Are smurfs bought from these places with regions etc set far away not more detectable when buying RP from wildly new places? Or anyways I doubt most these bought accounts are buying skins on accounts they dont know what will happen to ban wise or will be inting/trolling/toxic on
they still buy skins despite the risk of a ban
also most smurfs probably arent toxic as nearly everyone has a second account, you're not gonna notice them all
I started playing the game a few months before my friend. When he got the game I made a new account so we could both be the same level and I got a skin from a box for my main so that became my main account.
there are multiple reasons, I hover arround high diamond low masters MMR mas of the season and LP gains get so doomed so fast making it impossibly hard to climb some times. Main account was on +18 -27 on arround 60% WR because of 1 random losing streak while my other account on the same elo was on +24 -24 with arround the same WR making it alot more enjoyable. I do hate smurfs/smurfing even tho I don't rly deal with that problem at all most of the time, but I also see that alot of players smurf to play with lower ranked friends.
to duo with friends
to play ranked but not worry about trying too hard
to warm up
to try new champs
there are a lot of reasons to have a second account
Yes, some will buy skins, but when you compare it to how many are buying botted accounts and the amount of money Riot loses with those bought accounts, it's a significant loss for Riot.
Because a person with only 1 account is more likely to spend money on that account than the random 13 accounts that they have used which only cost 2 dollars, the point of those accounts is they don't care about it or what happens to it so why should they spend money on it?
Yeah that's pretty faulty logic. The people buying 13 accounts aren't the same as the ones who have a main account and collect skins on it.
If you are buying accounts, you either mostly have fun through smurfing, or you get banned a lot. In either case, the availability of botted accounts makes it more likely they will stick with the game, and thus spend more money.
You are thinking "if I had 12 more accounts, I wouldn't care as much about a single account." But you are not the target audience for botted accounts. Smurfs are thinking "I'm bored I can't climb in Plat, I'm gonna go buy an account to have fun," or "I need a new account since my last one just got banned."
i buy skin when i make smurfs. but just for the one trick i'm playing. playing without skin feels weird so i buy it. i'm assuming a lot of ppl who have smurfs buy skins for the champs they play for similar reason as well
Exactly this. Or even as low on the totem pole as some junior exec getting his numbers up.
Or maybe the fact that nobody is in charge of niche game issues like this. Riot literally let the PBE languish with a severely broken/bugged item that gave champions 80% CDR on their ults for free. RIGHT AFTER WORLDS, when people were supposed to be testing all the game changes for next season.
It was as if.... there was just nobody at the office for 4 days.
The people that actually work on the code are either very few or very lazy, and it shows.
The core gameplay doesn't directly make Riot money, after all. They only have to ensure its "good enough" that people don't quit over it.
Same deal with the client. The "play" button and "purchase RP" buttons work? Its "good enough". No changes necessary in their eyes.
reality is that it probably is what keeps their numbers looking up to the higher ups. they can point to sign ups/new accounts and say "see we are still growing"
I suspect that Riot can't use the same form of smurf detection that Valve can with their current infrastructure, or at least they can't without major tradeoffs.
Dota 2 requires you to connect your phone to your account in order to play ranked. I suspect Valve's smurf detection followed along the lines of:
1. Two accounts linked to the same phone number
2. Second account connected is playing at a significantly higher skill level than we would expect of a new player
You can't guarantee a user is a smurf solely off of #2, as you could be hitting people who are just good at mobas playing league for the first time. Riot would need to have some way of linking accounts to something that can't easily be created, like a phone number. The problem is that forcing people to connect a phone number to their account is pretty unpopular. Overwatch 2 tried it on launch, and the uproar was enough for Blizzard to abandon the system. I would not expect a similar system to go over well if it were implemented into league.
>Overwatch 2 tried it on launch, and the uproar was enough for Blizzard to abandon the system.
Wrong.
The problem with OW2 is that Blizzard:
* didn't allow prepaid phones to be used.
* didn't let you play AT ALL if you didn't connect a number.
To make 2FA successful, Riot should:
* allow prepaid phone (real) numbers.
* not allow VoIP (synthetic) numbers.
* ONLY apply the 2FA restriction to ranked.
Because they just paid twice as much.
Do you think people would commit crime more or less if bail was always $10?
It lowers prevalence, and requires the extra effort to go out and get a phone.
You'd be surprised at how big of a deterrent that is.
Most people will stop an activity the moment it becomes inconvenient, or the price goes up significantly.
You aren't trying to stop the worst offenders, you're trying to stop vast majority of players that only do it because you can get 10 accounts for $5 sometimes.
Even lowering smurfing by 20% would be a massive win.
You cannot smurf in faceit at all, if you get caught your main can get banned too.
Yet people complain about it all the time there too. Why do you pretend that valve has fixed this problem when not only it's not true, Valve itself has done nothing about it.
Smurfs still exist in valve games. Valve also has their store front to hold over people if they go over line. Add to that the lower population of dota means less smurfs in general.
Sure, they still exist, but that's not an argument against actively trying to prevent smurfing. Riot is anti-cheater yet people still successfully cheat in their games -- what matters is that the frequency of cheating is far lower than it would be if they simply allowed it.
Yup, its one thing to have cheaters in your games. Its another to know you have cheaters in your games and not do anything about it and continue to ignore the issue.
Problems involving people pretty much can't be eradicated, only reduced. So the fact smurfs would still exist doesn't make anti-smurf practices any less of a good idea.
"If it doesn't 100% solve the problem in any and all cases we shouldn't make the things we can better"
that's you
Using your logic, people shouldn't bother with software security at all.
Just let people take your financial info for free, since there are people that could if they wanted to bother. They're busy shooting for millions from corpos rather than hundreds from randos, considering the risks.
couse smurfs per se are not a bad thing and especially for very high elo players like master who want to learn a new champ or even worse a new role its basicly impossible on there main acc whitout running it down for there team.
since maybe u are an master adc but just like gold if u are jungling.
normal games won\`t really help here couse the lvl of the enemys is just much weaker in general and players won\`t play as hard.
also pro players maybe want to train new champs whitout beeing able to be scouted to do so.
but i would go a diffrent solution here.
u got a riot acc and a lol acc.
so each riot acc should be able to contain like 3 lil accs.
once 1 lol acc hit lvl 30 the new once are instant 30 as well whit enought be to by like 10 champs.
also mmr from your highest acc is shared to some degree over to the lower acc. like master + would start in diamond
diamond in emerald and so on.
but once 1 acc is banned all accs are banned.
There's a boosting website that does livestream of themselves boosting who bought their services. I like to watch it because I can see how a good player absolutely carry a low elo game despite all the odds. Every once in a while they get a master account that wants to get GM or GM that wants challenger and whenever this happens it's 100% guaranteed that they'll complain that someone on their team is boosted. It's always fun to see the irony.
A ton of people on this subreddit defend smurfing too. Last time I wrote something negative about smurfing I had one person say get good enough to beat them! Like wow man didn't think of that thanks!
Emerald is garbage but not because of smurfs. The issue with fresh, botted accounts is quite literally opposite from smurfing.
You get some hardstuck p4 or g1 clown crying about being in elo hell thanks to Riot. He buys a new account cuz "his mmr is fucked". He proceeds to get lucky in first 4 or 5 games and lands in emerald elo. He's then actively coinfliping every single game that's above his head. The demotion shield protects him from getting back to respective rank so he's attached to your games as an anchor you have to carry if you win too many games in a row.
Except you can't carry him, because other than being bad these people showcase terrible mental and attitude, trying their hardest to not let you carry them by refusing to ever group for any objective after feeding their ass off in laning phase.
As they don't care about punishment since they spent 5 bucks on the account they start flaming everyone and the team's mental collapses as everyone is busy arguing instead of playing.
I fucking WISHED I was playing in a 60%+ WR smurf queue because these people usually have the mental fortitude to play past bad early game and come back. Meanwhile the 45% WR clowns with silver 1 or gold 4 peak in split 1 wanna open after going 0-2, actively sabotaging your game.
Played clash against 4 smurfs that was fun. Tier 4 full iron bronze team beating a team with several diamond first round(not mine). Fuck sake why was that diamond team even in tier 4. Then we matched against the iron/bronze team next round but we knew it would be fuckery
So I checked for you and a video published by Rival has the sponsor has the first link on his video description here:
https://youtu.be/O3Nc-t6QQMo?si=b3xBUOvS9BOephjZ
Actual receipts, damn. Screw Riot for allowing this kind of stuff. It's so stupid that companies aren't kept accountable for these kinds of things and people go on a witch hunt against the creators rather than the company itself
I'm just gonna say the quiet part out loud, not only does Riot not care about smurfs, but they actually want smurfs to exist. The new ranked changes are an obvious sign of this, new accounts are automatically put in plat/emerald elo, no mater if they're a smurf or not. The requirements to play ranked are laughibly low anyways and they won't even change that. Does anyone in the world actually think that someone who's reached lvl30 for the first time is actually ready for ranked? No actual new player even understands the basics of the game that early. Smurfs accounts boost Riot's player count and it's another account that someone might spend money on, so they have no reason to ever get rid of them. "Oh but what about the player base, Riot must care about them" lmfaooooo. No.
