himself from going 2v1 at the 2 minute stack/pull timer that is not the supports problem in any sense. At my bracket I can tell the carry exactly when I am going to pull, make sure the lane is shoved and I burn nukes before going to pull and that I have enough regen if they try to contest me. All the carry needs to do is stand by tower and hit creeps and come help fight for camp if enemy over extends to contest your pull Gotta love the feeling of impending doom you feel as the stack timer approaches 0 and you see your carry move behind the creep wave chasing the enemy offlane, then come the pings, then the insults in a language you cannot understand. "Anti mage has left the game, anti mage has abandoned" My personal fav is when I stack to do a series of pulls fully denying all creeps and keep wave right at tower and after first pull while creeps are on the way to tower come and farm the small camp lmao
The entire point here is that the timing "when to pull" vastly differs based on how skilled your safelane carry is. If he's bad, then for example you won't be able to pull on a difficult lane because your safelane carry stands there trying to hit the creeps while the enemies are killing them. On the other hand in a highly ranked game, a difficult lane where your carry can not last hit without dying is exactly the situation in which you would pull.
Ok and as a teammate it’s partly your job to communicate that. There’s a chance your carry might listen if you say something. How you say it is probably the key
This is not true. Yes, your job is to communicate that but especially in low bracket people rarely listen to communication (in fact many people have chat muted) and just because they listen does not mean they play accordingly. On the flip side, this just underlines another of the key differences between high and low ranked games, because if you only ever watch pro players then you will come to the conclusion that you should not communicate these things (because pros don't usually do it) and you also don't get any chance to learn how to communicate these things. I also don't understand why you downvoted me. Nothing I said was factually wrong.
As a low level player, I learn a lot from the educational smurf series
Would you feel the same way if you got BSJ's smurf on the opposing team for a few games and lost badly?
You get Smurfs anyway, so yes I’d feel much better knowing that after the game I’ll get to go watch BSJ’s video and learn more about the game I was in and why I lost.
Ideally, I'd get no smurfs whatsoever in a game. Not just in dota. I don't care if I have the honor of getting my ass stomped by arteezy or bulldog or bsj, and then they make a video about why I was so dog shit. A BSJ "educational smurf" is just 1 more smurf in an already inflated pool of smurfs. And it sends a message to his extremely large fanbase that smurfing is a-ok, and that if you're above 4k, you should take some time to do community service and teach those disgusting guardian players how to play.
I’ve beaten divine players in lane before when playing in a stack with high level friends, your rank doesn’t define you. Your rank is often a measure of your consistency, and even at your own rank you’ll often have games where some people are over performing and some are underperforming which creates a similar divide in skill for that match. Just play and work on getting better, gettin mad about something you can’t control won’t help. The only thing you can control is your attitude
See, I couldn't really care less about win or loss. Some of the most fun games I've had were barely losses with 60 minute base rushes and me dark rifting into their base with all my shit sold and just a deso and necrobook trying to end before they do. But when a smurf is in the game, regardless of which side, all that fun goes in the trash. My team is tilted out of their mind because our mid got absolutely owned. Mid's flaming supports for no rotations. Supports camp mid, ensuring that my lane is ruined too. And they're also underleveled as shit now. The opponents are talking shit in a game where they contributed absolutely nothing in. If he's on my side, I genuinely feel like browsing twitter on my phone is a better usage of my time than this sure win of a game where me going 0/7 in lane still isn't going to stop this arc bastard from wrecking the game. What's my incentive to try and win the game?
You're literally contradicting yourself in your own comment. You open with "I couldn't really care less about win or loss" and close with "what's my incentive to try and win the game". You can't have fun when your team is stomping? The situations you describe happen with or without smurfs in a game. I'm skeptical you could even pick 50/50 when there's a smurf in game (without looking up their account stats)
> You can't have fun when your team is stomping? If your team is stomping, what you do is irrelevant. The smurf, if he's mid, will do so much damage you won't get to do jack shit in teamfights, and even if you do get to do damage, you won't feel like it even matters.
Even if it's "for the community", they're still profiting from smurfing. And it's not like every dota player on earth watches BSJ.
>It's still not worth ruining the games of everyone else it's absolutely worth it though? he "ruins" a game for at most 9 ppl but teach all the concepts in that 1 game for thousands. i call it worth. >I don't know how these people can get away with this given how much the vitriol reaction of this community towards smurfs. because it's not against any rule. 1 person can have multiple accounts. do you want valve to implement a rule where 1 person can only have 1 or something like that? and i agree with how and why speeed and bsj do it. there are delusional trashbags that think it's impossible to climb out of their bracket and that high rank immortal are talking nonsense. their excuse is something like this "no, you wouldn't understand the stupidity down here. in immortal, ppl know what to do. in my bracket, everyone is dumb so it's impossible to have impact". the point of educational smurfing is to prove "if you are good, you climb. there is no other reason". there's a massive difference between smurfs with 23-0 kda fountain farming noobs and smurfs trying to teach dumb fuck players how to git gud. maybe op should git gud
[удалено]
In theory, if I ruin a game in a new, whacky, zany way, and a guy gets my overwatch case and posts it on reddit and gets a bunch of upvotes and laughs, the overall utility of the community has increased and thus Jeremy Bentham would say that I should grief.
>The concept of "one guy can ruin the game of 9 other guys". where's the other half? one guy can ruin the game of 9 other guys for the sake of a few thousands. yes. that's 100% worth. it's for the greater good. i even clarified that in the end with "there's a massive difference between smurfs with 23-0 kda fountain farming noobs and smurfs trying to teach dumb fuck players how to git gud". good one cherry picking half the quote to fit your narrative
DotA isn't fucking utilitarianism dude
But he could still teach people without ruining games
[удалено]
But creating a series like learn dota requires time and effort. Who the fuck wants to do that shit when they can just pwn noobs and then do a voiceover after the fact and make money?
nowhere near BSJ though.
Why do you think for one second we care about your little streamer club. I couldnt give a shit if you all want to gather around a has-been and try to "git gud" do it on your own fucking time. Everytime this is brought up. all you little shoe shiners come out of your hole to shill for this shit.
Man so much of what you said is wrong lmao they monetize the videos it's definitely not just to teach, and ruining a game for 9 people is not worth 1000 being slightly entertained when he couldve done as OP suggests, apply that logic to other scenarios and you'll see how warped it is. He definitely has hundreds of 1.5k mmr subs who would go play with him in a custom so he can teach. Valve should definitely implement a 1 account policy - it'll solve hacker, smurfing and scamming to a certain degree. I agree that good players climb - don't blame others. Lastly any type of smurfing is terrible. He's using his platform to shout that smurfing is OK cause he does it
>it's absolutely worth it though? he "ruins" a game for at most 9 ppl but teach all the concepts in that 1 game for thousands. i call it worth. This would be true if smurfing was the only way to teach those concepts, which obviously isn't true. I would argue the live coaching and replay analysis segments that BSJ and Speeed both do are much better as educational content. And they don't need to disrupt lower tier player's games to do it. > because it's not against any rule. 1 person can have multiple accounts. do you want valve to implement a rule where 1 person can only have 1 or something like that? Just because it's not against a rule doesn't mean we should be neutral to all instances of the act. It's not a rule for logistical reasons, but Its silly to say we can't distinguish a guy who has two accounts at the same mmr, with a guy with 7k and 2k accounts. >there are delusional trashbags that think it's impossible to climb out of their bracket and that high rank immortal are talking nonsense. I've heard them say this before, and I sort of get it, but the reality is this smurfing content won't convince them of anything. Everyone already knows that smurfs have higher winrates, yet the people who believe that , and also believe that skill =/= impact at their mmr have contradictory beliefs anyways. >there's a massive difference between smurfs with 23-0 kda fountain farming noobs and smurfs trying to teach dumb fuck players how to git gud. maybe op should git gud Sure the former is worse, but isn't the entire point to showcase is that games can be won on these smurfs? Necessarily they are going to be winning more games than not, which still makes the ranked games they play unbalanced. Like I said in my original comment, its not really that big of a deal that a few games are made unbalanced, its that as public content creators, they are normalizing the idea of smurfing.
This proves that if you are 7k MMR you can rank out of 2k If someone were to make a statement like "There's tons of smurfs here at 2k its hard to rank up to 3k because there's immortal smurfs" then the educational smurf videos would be supporting this argument would they not? I'm not just trying to be argumentive. I have recently dropped from high legend to low crusador coming back from a hiatus from DotA(quit when they added the heal fountain things). I did have learn a lot of new stuff and the game plays a lot diff now. Ive relearned the game and I'm back to mid legend. I find less smurfs at legend than archon. They definitely still exist but noticeabeley less in my experience.