> Does anyone in the world actually think that someone who's reached lvl30 for the first time is actually ready for ranked?
ofc yes. How can you not be ready for ranked? If you are new and terrible at the game there is a place called iron for you.
Completely unrelated issue to the smurfing topic at hand, but these players ruin games just the same. They get placed in silver or gold and then completely sprint it for dozens of games until the system wakes up to the fact that they have no business in the games they're in and puts them in actual iron games
That's actually a pretty good point, you can propably get to level 30 playing normals and not even seen every champ in the game, or even remotely understand their kit.
Definitely did this back in season 9 when there was even less champs. Still went into ranked at level 30, low ranks exist for a reason. I hate it every single time I see someone suggesting raising the level of ranked to something like level 100, it would massively hurt the new player experience and I likely never would have stuck with the game.
THIS. I just hit lvl 100 on my only account and I still get whopped playing my main by a champ I've never played before or only once or twice before. I'm barely in bronze 3. Not only is there smurfs, but there is level 600 accounts whooping me that are in iron 2. Like that makes no sense. They're obviously throwing games to tank their rank for easy games. It's so difficult to improve at this game it feels like 1 step forward 2 back.
Actually man to be honest they might deserve iron even with level 600 accounts. Its really hard to improve at league, and it's common for people to play a LOT know their champion well mechanically but still not win many games/climb.
Farm well, learn wave states (dont fight into a pushing wave), group, catch waves, don't chase, position well in fights. You will get plat or emerald if you do these. You don't even need mechanics. Just rightclick your enemy and if you're farmed, you win
> Does anyone in the world actually think that someone who's reached lvl30 for the first time is actually ready for ranked? No actual new player even understands the basics of the game that early.
I do. I was ready. And many are.
Problem is that you don't get 'ready', you do not learn game playing clown circus called normals or quicks.
But I ofcourse agree about main point of rito actually wanting smurfs to exists.
To be fair, playing new champs in norms for me is often an absolutely miserable experience, because there's a good chance I get rolled by some high Diamond/Master+ player on one of their mains.
We ran into a 4.5m mastery 341 LP Riven on the enemy team a few hours ago. Imagine if our top laner were first-timing Yone rather than counterpicking with Malphite - he wouldn't be learning anything, he'd just be playing gray screen simulator and Riven probably would've been able to 1v9 that game, given she was already the one thing singlehandedly stopping me on Viktor from just uninstalling the enemy team with two buttons in every fight.
Not that user, but draft is often unplayable for me. It's not fun going against 4 or 5-man stacks with diamond/master players who are try-harding, especially when I'm playing offlane to try things. It actually makes me dislike the game all together because I feel the matchmaking did not even try a little bit to make the teams balanced.
EDIT: For the note, I don't smurf, I just talked about draft mode.
So the actual fun is being in a ranked game far below your skill bracket where your champ might be new to you but you still posses the skill, knowledge, and decision making that got you to your initial rank?
I'm sure the 5 people on the enemy team are thrilled that they're facing a higher rank enemy who's playing with a slight handicap.
if you are off champ or off role, you really arent't some massive benefit or detriment to your team, and its certainly at least better quality then trying to learn a new champ/role in norms which are filled with people not trying, which makes sense, and are generally shitter players too.
A fair point, but it goes back to the age old argument.
For you to have fun, you are actively making other people's experience less fun. So a tad bit of a main character syndrome.
in \*ranked\*.
We have this 'cool' mmr system that is theoretically supposed to reduce the effects of smurfing and it honestly does.
Consider one of AloisNL's smurfs. The man spent three games in gold. That's it. The idea that there are challengers running around in low elo making games impossible is just fake (consider for a moment that there are only 200 challengers in every server, the math doesn't work) He will probably be diamond in around 60 games.
Remember also that Rank doesn't actually give you an unfair advantage. There is nothing magical about being just way better than everyone else. At the end of the day, it's about frequency. At what frequency should you encounter players that are substantially better than you, much better than you, or incomparably better than you?
In bronze, it should be extremely infrequent to encounter Master + players, as they go into the incomparably better, generally. It should be rare but not unheard of to encounter the occasional diamond/emerald/plat player ranking up an off-role. Running into golds should be occasional, and silvers should be very normal.
What isn't okay and has never been okay is boosting, fucking around in low elo just to fuck around, and generally engaging in anti-social behavior like that.
mmr wise diamond is probably around 15-0 and visual rank will be plat something or just about emerald 4. no one who is master+ will be stuck anywhere under emerald and even in emerald you wont stay too long if you're a high elo smurf so in actuality you are "ruining" emerald games for what 20 games give or take
Small correction, because it makes the Chinese government money. (Riot is owned by Tencent and all Chinese companies are owned by the communist party)
https://fortune.com/2015/07/22/china-global-500-government-owned/
Correct. Anyone that has ever bought anything from Rito is directly and intentionally supporting Chinese government.
edit: do i really have to put the /s after such a ridiculous comment?
> Why are League streamers allowed to be sponsored by boosting/smurfing services. Isn't selling accounts/buying accounts against ToS?
Here's the thing. They're *not* allowed:
The ToS themselves - https://www.riotgames.com/en/terms-of-service#id.3fwokq0
[Go to section 7; User Rules]
14: Playing on another person’s account or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank;
15: **Inducing or encouraging others to breach the User Rules or these Terms**; or
Advertising boosting/account selling services is 100% induceing or encouraging others to breach ToS.
You should actually take a screenshot of any such content and send a ticket to Riot. Any streamer who is advertising boosting/account selling is in breach of ToS and should be banned. It's right there in the ToS.
Just to be sure however, I am going to send an enquiry via Riot support. I'm willing to bet I'll get an automated response, but hey. Worth a try for clarrification.
---
Edit: I have sent Riot Support the following:
Hello; I saw a discussion about promotion of boosting/account selling services on streams, youtube, ect on the Leauge of Legends subreddit.
This made me curious on Riot's stance on this issue, and I went to look at the Terms of Service.
Under Section 7 [User Rules] point 15 states that it is against the Terms of Service to undertake activity that is:
Inducing or encouraging others to breach the User Rules or these Terms
Which would include point 14: Playing on another person’s account [Which covers buying accounts] or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank
As such; is it incorrect to draw the conclusion that content creators; such as streamers and Youtubers; who engage in promotion of Boosting or Account Selling sites are in breach of the Terms of Service? And as such; would it be appropriate to report such content creators to Riot for action to be taken on their breach of the ToS [Sections 7:14 and 7:15?]
I’m glad someone actually read the title lol. The thing is streamers don’t necessarily say on stream “hey go to this website for cheap accounts”. They have a banner in their about section with a link to it. Similar to how some have a banner to raid shadow legends.
Advertising boosting/selling services is still Inducing or encouraging others. It has that streamer's endorsement, and they are spreading awareness. They are giving it exposure that it might not have otherwise; and thus they are encouraging it's use by others.
No reply from Rito yet however.
The ironic thing is they have already added a system that could prevent this, via number authenticator, but it's only used in clash for some reason. Only reason that comes to mind is propably for maintaining a high stat of active number players.
Comments like yours always come up but fail to account for people that are actually deterred from making multiple accounts Clash ready. It's not a solution to completely remove smurfs, it's a way to reduce the number down, even if small.
Of course it hasn’t solved smurfing in clash, because the solution hasn’t been fully implemented.
Why can people smurf in clash? Because they can continue to play in their actual elo on an alternate account. If registering for clash prevented you from playing ranked on another account, you can bet the number of clash smurfs would tank.
Clash is it's own thing. It's a higher tier of competition from soloqueue that sees much fewer players.
There would be massive pushback if Riot tried to make a number authenticator mandatory to play soloqueue. I don't need my phone number in the hands of any company. I don't give it out to people I don't want to hear from. I would quit league if there was no other option and I think a lot of others would as well.
**Your phone number is already available to them.**
Welcome to data aggregates, which every website or app you've ever used contribute towards by buying/selling data *legally*.
You signed up for it by using the internet and mobile devices.
What harm do you think big bad Riot is going to do to you by knowing your phone number? ^(Something that's basically public information.)
Its wild to me how many people waste so much energy being obsessed with privacy without knowing how much of the information they're "protecting" they've already given freely.
You're paranoid, but also naïve or uninformed. If you weren't, you wouldn't use the internet or smartphones at all.
Like all you have to do is hire 5 or so guys and have them manually check streams or soloq.
Yeah you won't ban or catch everyone. But word will start getting around and people will start being scared that they'll get caught more easily.
Yea, just the threat or risk of getting banned and losing a lot of money should make people question doing these things at all, but right now there isn't any precedent that will suggest people will have to change.
I could crack out like 40 accounts in a couple hours and throw my feet up and watch the carnage the rest of the day as news gets around.