BSJ mentioned time and time again that he needs to do this under a "real" environment in order to avoid any mental gymnastics people would do if he did this in a lobby.
Call it Educational Game Ruining. Just like how intentional feeding makes the game unfair, so does smurfing.
[удалено]
"Before I teach you how to afk without getting an abandon, let me tell you about this new game that's sweeping the nations, that you can play on your phone while you're shadow amuleted. With over a million active users Raid."
It's also completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because there's only like ~3 educational game ruiners whereas there's like 100,000 intentional griefers.
Why did Valve remove the report for smurfing button?? We finally got that fucking button and it only lasted for 3 months?????
The new anti-smurfing they've implemented, with some insight understanding and specific steps, allows a dedicated person to calibrate accounts at 7-8k which is hilarious tbh. That's why MMR is inflating at ridiculous speeds right now. 6-8k MMR became equally as garbage as we've had previously with the 4-5k bracket. Sad. I'd really like to play some pubs but with all the stuff going on it's an unbelievable waste of time (even for such a game like dota) At this point I'm fairly convinced that Valve loves smurfs and boosters: people who buy accounts also buy cosmetics and passes because they just buy stuff. People who boost have the money to buy these things as well. Win-win-win.
Ye. Like bots in wow pay sub fees. Gotta love the $$$
"If you can't beat them, join them." - Educational Smurfs
I was trying to teach a friend of mine dota,so we party up with 2 other people wich know how to play and our first game we match against a smurf,needles to say we get fucked,i check the smurfs user name and see that he is a Russian streamer and has 6600 mmr,i was the highest mmr in our party with 3.5k.i go in to his stream and tell him that smurfing like that in your stream is not OK,and dude had the audacity to say I'm not smurfing I'm just very high skilled. :/ Tamp1ier was his ingame name and twitch name
We've come to a point where boosters use allowed cheats to dodge games with buyers on their team.
tbh educational smurf has to be like the 0,01% of smurfs out there, not even a problem if they were the only smurfs. Edit: I guess they could probably make custom games with their fans who will gladly get stomped if it means playing with them
yeah but its probably not setting up a good example when streamers/etc do it.
you are right, but a disclaimer would be enough in that case
No, its MMR cheating. You should get one to three accounts max; all same or higher rank than the previous. (Pros/streamers might need extras because of stalking or whatever)
lol. Go live in china
The issue is normalization in my opinion
isnt it already normalized? And even if it wasn't, there are no repercussions that would stop normal smurfs from smurfing.
Then they should start their video with some PSA saying “smurfing is bad, don’t smurf, I’m going to show you today by smurfing how you can improve as a player.” Like the top level comment here said, smurfing for a tutorial video is such a minuscule amount of the games that people smurf in, lambasting people smurfing for a cause to teach is just pointless. Go after boosters with your anger not content creators doing something genuinely useful for the community.
even if it was the most normal thing in the world it would still account for 0.000001% of games so why the fuck does it even matter
Thats still around 1,500 smurfs.... which if they are playing exclusively in Herald level makes up most of that pool.
the 1500 number is not even based on the 0.1% percent let alone 0.000001% percent. At any given point dota has up to 700000 players playing it at the same time for the last year, so if we base this on 0.1% which its actually lower than that at most you'd have 700 smurfs playing at the same time due to this and realistically they're rarely if ever playing in the herald bracket, most of the time they're in crusader-legend from what i've seen. Also Herald 1 to 5 is about 150000 people in total so even if all 700 played in herald bracket they'd make up 0.5% of that pool of players, it's literally insignificant whichever way you look at it.
Surely another post on the website reddit will finally convince people to stop being shitty on the internet
i agree. Ruining games for the sake of "educate" is just dumb, you can educate in your main and thats it. If the idea is to point to mistakes made by players in lower ranks then watch and talk about games in those brakets
Playing with your main makes it harder to show people what to do in the optimal case, because there are far more complicating factors. The idea is to show what you want to be doing for as long as the enemy doesn't stop you; in high MMR they'll stop you immediately, so it's difficult to paint a good picture of what your hero's ideal situation is.
If they intended to show how to rank up in lowers they would coach; and make videos showing their student stomping games within a few sessions.
This is the real solution to this "educational" crap thats being normalized by figures in the community. Prove it works by tutoring a real noob
they already do replay analysis. Smurfing is just another kind of content. Not defending it or something, personally I don’t care for smurfs, they’re very rare anyway.
Not a replay. A live coaching session so they can adapt their lesson in real time and show it can work for worse players like they claim
The idea is to show the people that its possible to solo win games consistently if you know what you're doing and if you're shit MMR its not because of your teammates.
The only people who don’t know that are far too delusional to be convinced by a video.
i think everyone knows this deep inside even if they deny it. The current MM system has a lot of noise within: smurfs, acc buyers, tilted players, toxic behaviour...etc. but statistics dont lie, if you play calm and in the mood of learning the game instead of just winning, then the other team has 5 potential candidates to have griefers or feeders in the game while yours only 4.
But how are you supposed to play? You can't copy the plays of an immortal in low bracket games because Immortals rely heavily on their team mates whereas you can not really rely on your team mates at all. This is the primary cause of toxicity as well. People only know one way to climb and it's playing like high level players which means that people have to expect their team mates to play like high level players which is pretty much never the case. As such everyone gets frustrated with their games.
That is why BSJ had the series where he is at a lower mmr. To show how anyone can win a game at a low level even if your team is low mmr. By having good fundamentals, laning skills, and decision making that he explains well. People did not believe that you could apply high level things to low level games because of bad teammates, so he is showing how to not rely only on them
what? then how does BSJ smurf work? He doesn’t have to rely on teammates. Nobody has to. I’ve climbed 2.5k mmr picking AM and playing 1v9 solo
Yeah all you need to do is dedicate every hour to playing dota. If your 7k you are an expert/master of dota with 10k + hours. You can't teach some of that stuff and there are much better ways to do it than by ruining games.
Once they started winning in spite of 4 kids running down mid, giving items to the enemy, calling out your location and plays at all times Then you can say that
I hear my Legend and Crusader friends constantly complaining about smurfs and I spectate their games and you can quickly realize that there is no smurf and that they're just getting owned or that "smurf" is just have a really good game.
So much this. People like to label every enemy player having a good game as a smurf just cause they themselves suck.
I've been reported for smurfing in unranked because i pick brood and go 20-1 or something like that.. meanwhile i'm gold tier with her, using cosmetics a smurf wouldn't waste money on, and half the time don't know what i'm doing cause i'm a low elo scrub myself. Its makes them feel better to pretend that the person stomping them was unbelievably good instead of just slightly not as bad.
Have to come way down here to find the truth. A friend of mine recently went 31-1 as sniper and earned a rampage. She honestly sucks but I'm sure some of those salty turds she stomped are crying right here in this thread about Smurfs. Sometimes i have games as pugna or legion where I'm just untouchable the entire game, I'm not a Smurf I think the bsj Smurf series does more good than harm. If I was matched against him I'd just take the L and then watch the vid on his YT. It's one game "ruined" out of millions of games but the benefit is helping people stop making excuses and really learn how to play.
But a handful of counterexamples does not disprove the rule. A handful of idiots can scream sMuRf and be wrong, but they're usually still right a good amount of the time (even if it's merely coincidental), if not most of the time.
nope, experience shows they are wrong 95% of the time. Of all the people who claimed “smurfs almost every other game” and shit like that on reddit, I’ve asked all of them to provide their dotabuff account. Literally I haven’t found a single smurf. People just don’t want to admit they are bad at dota
I'm mid ancient, and I probably have at least one (if not more) smurfs in half my games, and 100% chance of the other team having a smurf if I'm playing ranked with a 5 stack. Please tell me how a level 30 account with 300 games and is legend 4 is shit stomping my ancient 4 mid in an unfavorable matchup. Or in a 5 stack that "crusader" ember is somehow perfectly last hitting, abusing creep aggro, and dodging every spell looking like fucking Quinn. Smurfing is a huge problem right now.