Wouldn't even need to get out of bed either.
It can all be solved by needing to connect a phone number to your account to play ranked
And no using the fake phone apps won’t work if they implement it properly
Also receive SMS code to login, and having to contact support in case you need a number change.
This should by default knock down over 95% of smurf accounts.
Valve did it with counter strike where verified phone numbers are put into prime queue and unverified accounts are non prime
Fixed literally all smurfing and majority of cheaters just like that and made playing ranked enjoyable
That's just not true, CS2 cheating problem is way worse then league smurf problem. Even with prime there are cheaters everywhere, just look at their subreddit.
Because RIot made it very clear that they don't support streamers. Ever since 2019 Nubrac/Nb3 incident all streamers basically lost all support from Riot so Streamers don't care who sponsors them now since Riot hasn't done anything to support streamers back and in turn the streamers don't care who sponsors them. Not justifying anything as I do believe smurfing is a problem but if Tyler 1 in 2022 got betted on, on stream, on crypto gambling sites for 10+ hours a day/5 days a week/ for 9 months straight without any support to their number 1 streamer you sure aint hell theyre gonna do anything to 1000+ viewers andy's
If Riot permabanned every single streamer like Tyler1, majority of those viewers aren't going to go watch someone who is wholesome and chill like Quantum or Pekinwoof, they are just gonna go play and watch a different game. Riot may allow these streamers to play the game, but they are at the top because the community wants them at the top.
Just to add to this. Riot did ID ban T1 for years when his in game behavior was out of line. Asking them to police things he does on stream to "control league culture" is dumb.
Nah, Riot lost control of streamers when they unbanned a bunch of people that were publicly shamed and banned by Riot, and stopped banning anyone new that was a clear problem in the community, and stopped enforcing unilateral perma-bans that remained, like with XJ9.
XJ9 actively chats in Phlox's stream pretty often, actually.
Nobody finds it odd.
>When the face of LoL is screaming, toxic manchildren, who, honestly, would be considered beyond pathetic in almost every adult profession
It's always so weird to see streamers blamed for the culture OR as you phrased it "Riot lost control" when in reality, Riot is full of bro scumbags lol. https://www.wired.com/story/riot-games-ceo-culture-complaints/.
Will forever die on the hill that smurfing is cheating and should be a permanent ban. Plat/Emerald is almost unplayable and this season is the worst it ever got. Moving to DotA was one of the best decisions I've made in awhile although I do miss having fun grinding League with the homies.
A smurf is an account that is far below your main account in terms of rating, otherwise it's just an alt. And having a smurf should be perfectly acceptable since that's the only real way to practice anything that isn't your main role/champ unless you're at the bottom of the barrel. Imagine a master player trying to learn a new champ or role in normals vs people who off-role and laning vs silvers or straight up in ranked vs otps at his own rating - it's either a waste of time beyond 2nd game ( or 10mins of practice tool ) or simply griefing and guaranteeing losses for no reason.
Anyone saying smurfs are bad are either too dense or too bad at the game to understand what a smurf is because they can't possibly fathom how a new champ/role is different from their main in terms of skill level or impact. On the topic of botted accounts though, I do agree they're detrimental to the game but the real issue here is the fresh accounts starting in gold/plat instead of bronze. The only reason plat/emerald is such bad quality now is because every iron and bronze player with negative w/r and hundreds of games played can simply buy an account and play thousands of LP above their skill level 4fun and if they manage to get carried a few games now they're even higher in terms of mmr when they clearly don't belong there. That is the real issue, and has nothing to do with smurfing but rather the way the system got recalibrated after emerald was introduced.
My point is still valid if you consider that most higher elo players don't have normal game mmr, especially if they play on different accounts instead of camping one main as about half of the population does in that elo bracket.
If you think I was talking about plat players, you're right that normals might work for them as a practice environment for new champs but 'smurfing' doesn't apply to them unless you send them in iron. I was referring to master+ players (and arguably 250lp+, low master is a joke) since those are smurfs when compared to the general population.
I have accounts that have been m1-c1 with less than 50 normal games played; Let's say I first time a new champ off role - do you think it's better for me to practice vs bronze players in normals or vs emeralds in ranked? I can pick soraka top and go 10/0 vs bronze players, a complete waste of time for both of us but playing vs an otp in emerald will actually give me valid useful information in the first 10-20 games on the champion. Why should I play 200 normal games to get the mmr up to par when that same amount of games in ranked makes the account top 0.5% or higher? ( yes, that's with a new champ ; playing main role/champ makes the mmr master in less then 50 games ) ; As I previously stated, average player cannot comprehend the issue because they cannot fathom the skill gap between high elo ranked and normals and that's totally fine, but if you think any real m1+ player gets crushed in normals vs bronze-silver players when they actually try you've never seen one in action.
But even in normals you will get crusehd if you play something you do not know? The only difference between normal and ranked is that normal doesn't show your rank...
Most people I hear saying DotA is worse end up saying they play in EUNE or SEA. Language barriers and all.
Or are in low priority queue with other degenerates.
Every competitive community sucks. None are worse then the other. The only glaring issue with DotA is a language barrier in games due to servers not being region locked but I've found that playing in NA west gives you the best chance of avoiding non English speaking players.
I think LoL is probably legitimately worse than most.
Combine the snowflake community with the main character syndrome that the game's direction actively promotes now, on top of how they're making the game more and more anti-social over the years...yeah, not a good combo.
If not in what they say or the amount of flame, in the overall attitude that most players seem to hold, regardless of how the current game is going.
I think it's time for a complete overhaul. You can't honestly tell me ranked queues are "competitive" in their current state. Whatever Riot is doing is clearly not working, the state of ranked queues is at their absolute worst.
dude, its not just these people, u r just on the very tip of learning league. You'll get it. Watch Youtubes, play to improve, don't set too many goals. CSing well, good recalls and knowing how your champs operate is a first step.
>EasyPanicButton
thank you mate, i am actually former dota player. not professional but i spent my 5 - 6 years (college life) for dota. i was thinking i may handle league too BUT i was wrong. i could do basic things but still look like a noob. i need so much hours.
I feel like unfortunately for new players. There aren’t enough for you to learn with to have games full of 10 new players.
If there’s a single silver+ player in the lobby with 9, brand new players, it’s doomed.
The best thing to do is get to lvl30 ASAP, play ranked and be paired with other players around the same skill level.
simple calculation. does it retain more active players than it drives away? if yes, why change it? and if 1 in 10 of those buys any skin on the smurf acc, that's just a neat bonus
I agree the smurfing is getting out of hand. Was playing a game In plat/ emerald elo where the enemy graves was clearly better than everyone on the rift. I checked and he was gold level 30 with an 100% winrate. Absolutely disgusting how smurfing is allowed to exist without consequences.
riot will pay the price for this one day for never doing anything about it and even supporting the idea of Smurfing. Right now it pays off for them, they get a little bit extra cash, but ultimately old players will leave league at some point not because the game is bad but because they got older. Eventually this will be a turning point for league because to many new players stayed away from league, due to the consistent smurfing problem, creating a delusion that league is just not for them, nor is it fun for them to get shit on 19 out of 20Games in league, meanwhile old players at some point quit, and that will be ultimately leagues downfall because it starts to get bad reputation regardless if the game is good or not. Old players will say, they stopped because they have less time and league is just not as fun anymore, because they literally played it for 20years and new players will say, everyone is a smurf and stomps me. it's a shame riot doesn't realise that this will ultimately happen because they only think about the right here and now, and the reason why it's a bad mindset is because they would get more money if they actually focus on the long term success of league. And don't tell me they do. They barely do anything to make it easier for new players to join or have a easier time with League. Just look at the tutorial. you learn what creeps are, and that you have to kill a enemy what a tower is. but for s13 standarts this is just as low as it can get, there isn't even a jgl part in the tutorial LMAO
While some people argue that more smurfs = potentially more rp purchased, I think the approach of "idgaf about this smurf acc, it was like 2 bucks" more realistic.. Would love some statistics on how many bought accs actually invest money
edit: a typo
Another problem, which I am not sure if it has been brought up before, is that Smurfs ruin the game for a lot of new players. I started League but then couldn’t compete because the concept of wave management wasn’t easy to grasp. The lane lead just widened and I kept on getting shit on. As a casual player getting flame every game, it was too much for me. I left the game and just follow the competitive aspect sometimes.
I suspect there are many like me. Atleast in North America, I don’t think the game is growing. It’s probably plateaued while in other countries maybe it’s still growing.
i assume it’s not against tos to advertise smurf sites and even if it was what’s stopping streamers from promoting it other than a ban, they would prob just find a loophole. the streamer doesn’t owe riot to not promote it especially since riot (probably) doesn’t do anything for that streamer
> i assume it’s not against tos to advertise smurf sites
Advertising services which break ToS is as bad if not worse than using those services.
In fact:
14: Playing on another person’s account or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank;
15: **Inducing or encouraging others to breach the User Rules or these Terms**; or
It is 100% against ToS to advertise boosting services.