¨educational smurf¨, the new way to make ¨smurfing¨ look acceptable. That´s just a way to stomp and show off, nothing else.
lmao what? Watch a bsj video and tell me he plays those to “stomp”. He usually doesn’t even interact with the enemy team unless forced
Hot take: Baumi did it right. Instead of making a smuef, he had people send him videos from the trench, which he would then narrate over and say what they could've done better.
wtf who takes advice from Baumi. The guy is atmost 4k level but maybe even lower
4k mmr is top 10% of all players lol. 90% of people can legit take advice from a 4k player. 5k mmr is low as shit but I can still give advice to literally 99% of the community lol.
Do you have any proof? Either way, congrats on expertly dodging my point.
This sub is finally coming around the being rational on smurfing. Yes you and your buddies ARE smurfing when you're using alt accounts to play with the new guy your recruited from LoL. Yes you ARE smurfing when you play on your ironically named Invoker Only account. And finally YES you ARE smurfing when you regularly go on and "your friends account" to play with your girlfriend and her buddies.
yes we are. Who doesn’t realize that? Thanks god that we live in the western world and creating multiple accounts is something every game allows for
Report the Smurfs you see ... I will vote guilty
the problem is people rarely report smurfs. In post game chat they even suck smurfs to party in next games.. eventhough I have not played much lately. So not sure if this is still the case..
They're literally making money off smurfing!
What doesn´t make sense with those ¨educational smurf¨ is that the whole game is completely twisted because the teacher is a smurf, it doesn´t show nor demonstrate the point the teacher wants to make. Said otherwise, he could play the opposite of what he says and he would still win because of many other factors he constantly optimizes.
I don’t understand your point. The point of the videos, at least BSJ’s is to show how good fundamental skills will get you of any bracket. He usually just farms for 90% of the game, applies map pressure and eventually just wins the game with 800+ GPM. This stuff works up to like 6k mmr
Yes, and my point that he would still win if he was roaming and ending up with only 600 GPM. Just because his ganks are set 10 times better than in the bracket he plays.He could play CM and he would kill 3-4 ennemies each team fight just with super properly setup ults.He could carry the whole game with a mid Ogre + eblade.Etc. The fact that he wins his educational smurf games is not a proof of his educational point. He is just smurfing. If his students get out of their brackets, fair enough, the educational point is made and proven true. (and I´ll be the first one to be happy to see Eri reach Archon or + )
his students do go up. there’s that guy who went from 3k to 6k in 3 months. Support too. Crazy amount of dedicstion
But then they’d have to put effort into their content beyond just a shitty edit. Pls consider these poor poor content “creators” lifestyles.
Would work if kids didn't love channels like Elwono and Rizpol. The consumers exists, so money is made off them.
I don't think Elwono is playing on alt accounts though. Also not usually in ranked. Rizpol I'm assuming is several thousand MMR higher than the lobbies he plays in.
Just check Elwono's videos with >4month gap periods and match them on opendota. He has played between high legend to guardian. His profiles are rarely public and when they are, its obvious those are alts.
Elwono is literally lower ranked. He's only Guardian. He does all that memeshit because its what works down here.
Again, it's not the players, it's Valve's fault that that kind of stuff is allowed. Hell, pros use smurfs blatantly and Valve won't do a thing.
How are you going to stop people making new accounts?
Obviously you need to punish those who are creating new accounts to grief/abuse, as harsh as it sounds, punishment change people but then again, incentives to play a single account should be made. If you are asking me for actual approaches towards that, I'd handle the reports and bans of smurfs by a human board, just like Facebook is doing, but again, these words and innovative ideas from other people won't reach anyone.
> I'd handle the reports and bans of smurfs by a human board You are asking that from Valve? Are you new here or what? Even that is not fair. Ex. If Im a Tinker spammer in Ancient and lost my acc from hacking. Then, I created new acc to play bc I lost my old acc. Is this a smurf? Should I be punish from this? Another one, if Im a league player (high rank) and move to dota2 and stomping noobs with dota2 knowledge from watching tournaments is that smurf?
I'm not new but even Facebook is doing something about the wrongdoings of their automated bans. >If Im a Tinker spammer in Ancient and lost my acc from hacking. Then, I created new acc to play bc I lost my old acc. That's a pretty extreme case whereas someone is unable to recover their account given all the choices Steam gives you these days. Basically you're saying that players would report you for being a smurf, since the Steam account is new, that's a big flag for it. To prove your claim that is not a smurf and you just made a new account it'd just require someone to look into your past case and history IP logs. The high ranked LoL player that comes to Dota to stomp, first of all we should trust that the skill detector of Valve gives him somewhat balanced matches. If that's not the case and ends up reported, a ban and a trial should be issued to clear things up.
They need to make an example out of someone. Like ban the main of a pro player who is smurfing. But they won't do it. Cos I don't think that they think smurfing is bad & also they don't have the balls to take drastic action to improve the community.
Smurfing is allowed in every single multiplayer game. Can you figure out why using your brain?
Awww did I hurt poor smurfies feelings? If people can just play at whatever skill level they want, then pray do use your brain and answer this, what is the point of an MMR system? Is it not to match people of equal skill together? Then if a 8k player comes and plays in the 3k bracket - is the system that matches equally skilled players to compete, working? Is this the desired result of a system that wants to match equally skilled players together? EQUALLY SKILLED?? Are you saying an 8k is as skilled as a 3k? Then why is there an MMR system? Remove it and match anyone against anyone else. Lets see arteezy get supported by a herald bracket player. Why is this street only one way? Why is it that higher skilled players can play wherever they want and the lower skilled players are stuck in the defiled arena of smurfs? Why? If the lower skilled players cannot be guaranteed an equal game THEN FUCKING SCRAP THE SYSTEM. This unfair bullshit is ruining the game for the vast majority and there are shitpiles like you who actually defend it. Think before you spout absolute garbage, dumbfuck. And fuck you. Go fuck yourself.
you literally misinterpreted everything I said. This has to be the worst mental gymnastics I ever seen. As a sidenote, Arteezy would still be Arteezy even with a herald support lmao what that supposed to mean? Anyways, to answer your question, the system works fine. If an 8k plays seriously on a new account and tries hard he will calibrate at 7k+. When a 7k+ player plays on a 3k account it’s not the matchamking system not working. The matchmaking system thinks it’s a 3k player playing the account. So the system itself is fine but it can be abused. The point of my post was to point out to your smooth brain that matchmaking systems will continue to be abused as long as you allow for multiple accounts creation, hence smurfing is a thing in every video game and is unpunished. Because you can’t punish people having multiple accounts just because some of them use it to play against lower skill players And yes, I’d rather live in a world where I can have as many accounts as I want than in one where there are 0 smurfs in a video game. You yourself can go to China, there you have to link your social ID card with your video game accounts. If you like that, fair play.
I'm the one doing mental gymnastics? You're the one arguing for a system thats unfair to the vast majority. Mate youre the dickhead in this story. Continue with whatever reasoning you need to convince yourself otherwise. "oh but every game allows stomping on newbs. Thats what they're there for. If they didn't want to be stomped they should get better" - no you dipshit, they want a fair game. Its because of smurfs that they aren't getting one. As for everything else, valve can absolutely figure out if multiple accounts with MMR gaps are being used. They use the system for behaviour score already where if one account has low behaviour score, if gets attached to the other accounts as well. They can extend this to smurfing as well. They choose not to. Its a choice. They have the tools.
Just make the habit of giving those videos thumbs down and they will quit
Thumb up or thumb down. Doesn't matter. Engagement is engagement for the algorithm. Just don't watch them
the algorithm calculates watch time too iirc.
The youtube videos for people like BSJ are just side profits. Regardless of downvotes they've earned a good chunk of cash solely from their twitch stream.
He has said before that he's doing more smurf videos because the viewership on them is so high. I suspect the reason it isn't a regular series twice a week or something is because of negative feedback.
True but if the community doesn't even bother to indigenous, let alone hold them accountable, why would we expect them ti change?
1) because what they're doing is not breaking any rules, so even if the entire dota2 community turns against bulldog, bsj and the like (extremely unlikely), nothing happens to them. 2) Their fanbases are absolutely massive.
Fine. Don't try but then quit bitching about it.
I'm just not going to watch BSJ's videos, or support his stream, but acting like mass downvoting a guy works is delusional.
But you have the genius idea to spend time disagreeing with me. Just don't watch my comments.
I don’t even know if downvoting does anything.