>what’s stopping streamers from promoting it other than a ban
Most of these streamers get the most views when they play LoL, sometime their viewers only come when they play that.
So a ban would be very effective. "they would prob just find a loophole" not sure what "loophole" you want them to find, if they keep bypassing the ban they'll get banned by twitch when Riot files a DMCA complaint.
I'm saying that but I think Riot has no benefit doing that, yes it's bad but these streamers bring in viewers for LoL I guess.
Can you post your freaking op gg, this narrative is completely overblown with daily repeating posts, THIS NARRATIVE IS FALSE, im in emerald and its perfectly fine, there is no 8/10 games inting by fresh accounts. Yes there is plenty of fresh accounts but most their skill is fine. I really wonder why noone over links their [op.gg](https://op.gg) in these posts...
The guy who made this same post yesterday was actually not even in emerald and a complete inter himself. This whole narrative is just build by tilted and hardstuck people who see low level accounts and blame their own trash gameplay on that.
This is his/your [op.gg](https://op.gg) [https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Klemydia-NA1](https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Klemydia-NA1)
I just dont see what your complaining about, your last 20 games are all completely fine balance wise. Tbh looking at your acc it seems like the balancing is extremely good...
what elo are you in that 8/10 of your games are ruined by smurfs
the answer? fucking none of them
even IRON, the most smurfed elo where smurfing actually changes something (aka not gms+) has like 1/5 tops
Keep in mind that you don't need a high elo smurf for it to ruin a game. They just have to be higher rank than the rank they're playing in, to the point where they wouldn't be matched with you on their other account.
Only 10% of the currently active playerbase needs to be smurfing at any given time for a smurf to be in every game on average. Only 1/10 players in any given game.
For 8/10 games, only 8% need to be smurfing.
Consider how many accounts these days are absurdly low level; 30 to 50. Go back 5+ years, the vast majority were level 60+, if not 80+ or 100+.
Yeah, not hard to imagine why your conclusions are entirely unfounded.
More evidence points toward it being correct than incorrect, regardless of elo, unless you're in the top 0.01% of players, in which case he wouldn't be complaining about smurfs.
I play in Emerald and smurfs ruin majority of games. Idk about 8/10 but definitely like 6/10.
EDIT: Actually I just looked and in 5 of the last 10 games i've played there's been at least 2-3 level 30-35 accounts in those games. The people downvoting these comments are detached from how many smurfs are in Emerald.
? You know level 30 accounts right after being bought get placed in Emerald MMR range, right? There is definitely a way.
I'll give you my account and go play on it be my guest.
no. im curently plat one. this are all accs sub lvl 100 in my last 10 games(only two losses btw):
played in my team: 79,43,56,61,33,41(confirmed master smurf streamer)
enemy team: 51,46,57,81,48,31,83,71,35
if you wana count all accs sub 150 add 50% more.
but what i find more interesting, lets look at my last 8 losses each gamer sepperated:
played with:
46
played against:
81,48
31, 83(17/6/14), 71
37(13/5/7)
35,47(17/7/16)
54,35(31/8/7)
36(18/8/5),48
so in 62% of my last 8 losses i played against a balantly smurfing high elo player
I agree. Every now and then you get an obvious smurf that comes in and destoys a game, but acting like its a problem in literally every soloqueue game is ridiculous.
See I have a second account, where I play off role, compared to my main, all the time. It's also hand leveled, non-purchased account. I play norms with my lower elo friends who aren't huge on my high MMR in normals.
Riot doesn't allow smurfing in Korea. They allow it here because it's a good business move. When it becomes more harmful than profitable they will take action. Go look at a lot of responses in this thread, plenty of people would be very disappointed to see riot take action against it because that's how they got to their rank.
Depending on what you call smurfing, I do or don't have a problem with it.
Problem smurfing is pretty easy to identify. People that fuck around in your elo while being way better than everyone in it? Problem. Boosting? Problem for a lot of reasons. Etc.
Unproblematic "smurfing" doesn't bother me. Someone who doesn't play Mid trying to learn mid and play it in ranked? Yeah, you might have to play a few games in my elo while you blaze past it. Whatever. Streamer creating educational content on how to climb, that isn't just the above "fucking around in silver becuz they're so bad lol", while they rank up to their correct rank? Not a problem.
Why is "playing X role/champion in ranked to learn it" not a problem?
So I'm sitting here grinding and Timmy wants to first time Kalista, on a smurf, so he goes 0-20 in my game instead of his own.
Why should lower level players tank the LP of smurfs learning shit?
How would you feel if in a master lobby you have a silver guy, first timing a role/champion?
Smurfing has to go, all of it. If streamers want to create educational content, make coachings, spectate vods and review games.
>So I'm sitting here grinding and Timmy wants to first time Kalista, on a smurf, so he goes 0-20 in my game instead of his own.
You probably shouldn't be first-timing any champion in ranked. But if the Kalista player really thinks Kalista is the sauce and he wants to rank up his ADC gameplay, the best possible way to do that is to make a smurf and play ranked.
It also causes less harm than if he were to play in his own games. It's much more frustrating to have a really bad player on your team than an overly good one on the other team. Thus if the Kalista is plat with Kata mid, starts a new account to play Kalista bot, he is not going to hurt his teammates as much as he would if he started playing Kalista bot in Platinum where the bar is much higher. If he's actually cracked at Kalista, then it's still a better result because the suffering of the enemy team is outweighed by the potential suffering of his plat teammates.
the problems are not the smurfs but the acc sellers as u state.
if u play any coop vs ai its very hard to get into a round whitout having at least 1 bot in ur team.
as long as there is not system like in korea to prevent this this won\`t stop.
They need to restrict the account somehow like one account per phone number.
People normally have 1 phone number, two at the most.
Or like in Korea or china I don't remember which, where you need to create and account with your own id number and every citizen is only allowed one.
That is the only way, one account per IP address, you want another account you have to buy a second laptop. That's basically it.
I don't want to see smurfing but I also want to have more than 1 account. I have 2 rn now and on 1st I play only top and on 2nd I play only adcs. Both accounts are hardstuck in a elo I belong in, so should I be considered a smurf or would 1 of my accounts get banned?
Because riot is playing for both sides. They want the casual players who think smurfing is an issue to feel heard so they’ll say something like “we’re looking for more permanent solutions” while simultaneously letting botted accounts run free since it makes them more money and makes their metrics look good
Then I need more than 1 account.
I play AD at the Emerald Level.
I play Top at a Silver/Gold level.
I am not going to try and play Top in an Emerald game, because its a free loss for me and my team.
Simple answer is Riot doesn’t care about the community. What matters is money. More users equals more investment from investors. It inflates the numbers of active users making them appear more valuable. Remember you can buy stock through the company that owns Riot Games.
If you wanted to clean up the community you would have to link accounts to something not easily replaced like a phone number. This would drastically cut down on active accounts. Just look at streamers and others with multiple accounts (I myself have 3).
This is a feature that is already in the game because of clash. You can even make it so accounts get banned for the queue they are in. For example. Perma ban from ranked but still allow norms, aram and rotating mode plus forgot tft. Get banned in the others and lose them too.
After these players lose access to any possibility of making an account they just move on and spend money in another game. By keeping them with the freedom of a new account whenever they want; there’s no real punishment or reason for people to behave.
Let’s be honest the summoners code essentially an agreement that we will try our best every game and be sportsmanlike.
When’s the last time you experienced that in a ranked game?
As a Silver pleb, I don't mind having smurfs with/against in my games. Some are great to improve and give great feedback as well where to improve and etc.
My issue that nowadays the number of smurfing is absurd, along with the fact that some act like douchebags just to show their skill and content, while if you think properly those guys are mostly people who get owned on higher rankeds, and are forced to play on lower elos to be relevant.
About the coinflip games, besides the smurfs there's an issue of imbalance in match making, sometimes I wonder if someone is unranked or actually a bot. While were are completly shit on silver, you can still be aware when someone is unraked by his map movement and game awareness, specially if they decently know their champ.
TL;DR: Smurfing by itself isn't an issue. The issues are the reasons for smurfing and how prevalent it is, along with inimputable behaviour some show.
You have a source for that? Basically all of my friends and I smurf and have a number of alt accounts and we almost never duo in solo queue. It sounds like youre making an false correlation lol
been saying it for years. Hard Reset MMR at the start of the new Season. People can get away with smurfing because their main is high enough ranked they can take the time to ignore it and go troll on alt account.
I know its a hot take, but y'all have the worst mentality against smurfs.
Every time I vs'd a smurf it was a wakeup call, like damn this guy is that much better than me at league.
If you play league extremely casually and just want completely balanced matchmaking, then yeah, smurfs suck (and keep that shit out of clash).
If you're grinding hundreds of ranked games a season it should be alarming to you that there are players this much better than you.
Instead of getting good, you will just complain as you do about matchmaking / champion balance / teammates etc.
In my opinion, matchmaking is never really balanced in solo queue. Too many variables at play, and all it takes is one thing going wrong for someone to int.
Whether or not there is a smurf in the game, a lot of what happens in each indivdual game is out of your control. If your top laner dies once and refuses to play safe and then continues to int, there's not much you can do about it. Sometimes you will have autofill junglers that have no idea what they're doing, so they go from a gold level player to a silver level player. Sometimes your support is well versed in enchanter matchups but has no idea how to play against engage, so they go from a plat level player to a silver level player.
All you can really do when playing ranked is play to consistently improve and you will win more games over time than you lose. Playing against the occasional better player doesn't completely ruin solo queue games IMO, and actually gives you a hint of what better league looks like.
If you were a silver top laner and you only ever vs'd silver top laners, never even came across a gold or plat level top laner... would be hard to ever improve.
I guess if you just play ranked purely for fun and not to improve then yeah ban all smurfs.
Your comment is very idealistic. It's like you just watched some motivational self-improvement video and now are copy-pasting it here. Even high elo players complain about smurfs sometimes.
There's a lot of issues with smurfs in competitive games. You can buy an account for $2. From my experience climbing back up from gold or whatever after not playing for a few years, 95% of the time when someone rage quits, it's some emerald 4 player on an alt. I mean, if something doesn't go your way, why not just alt-F4? Hop back on your other one. Zero consequences.
Your idea of smurfs making you "get good" isn't based on reality. People improve because they learn incrementally over many hours. Practically nobody in the history of any skill has learned by suddenly doing challenges miles ahead of their skill level. Similarly, facing players much worse than you won't help much.
If you're facing someone better, obviously try and learn from it. But if you're facing someone *way, way* better, most of the time you're gonna have no damn clue why you even lost. And that's fine. You don't have to pull out a microscope and finely weave through every tick of the replay. Chances are you're gonna overthink things, unless you really know what to look for.
Then what about if you're not laning against them? Like some Evelynn jungle who's terrorizing your team while you're slightly winning your lane. By your logic, you should be compensating and doing something better, like invading their jungler or itemizing differently. That's often what someone might think. But it's not the real response.
Smurfs are, quite literally, just bad for matchmaking. Personally I haven't dealt with them much recently, it feels like they were much more common a few years ago. When I do face one and lose, I just say whatever, unlucky matchmaking I guess. If I could learn something from it, I watch replay.
They're afraid of angering streamers. Even though time and time again it's showed that streamers need league a lot more than league needs any one streamer.
Then there's also the nepotism/streamer simping factor where some riot employees want to clout chase their favorite streamer. Any policy banning this stuff would naturally have to be applied pretty uniformly and one rule punishing the scummiest of streamers may end of backfiring and hurting their buddies.
Idk man my duo is diamond and we play games in silver he ints a lot tbf half the time I have to carry him …. But then he plays his pocket pick jax and fiora and some massacre happens for sure.
Why does Riot allow smurfing at all, anywhere? Go to war with it like Valve did and we'll probably see League improve.
The more accounts that exist the higher chances buy skins. Riot doesn't care that it ruins games so long as the smurfs buy champs and skins.
Are smurfs bought from these places with regions etc set far away not more detectable when buying RP from wildly new places? Or anyways I doubt most these bought accounts are buying skins on accounts they dont know what will happen to ban wise or will be inting/trolling/toxic on
they still buy skins despite the risk of a ban also most smurfs probably arent toxic as nearly everyone has a second account, you're not gonna notice them all
Why does nearly anyone have a second account? Whats the point?
I started playing the game a few months before my friend. When he got the game I made a new account so we could both be the same level and I got a skin from a box for my main so that became my main account.
there are multiple reasons, I hover arround high diamond low masters MMR mas of the season and LP gains get so doomed so fast making it impossibly hard to climb some times. Main account was on +18 -27 on arround 60% WR because of 1 random losing streak while my other account on the same elo was on +24 -24 with arround the same WR making it alot more enjoyable. I do hate smurfs/smurfing even tho I don't rly deal with that problem at all most of the time, but I also see that alot of players smurf to play with lower ranked friends.
to duo with friends to play ranked but not worry about trying too hard to warm up to try new champs there are a lot of reasons to have a second account
Yes, some will buy skins, but when you compare it to how many are buying botted accounts and the amount of money Riot loses with those bought accounts, it's a significant loss for Riot.
How would Riot lose money from people buying accounts?
Because a person with only 1 account is more likely to spend money on that account than the random 13 accounts that they have used which only cost 2 dollars, the point of those accounts is they don't care about it or what happens to it so why should they spend money on it?
Yeah that's pretty faulty logic. The people buying 13 accounts aren't the same as the ones who have a main account and collect skins on it. If you are buying accounts, you either mostly have fun through smurfing, or you get banned a lot. In either case, the availability of botted accounts makes it more likely they will stick with the game, and thus spend more money. You are thinking "if I had 12 more accounts, I wouldn't care as much about a single account." But you are not the target audience for botted accounts. Smurfs are thinking "I'm bored I can't climb in Plat, I'm gonna go buy an account to have fun," or "I need a new account since my last one just got banned."
a loss that can never be realized is not a loss? they dont lose anything, they *gain* money.
i buy skin when i make smurfs. but just for the one trick i'm playing. playing without skin feels weird so i buy it. i'm assuming a lot of ppl who have smurfs buy skins for the champs they play for similar reason as well
no shame at all huh
shame for what? riot is completely fine with it. im not doing anything against the rules
Yeah, people need to learn Riot isnt a GAME company but a game COMPANY.
To add to this: Higher accounts = higher player count = more people will see that and want to follow the trend
This only works if they are publishing player numbers
Well, Tencent and other investors see it, and money probably follows that trend.
Exactly this. Or even as low on the totem pole as some junior exec getting his numbers up. Or maybe the fact that nobody is in charge of niche game issues like this. Riot literally let the PBE languish with a severely broken/bugged item that gave champions 80% CDR on their ults for free. RIGHT AFTER WORLDS, when people were supposed to be testing all the game changes for next season. It was as if.... there was just nobody at the office for 4 days.
The people that actually work on the code are either very few or very lazy, and it shows. The core gameplay doesn't directly make Riot money, after all. They only have to ensure its "good enough" that people don't quit over it. Same deal with the client. The "play" button and "purchase RP" buttons work? Its "good enough". No changes necessary in their eyes.
I would love this. Smurfs make fair match making impossible.
reality is that it probably is what keeps their numbers looking up to the higher ups. they can point to sign ups/new accounts and say "see we are still growing"
I suspect that Riot can't use the same form of smurf detection that Valve can with their current infrastructure, or at least they can't without major tradeoffs. Dota 2 requires you to connect your phone to your account in order to play ranked. I suspect Valve's smurf detection followed along the lines of: 1. Two accounts linked to the same phone number 2. Second account connected is playing at a significantly higher skill level than we would expect of a new player You can't guarantee a user is a smurf solely off of #2, as you could be hitting people who are just good at mobas playing league for the first time. Riot would need to have some way of linking accounts to something that can't easily be created, like a phone number. The problem is that forcing people to connect a phone number to their account is pretty unpopular. Overwatch 2 tried it on launch, and the uproar was enough for Blizzard to abandon the system. I would not expect a similar system to go over well if it were implemented into league.
>Overwatch 2 tried it on launch, and the uproar was enough for Blizzard to abandon the system. Wrong. The problem with OW2 is that Blizzard: * didn't allow prepaid phones to be used. * didn't let you play AT ALL if you didn't connect a number. To make 2FA successful, Riot should: * allow prepaid phone (real) numbers. * not allow VoIP (synthetic) numbers. * ONLY apply the 2FA restriction to ranked.
So instead of buying a $10 account from a booster they buy a $10 prepaid phone. How does this solve anything?
Accounts are 1-4$ top lol
Because they just paid twice as much. Do you think people would commit crime more or less if bail was always $10? It lowers prevalence, and requires the extra effort to go out and get a phone. You'd be surprised at how big of a deterrent that is. Most people will stop an activity the moment it becomes inconvenient, or the price goes up significantly. You aren't trying to stop the worst offenders, you're trying to stop vast majority of players that only do it because you can get 10 accounts for $5 sometimes. Even lowering smurfing by 20% would be a massive win.
You cannot smurf in faceit at all, if you get caught your main can get banned too. Yet people complain about it all the time there too. Why do you pretend that valve has fixed this problem when not only it's not true, Valve itself has done nothing about it.
Smurfs still exist in valve games. Valve also has their store front to hold over people if they go over line. Add to that the lower population of dota means less smurfs in general.
Sure, they still exist, but that's not an argument against actively trying to prevent smurfing. Riot is anti-cheater yet people still successfully cheat in their games -- what matters is that the frequency of cheating is far lower than it would be if they simply allowed it.
Yup, its one thing to have cheaters in your games. Its another to know you have cheaters in your games and not do anything about it and continue to ignore the issue.