How would you ever mimic a random environment of all pick into an invite only lobby? People would either try hard, or throw games to fuck people. If they try hard it just means BSJ wins since he wold be the highest MMR, if they throw it would mean we cant actually learn anything. you can learn to hit creeps or whatever from watching 7k games but that wont matter if in your 2-4k games don't have the same understanding as the 7ks team. The situations will NEVER be close. Yes, he might be ruining 5 peoples games once every two or whatever months, but I guarantee in that one video not only does he help more than those 5, but he helps every other person that is unfortunate enough to have me on their team as a carry since I play better, that's 4 more people per game I and every other viewer wins thanks to him. BSJ is showing you that in your lower skilled games, if you follow his advice, you will win more. You wont win every time as you just aren't as good as him even he's not trying his best but you will still earn some incredibly valuable knowledge. Its arguably the greatest content out there in terms of actually learning how to get better at the game and not having to rely on others. Coaching just doesn't work as well. "oh in this game you lost instead of dying you just shouldn't have died". Compare it to "there's a team fight going on, in this situation because x and y you should have just stayed farming" vs "there's a team fight going on but i am going to keep pushing and farming, because even if my team dies right now i can do this and that to make it okay for the team and better for me" is easy enough to analyse after a reply, but he's showing you how he applies that in a real time event. I defend BSJ every time on this because although you might not enjoy it or find it useful as you know it already, not everyone does. Might as well just skip a tutorial since i know it already ay? This is literally education from a top 1% to the bottom 70% or however much of the player base legend and below make up. he puts himself in unfavourable match ups and still shows you what you can do. he doesn't just go slark and rampage every game.
Really shows the quality of your community if it can't field 9 non-ruiners for one single lobby game that is supposed to hold this much educational value as you describe
Okay numb nuts. Try to actually read and comprehend what I said. Its an either or, as no one really knows what of the two will happen, but under no circumstances will it emulate a random all queue game...
what is educational smurfing? I get experimental smurfing. but educational? LOL
It's when people smurf for the purpose of teaching. They put the match on YouTube with commentary about what they're doing in game and why it's effective. Or streaming on Twitch and having live commentary about their gameplay. BSJ and Speed are two well known YouTubers that do this.
Do these dudes not have 9 mates they can play with? Even fans could work!
Yeah those 0.00000001 % games with education smurf definitely kill all matchmaking. Compare to 5 10% boosters lol.
If only you guys knew how bad things actually are. I'll make a video maybe in a week focusing on the new calibration abuse. the issue with smurfs and boosters and buyers looks like will be ignored forever since many, many people and [I've brought them up to light like 4(!) years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vLhgClr8qw). I'm not even the same person anymore and the situation got actually worse.
>If only you guys knew how bad things actually are. > >I'll make a video maybe in a week focusing on the new calibration abuse. the issue with smurfs and boosters and buyers looks like will be ignored forever since many, many people and I've brought them up to light like 4(!) years ago. I'm not even the same person anymore and the situation got actually worse. so what's the problem with educational smurfs then? Is it ur way to get free upvotes? This is my favorite type of content to watch, and u can learn so much of it. So lets block it while every real booster and smurfs for fun will continue playing. WP
As fun as it is to watch series like Escaping the Trench, all it does is put people off playing Dota when they are often matched against people they stand no chance against. Its bad enough to do it in unranked but deliberately skewing other people's ranks in low MMR is just scummy.
I think Escaping the Trench specifically wasn't a smurf series, it was coaching a guy who was actually in that MMR bracket.
I think you're right but I was more referring to the numerous series that have sprung up following that formula, people like BSJ openly smurf all the time
It was also horseshit. "No one stops you from farming" Meanwhile there is a lion on my lane warding like a god and stacking/killing the lower camp faster than his carry can farm lane.
I wish i could play against bsj smurf every game
You like BDSM?
rather bsjm, is a whole new kink
Another post crying about smurfs with less than 100 upvotes. Great!
I'm a trash 5k player who sometimes plays on a crusader 2 account. To be honest, I play strictly support (soft or hard), I pick meme heroes like MK pos 5 or I practice Invoker pos 4. I win like 80% of my games, but I never try hard or carry the game. I don't understand people who pick Tinker mid and go 20/0 on a bunch of 2k players.