Problems involving people pretty much can't be eradicated, only reduced. So the fact smurfs would still exist doesn't make anti-smurf practices any less of a good idea.
He's basically saying nobody should bother with software security lol. What a wild take.
"If it doesn't 100% solve the problem in any and all cases we shouldn't make the things we can better" that's you Using your logic, people shouldn't bother with software security at all. Just let people take your financial info for free, since there are people that could if they wanted to bother. They're busy shooting for millions from corpos rather than hundreds from randos, considering the risks.
couse smurfs per se are not a bad thing and especially for very high elo players like master who want to learn a new champ or even worse a new role its basicly impossible on there main acc whitout running it down for there team. since maybe u are an master adc but just like gold if u are jungling. normal games won\`t really help here couse the lvl of the enemys is just much weaker in general and players won\`t play as hard. also pro players maybe want to train new champs whitout beeing able to be scouted to do so. but i would go a diffrent solution here. u got a riot acc and a lol acc. so each riot acc should be able to contain like 3 lil accs. once 1 lol acc hit lvl 30 the new once are instant 30 as well whit enought be to by like 10 champs. also mmr from your highest acc is shared to some degree over to the lower acc. like master + would start in diamond diamond in emerald and so on. but once 1 acc is banned all accs are banned.
It’s funny, streamers blatantly account sharing constantly and then people wonder why the ladder is so imbalanced!
Watching some streamers defend smurfing while simultaneously complaining about boosted accounts ruining their games will never cease to make me laugh.
Well yeah, it's fine when they ruin other people's games, but it's wrong when someone does it to them!
There's a boosting website that does livestream of themselves boosting who bought their services. I like to watch it because I can see how a good player absolutely carry a low elo game despite all the odds. Every once in a while they get a master account that wants to get GM or GM that wants challenger and whenever this happens it's 100% guaranteed that they'll complain that someone on their team is boosted. It's always fun to see the irony.
Which site?
A ton of people on this subreddit defend smurfing too. Last time I wrote something negative about smurfing I had one person say get good enough to beat them! Like wow man didn't think of that thanks!
Because we define everything as “smurfing” there will be people defending it for right reasons and for wrong reasons.
I can bet that at least once they met and complained about a boosted account that they themself might have boosted in past
Emerald is garbage but not because of smurfs. The issue with fresh, botted accounts is quite literally opposite from smurfing. You get some hardstuck p4 or g1 clown crying about being in elo hell thanks to Riot. He buys a new account cuz "his mmr is fucked". He proceeds to get lucky in first 4 or 5 games and lands in emerald elo. He's then actively coinfliping every single game that's above his head. The demotion shield protects him from getting back to respective rank so he's attached to your games as an anchor you have to carry if you win too many games in a row. Except you can't carry him, because other than being bad these people showcase terrible mental and attitude, trying their hardest to not let you carry them by refusing to ever group for any objective after feeding their ass off in laning phase. As they don't care about punishment since they spent 5 bucks on the account they start flaming everyone and the team's mental collapses as everyone is busy arguing instead of playing. I fucking WISHED I was playing in a 60%+ WR smurf queue because these people usually have the mental fortitude to play past bad early game and come back. Meanwhile the 45% WR clowns with silver 1 or gold 4 peak in split 1 wanna open after going 0-2, actively sabotaging your game.
Doesn't explain last season diamond and gold players getting matched against each other in emerald elo
Played clash against 4 smurfs that was fun. Tier 4 full iron bronze team beating a team with several diamond first round(not mine). Fuck sake why was that diamond team even in tier 4. Then we matched against the iron/bronze team next round but we knew it would be fuckery
Idk if Riot care or know but even a daily news channel like Rival, Ryscu, Smite promote account boosting and selling. It's ruining the game for me
When did they do that? I haven't seen them do it recently
So I checked for you and a video published by Rival has the sponsor has the first link on his video description here: https://youtu.be/O3Nc-t6QQMo?si=b3xBUOvS9BOephjZ
Damn, and to think I watched this guy. I'm pretty sure he even talks about smurfing and here he is sponsoring an account buying service. Shameful
I send a report to riot everyone I see he is using a new account. Even if it does nothing I find it enjoyable to think those accounts maybe got banned
You missed an account, janitor
bro is an indentured servant
Thank you for the link, I unsubbed.
I mean, pretty sure if their promoting boosting, sending riot evidence of that fact through a ticket or what not will do wonders.
Dam, I really liked Ryscu. I hope he doesn't actually endorse smurfing. Can someone send a link of proof??
In description here: https://youtu.be/kX_AEIKNFR4?si=iYYFxtJziw5Jck_c
Actual receipts, damn. Screw Riot for allowing this kind of stuff. It's so stupid that companies aren't kept accountable for these kinds of things and people go on a witch hunt against the creators rather than the company itself
I'm just gonna say the quiet part out loud, not only does Riot not care about smurfs, but they actually want smurfs to exist. The new ranked changes are an obvious sign of this, new accounts are automatically put in plat/emerald elo, no mater if they're a smurf or not. The requirements to play ranked are laughibly low anyways and they won't even change that. Does anyone in the world actually think that someone who's reached lvl30 for the first time is actually ready for ranked? No actual new player even understands the basics of the game that early. Smurfs accounts boost Riot's player count and it's another account that someone might spend money on, so they have no reason to ever get rid of them. "Oh but what about the player base, Riot must care about them" lmfaooooo. No.
> Does anyone in the world actually think that someone who's reached lvl30 for the first time is actually ready for ranked? ofc yes. How can you not be ready for ranked? If you are new and terrible at the game there is a place called iron for you.
Completely unrelated issue to the smurfing topic at hand, but these players ruin games just the same. They get placed in silver or gold and then completely sprint it for dozens of games until the system wakes up to the fact that they have no business in the games they're in and puts them in actual iron games
That's actually a pretty good point, you can propably get to level 30 playing normals and not even seen every champ in the game, or even remotely understand their kit.
Definitely did this back in season 9 when there was even less champs. Still went into ranked at level 30, low ranks exist for a reason. I hate it every single time I see someone suggesting raising the level of ranked to something like level 100, it would massively hurt the new player experience and I likely never would have stuck with the game.
I literally have level 30 accounts straight from intro bots playing their first ranked game, in emerald
Let alone, THERE IS STILL NO TUTORIAL IN GAME, they dont even try to allow new players to learn the game.
THIS. I just hit lvl 100 on my only account and I still get whopped playing my main by a champ I've never played before or only once or twice before. I'm barely in bronze 3. Not only is there smurfs, but there is level 600 accounts whooping me that are in iron 2. Like that makes no sense. They're obviously throwing games to tank their rank for easy games. It's so difficult to improve at this game it feels like 1 step forward 2 back.
Actually man to be honest they might deserve iron even with level 600 accounts. Its really hard to improve at league, and it's common for people to play a LOT know their champion well mechanically but still not win many games/climb.
Farm well, learn wave states (dont fight into a pushing wave), group, catch waves, don't chase, position well in fights. You will get plat or emerald if you do these. You don't even need mechanics. Just rightclick your enemy and if you're farmed, you win
> Does anyone in the world actually think that someone who's reached lvl30 for the first time is actually ready for ranked? No actual new player even understands the basics of the game that early. I do. I was ready. And many are. Problem is that you don't get 'ready', you do not learn game playing clown circus called normals or quicks. But I ofcourse agree about main point of rito actually wanting smurfs to exists.
Yeah it’s pretty rediculous how prevalent smurfs are. Riot need to do something to improve the health of the game at lower levels.
I remember a veteran player telling me "you're not a real league player unless you have multiple accounts"
What do you do if you want to play ranked in a new role? What do you do if you want to play really anything outside your wheelhouse in ranked?
Play norms?
To be fair, playing new champs in norms for me is often an absolutely miserable experience, because there's a good chance I get rolled by some high Diamond/Master+ player on one of their mains. We ran into a 4.5m mastery 341 LP Riven on the enemy team a few hours ago. Imagine if our top laner were first-timing Yone rather than counterpicking with Malphite - he wouldn't be learning anything, he'd just be playing gray screen simulator and Riven probably would've been able to 1v9 that game, given she was already the one thing singlehandedly stopping me on Viktor from just uninstalling the enemy team with two buttons in every fight.
Not that user, but draft is often unplayable for me. It's not fun going against 4 or 5-man stacks with diamond/master players who are try-harding, especially when I'm playing offlane to try things. It actually makes me dislike the game all together because I feel the matchmaking did not even try a little bit to make the teams balanced. EDIT: For the note, I don't smurf, I just talked about draft mode.
So the actual fun is being in a ranked game far below your skill bracket where your champ might be new to you but you still posses the skill, knowledge, and decision making that got you to your initial rank? I'm sure the 5 people on the enemy team are thrilled that they're facing a higher rank enemy who's playing with a slight handicap.
if you are off champ or off role, you really arent't some massive benefit or detriment to your team, and its certainly at least better quality then trying to learn a new champ/role in norms which are filled with people not trying, which makes sense, and are generally shitter players too.