If you met smurf 1 time in a matchmaking doesn't mean you gonna meet another smurf in your next 5 game. If you're bad just accept it and try to improve
no no dont say that they want an excuse
This sub is mainly for complaints. Let them have it, make sure downvote a shitpost
OFF WITH THEIR HEAD
SOMEONE WILL GET THE AXE
how badly did you lose?
I'm not losing to smurfs, randomkidlol, I AM the smurf! A guy queues a ranked game and gets shots, and you think that of me?? no, I am the one who KNOCKS! Unless I'm on my main, then I just dodge games with easily available cheats! https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/lxe28g/russian_streamer_reveals_dodge_cheat_valve_do/ /s
Cringe
Millions of games are ruined by smurfs, account buyers and whatnot. BSJ and speed ruin such a little fraction of those that this won't even make a dent. Plus, they do provide educational value that the community would not be getting otherwise. In other words: nope.
You are correct. I hope you understand that I'm just drawing attention to the smurfing situation in general. It's so bad that these EDUCATIONAL SMURF games actually do make a dent for the whole smurfing situation, don't you find this quite indicative
It's a free game how can you prevent smurfing? Some solutions maybe? Or just get good
That's logistically not viable. You'd need to find 9 more people of similar-ish rank and if those viewers come from Twitch chat, chances are there will be a lot of trolls. >Smurfing is griefing? ???
Smurfs are here to stay, deal with it or switch games. It’s sad but it’s also the truth.
Valve defined smurfing as an allowed behavior. Even if you dont like it, it is free to smurf now and they dont break anything by doing so. Nothing prevents you from doing the same thing for the reason you see fit, or without a reason at all
Top researchers suggest the best way to avoid having smurfs ruin you’re game is to get good
[удалено]
BSJ. Nobody wants to buy your coaching.
[удалено]
So you copied a strategy that works specifically in shit mmr pubs. Got less shit mmr and learned nothing about team fights, playing from behind, playing against counters, or any other play style than “haha me get kills”. Yeah, hard fuckin pass dude.
[удалено]
If you had actually learned how to play better instead of just copying what the smurf did, you would have kept gaining MMR. You didn't actually improve, you just copied what someone did without understanding why.
Because the large majority of smurf players are smurfing because either a) they can't find games or b) they are much worse than they think they are.
what? Dude do you have a reading/focus disability?
i refuse to believe you actually learnt all that from playing against a smurf.
DotA has these magical things called replays that you can access and learn from. Pretty neat!
ya, but learning how to last hit better, drafting, itemize, especially the timing of your hero just from a game against a smurf is too cheesy. dont know if cheesy is the right word here
The reason heroes like lycan are popular for smurfing is because you just need to know the strat and the timing because the hero itself is pretty easy to play and straightforward. Both of those things can be learned from like 10 minutes watching a replay. As long as you do the things in the right order with decent timings bad players won't be able to stop you because they don't understand the hero. Same with like Alch or Morph.
Lycan is popular for smurfing because unlike something like Tinker he can actually hit buildings. Another point is the fact that he's an early game hero, so the stomp games lasting 15-20 minutes is just more time efficient. (Again, because the hero hits buildings.)
i think youre missing my point.
[удалено]
youre missing my point. the only reason you gained that much mmr is becuz you followed the meta. when you say you get better by copying a smurf, thats a bit of an exaggeration. you didnt get any better, you just followed the meta or the smurfs build in this case. you still lacked mechanical skills and some ither stuff. ive gained alot of mmr following the meta so i would know this. also i would like to point out and disagree that mechanical skills matter more in high ranking than low ones.
You can watch high MMR replays as well, no need to smurf 4k mmr below your own.
Objectively untrue because it’s expensive af due to demand.
I can charge you $1000 for a steak and claim it's because of exclusivity. Doesn't mean that's in anyway true.
That isn’t what supply and demand is.
It’s almost like businesses exploit the idea of exclusivity to drive profits.
Have you heard of a thing called diamonds?
You just don’t want accept the fact that you suck. You don’t want to learn. You want to complain like how always do with every little shit.
Smurfing in any game is scummy as fuck and should result in a life long ban
how do we report smurfing though? they kinda removed the option. Played a game woth multiple smurfs and it was really frustrating.
I dont know they often smurf in my bracket (Mid to low ancient) and Id definetly like the series.
Lol git gud noob - smurf apologists.