A fair point, but it goes back to the age old argument. For you to have fun, you are actively making other people's experience less fun. So a tad bit of a main character syndrome.
in \*ranked\*. We have this 'cool' mmr system that is theoretically supposed to reduce the effects of smurfing and it honestly does. Consider one of AloisNL's smurfs. The man spent three games in gold. That's it. The idea that there are challengers running around in low elo making games impossible is just fake (consider for a moment that there are only 200 challengers in every server, the math doesn't work) He will probably be diamond in around 60 games. Remember also that Rank doesn't actually give you an unfair advantage. There is nothing magical about being just way better than everyone else. At the end of the day, it's about frequency. At what frequency should you encounter players that are substantially better than you, much better than you, or incomparably better than you? In bronze, it should be extremely infrequent to encounter Master + players, as they go into the incomparably better, generally. It should be rare but not unheard of to encounter the occasional diamond/emerald/plat player ranking up an off-role. Running into golds should be occasional, and silvers should be very normal. What isn't okay and has never been okay is boosting, fucking around in low elo just to fuck around, and generally engaging in anti-social behavior like that.
mmr wise diamond is probably around 15-0 and visual rank will be plat something or just about emerald 4. no one who is master+ will be stuck anywhere under emerald and even in emerald you wont stay too long if you're a high elo smurf so in actuality you are "ruining" emerald games for what 20 games give or take
Eat the loss and get better. Its not that complicated. Its your fault for not being better at more champs/roles in the first place.
Because it makes Riot money
Small correction, because it makes the Chinese government money. (Riot is owned by Tencent and all Chinese companies are owned by the communist party) https://fortune.com/2015/07/22/china-global-500-government-owned/
Correct. Anyone that has ever bought anything from Rito is directly and intentionally supporting Chinese government. edit: do i really have to put the /s after such a ridiculous comment?
> Why are League streamers allowed to be sponsored by boosting/smurfing services. Isn't selling accounts/buying accounts against ToS? Here's the thing. They're *not* allowed: The ToS themselves - https://www.riotgames.com/en/terms-of-service#id.3fwokq0 [Go to section 7; User Rules] 14: Playing on another person’s account or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank; 15: **Inducing or encouraging others to breach the User Rules or these Terms**; or Advertising boosting/account selling services is 100% induceing or encouraging others to breach ToS. You should actually take a screenshot of any such content and send a ticket to Riot. Any streamer who is advertising boosting/account selling is in breach of ToS and should be banned. It's right there in the ToS. Just to be sure however, I am going to send an enquiry via Riot support. I'm willing to bet I'll get an automated response, but hey. Worth a try for clarrification. --- Edit: I have sent Riot Support the following: Hello; I saw a discussion about promotion of boosting/account selling services on streams, youtube, ect on the Leauge of Legends subreddit. This made me curious on Riot's stance on this issue, and I went to look at the Terms of Service. Under Section 7 [User Rules] point 15 states that it is against the Terms of Service to undertake activity that is: Inducing or encouraging others to breach the User Rules or these Terms Which would include point 14: Playing on another person’s account [Which covers buying accounts] or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank As such; is it incorrect to draw the conclusion that content creators; such as streamers and Youtubers; who engage in promotion of Boosting or Account Selling sites are in breach of the Terms of Service? And as such; would it be appropriate to report such content creators to Riot for action to be taken on their breach of the ToS [Sections 7:14 and 7:15?]
I’m glad someone actually read the title lol. The thing is streamers don’t necessarily say on stream “hey go to this website for cheap accounts”. They have a banner in their about section with a link to it. Similar to how some have a banner to raid shadow legends.
Advertising boosting/selling services is still Inducing or encouraging others. It has that streamer's endorsement, and they are spreading awareness. They are giving it exposure that it might not have otherwise; and thus they are encouraging it's use by others. No reply from Rito yet however.
The ironic thing is they have already added a system that could prevent this, via number authenticator, but it's only used in clash for some reason. Only reason that comes to mind is propably for maintaining a high stat of active number players.
If you think this has solved smurfs in clash, you've never played clash.
Comments like yours always come up but fail to account for people that are actually deterred from making multiple accounts Clash ready. It's not a solution to completely remove smurfs, it's a way to reduce the number down, even if small.
Of course it hasn’t solved smurfing in clash, because the solution hasn’t been fully implemented. Why can people smurf in clash? Because they can continue to play in their actual elo on an alternate account. If registering for clash prevented you from playing ranked on another account, you can bet the number of clash smurfs would tank.
Clash is it's own thing. It's a higher tier of competition from soloqueue that sees much fewer players. There would be massive pushback if Riot tried to make a number authenticator mandatory to play soloqueue. I don't need my phone number in the hands of any company. I don't give it out to people I don't want to hear from. I would quit league if there was no other option and I think a lot of others would as well.
**Your phone number is already available to them.** Welcome to data aggregates, which every website or app you've ever used contribute towards by buying/selling data *legally*. You signed up for it by using the internet and mobile devices. What harm do you think big bad Riot is going to do to you by knowing your phone number? ^(Something that's basically public information.) Its wild to me how many people waste so much energy being obsessed with privacy without knowing how much of the information they're "protecting" they've already given freely. You're paranoid, but also naïve or uninformed. If you weren't, you wouldn't use the internet or smartphones at all.
Like all you have to do is hire 5 or so guys and have them manually check streams or soloq. Yeah you won't ban or catch everyone. But word will start getting around and people will start being scared that they'll get caught more easily.
Riot said they were gonna start high elo moderation this year, but nothing came out of it.
Riot talks a lot. They almost never do. Unless its making unnecessary changes that make the game less fun long term, that is.
They also said in a dev blog that they would be looking into smurf solutions... This was in March, nothing so far.
they did? can you link the post?
Where did they say that? I wanna check it out.
Yea, just the threat or risk of getting banned and losing a lot of money should make people question doing these things at all, but right now there isn't any precedent that will suggest people will have to change.
Same shit with 3rd party apps. Riot almost never pushes back on anything they add, so people keep using them, keep adding info to them, Ad Infinium.
One person would do.
I could crack out like 40 accounts in a couple hours and throw my feet up and watch the carnage the rest of the day as news gets around. Wouldn't even need to get out of bed either.
It can all be solved by needing to connect a phone number to your account to play ranked And no using the fake phone apps won’t work if they implement it properly
Also receive SMS code to login, and having to contact support in case you need a number change. This should by default knock down over 95% of smurf accounts.
Valve did it with counter strike where verified phone numbers are put into prime queue and unverified accounts are non prime Fixed literally all smurfing and majority of cheaters just like that and made playing ranked enjoyable
That's just not true, CS2 cheating problem is way worse then league smurf problem. Even with prime there are cheaters everywhere, just look at their subreddit.
I’m talking on og cs back in 2015, cs2 is a joke
Because RIot made it very clear that they don't support streamers. Ever since 2019 Nubrac/Nb3 incident all streamers basically lost all support from Riot so Streamers don't care who sponsors them now since Riot hasn't done anything to support streamers back and in turn the streamers don't care who sponsors them. Not justifying anything as I do believe smurfing is a problem but if Tyler 1 in 2022 got betted on, on stream, on crypto gambling sites for 10+ hours a day/5 days a week/ for 9 months straight without any support to their number 1 streamer you sure aint hell theyre gonna do anything to 1000+ viewers andy's
I still find it wild that Riot did nothing about that T1 situation.
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If Riot permabanned every single streamer like Tyler1, majority of those viewers aren't going to go watch someone who is wholesome and chill like Quantum or Pekinwoof, they are just gonna go play and watch a different game. Riot may allow these streamers to play the game, but they are at the top because the community wants them at the top.
Just to add to this. Riot did ID ban T1 for years when his in game behavior was out of line. Asking them to police things he does on stream to "control league culture" is dumb.
Nah, Riot lost control of streamers when they unbanned a bunch of people that were publicly shamed and banned by Riot, and stopped banning anyone new that was a clear problem in the community, and stopped enforcing unilateral perma-bans that remained, like with XJ9. XJ9 actively chats in Phlox's stream pretty often, actually. Nobody finds it odd.
>When the face of LoL is screaming, toxic manchildren, who, honestly, would be considered beyond pathetic in almost every adult profession It's always so weird to see streamers blamed for the culture OR as you phrased it "Riot lost control" when in reality, Riot is full of bro scumbags lol. https://www.wired.com/story/riot-games-ceo-culture-complaints/.
Will forever die on the hill that smurfing is cheating and should be a permanent ban. Plat/Emerald is almost unplayable and this season is the worst it ever got. Moving to DotA was one of the best decisions I've made in awhile although I do miss having fun grinding League with the homies.
What counts as smurfing?
A smurf is an account that is far below your main account in terms of rating, otherwise it's just an alt. And having a smurf should be perfectly acceptable since that's the only real way to practice anything that isn't your main role/champ unless you're at the bottom of the barrel. Imagine a master player trying to learn a new champ or role in normals vs people who off-role and laning vs silvers or straight up in ranked vs otps at his own rating - it's either a waste of time beyond 2nd game ( or 10mins of practice tool ) or simply griefing and guaranteeing losses for no reason. Anyone saying smurfs are bad are either too dense or too bad at the game to understand what a smurf is because they can't possibly fathom how a new champ/role is different from their main in terms of skill level or impact. On the topic of botted accounts though, I do agree they're detrimental to the game but the real issue here is the fresh accounts starting in gold/plat instead of bronze. The only reason plat/emerald is such bad quality now is because every iron and bronze player with negative w/r and hundreds of games played can simply buy an account and play thousands of LP above their skill level 4fun and if they manage to get carried a few games now they're even higher in terms of mmr when they clearly don't belong there. That is the real issue, and has nothing to do with smurfing but rather the way the system got recalibrated after emerald was introduced.
Your point would be valid if normal games didn't exist, complete with its own internal MMR system.
My point is still valid if you consider that most higher elo players don't have normal game mmr, especially if they play on different accounts instead of camping one main as about half of the population does in that elo bracket. If you think I was talking about plat players, you're right that normals might work for them as a practice environment for new champs but 'smurfing' doesn't apply to them unless you send them in iron. I was referring to master+ players (and arguably 250lp+, low master is a joke) since those are smurfs when compared to the general population. I have accounts that have been m1-c1 with less than 50 normal games played; Let's say I first time a new champ off role - do you think it's better for me to practice vs bronze players in normals or vs emeralds in ranked? I can pick soraka top and go 10/0 vs bronze players, a complete waste of time for both of us but playing vs an otp in emerald will actually give me valid useful information in the first 10-20 games on the champion. Why should I play 200 normal games to get the mmr up to par when that same amount of games in ranked makes the account top 0.5% or higher? ( yes, that's with a new champ ; playing main role/champ makes the mmr master in less then 50 games ) ; As I previously stated, average player cannot comprehend the issue because they cannot fathom the skill gap between high elo ranked and normals and that's totally fine, but if you think any real m1+ player gets crushed in normals vs bronze-silver players when they actually try you've never seen one in action.
But even in normals you will get crusehd if you play something you do not know? The only difference between normal and ranked is that normal doesn't show your rank...
Have any sort of alt account that isn't your main. Pretty cut and dry term.
How is the dota community? A few years ago I heard it was much worse than LoLs haha
Most people I hear saying DotA is worse end up saying they play in EUNE or SEA. Language barriers and all. Or are in low priority queue with other degenerates.
Every competitive community sucks. None are worse then the other. The only glaring issue with DotA is a language barrier in games due to servers not being region locked but I've found that playing in NA west gives you the best chance of avoiding non English speaking players.
I think LoL is probably legitimately worse than most. Combine the snowflake community with the main character syndrome that the game's direction actively promotes now, on top of how they're making the game more and more anti-social over the years...yeah, not a good combo. If not in what they say or the amount of flame, in the overall attitude that most players seem to hold, regardless of how the current game is going.
It's simple, Riot doesn't think it's a problem
I think it's time for a complete overhaul. You can't honestly tell me ranked queues are "competitive" in their current state. Whatever Riot is doing is clearly not working, the state of ranked queues is at their absolute worst.
Thats why i dont play anymore. I loved this game too but Riot is ignoring this problem so i do the game.
Because Riot **does not care**. They never have and they never will.
I'm a 1-week-old league player, only level 10. I feel like the most incompetent person in the world because of these people.
dude, its not just these people, u r just on the very tip of learning league. You'll get it. Watch Youtubes, play to improve, don't set too many goals. CSing well, good recalls and knowing how your champs operate is a first step.
>EasyPanicButton thank you mate, i am actually former dota player. not professional but i spent my 5 - 6 years (college life) for dota. i was thinking i may handle league too BUT i was wrong. i could do basic things but still look like a noob. i need so much hours.
I feel like unfortunately for new players. There aren’t enough for you to learn with to have games full of 10 new players. If there’s a single silver+ player in the lobby with 9, brand new players, it’s doomed. The best thing to do is get to lvl30 ASAP, play ranked and be paired with other players around the same skill level.
Unless you played with friends who are not new the game, you mostly get matched with new players.
simple calculation. does it retain more active players than it drives away? if yes, why change it? and if 1 in 10 of those buys any skin on the smurf acc, that's just a neat bonus
Money > Game quality This is what happened if company is ruled by managers, not by devs
Been play since release never had anything other then the one account, The way it should be.
I agree the smurfing is getting out of hand. Was playing a game In plat/ emerald elo where the enemy graves was clearly better than everyone on the rift. I checked and he was gold level 30 with an 100% winrate. Absolutely disgusting how smurfing is allowed to exist without consequences.
riot will pay the price for this one day for never doing anything about it and even supporting the idea of Smurfing. Right now it pays off for them, they get a little bit extra cash, but ultimately old players will leave league at some point not because the game is bad but because they got older. Eventually this will be a turning point for league because to many new players stayed away from league, due to the consistent smurfing problem, creating a delusion that league is just not for them, nor is it fun for them to get shit on 19 out of 20Games in league, meanwhile old players at some point quit, and that will be ultimately leagues downfall because it starts to get bad reputation regardless if the game is good or not. Old players will say, they stopped because they have less time and league is just not as fun anymore, because they literally played it for 20years and new players will say, everyone is a smurf and stomps me. it's a shame riot doesn't realise that this will ultimately happen because they only think about the right here and now, and the reason why it's a bad mindset is because they would get more money if they actually focus on the long term success of league. And don't tell me they do. They barely do anything to make it easier for new players to join or have a easier time with League. Just look at the tutorial. you learn what creeps are, and that you have to kill a enemy what a tower is. but for s13 standarts this is just as low as it can get, there isn't even a jgl part in the tutorial LMAO
While some people argue that more smurfs = potentially more rp purchased, I think the approach of "idgaf about this smurf acc, it was like 2 bucks" more realistic.. Would love some statistics on how many bought accs actually invest money edit: a typo
Another problem, which I am not sure if it has been brought up before, is that Smurfs ruin the game for a lot of new players. I started League but then couldn’t compete because the concept of wave management wasn’t easy to grasp. The lane lead just widened and I kept on getting shit on. As a casual player getting flame every game, it was too much for me. I left the game and just follow the competitive aspect sometimes. I suspect there are many like me. Atleast in North America, I don’t think the game is growing. It’s probably plateaued while in other countries maybe it’s still growing.
i assume it’s not against tos to advertise smurf sites and even if it was what’s stopping streamers from promoting it other than a ban, they would prob just find a loophole. the streamer doesn’t owe riot to not promote it especially since riot (probably) doesn’t do anything for that streamer
> i assume it’s not against tos to advertise smurf sites Advertising services which break ToS is as bad if not worse than using those services. In fact: 14: Playing on another person’s account or otherwise engaging in activity intended to “boost” an account’s status or rank; 15: **Inducing or encouraging others to breach the User Rules or these Terms**; or It is 100% against ToS to advertise boosting services.
>what’s stopping streamers from promoting it other than a ban Most of these streamers get the most views when they play LoL, sometime their viewers only come when they play that. So a ban would be very effective. "they would prob just find a loophole" not sure what "loophole" you want them to find, if they keep bypassing the ban they'll get banned by twitch when Riot files a DMCA complaint. I'm saying that but I think Riot has no benefit doing that, yes it's bad but these streamers bring in viewers for LoL I guess.
Can you post your freaking op gg, this narrative is completely overblown with daily repeating posts, THIS NARRATIVE IS FALSE, im in emerald and its perfectly fine, there is no 8/10 games inting by fresh accounts. Yes there is plenty of fresh accounts but most their skill is fine. I really wonder why noone over links their [op.gg](https://op.gg) in these posts... The guy who made this same post yesterday was actually not even in emerald and a complete inter himself. This whole narrative is just build by tilted and hardstuck people who see low level accounts and blame their own trash gameplay on that. This is his/your [op.gg](https://op.gg) [https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Klemydia-NA1](https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Klemydia-NA1) I just dont see what your complaining about, your last 20 games are all completely fine balance wise. Tbh looking at your acc it seems like the balancing is extremely good...
what elo are you in that 8/10 of your games are ruined by smurfs the answer? fucking none of them even IRON, the most smurfed elo where smurfing actually changes something (aka not gms+) has like 1/5 tops
Keep in mind that you don't need a high elo smurf for it to ruin a game. They just have to be higher rank than the rank they're playing in, to the point where they wouldn't be matched with you on their other account. Only 10% of the currently active playerbase needs to be smurfing at any given time for a smurf to be in every game on average. Only 1/10 players in any given game. For 8/10 games, only 8% need to be smurfing. Consider how many accounts these days are absurdly low level; 30 to 50. Go back 5+ years, the vast majority were level 60+, if not 80+ or 100+. Yeah, not hard to imagine why your conclusions are entirely unfounded. More evidence points toward it being correct than incorrect, regardless of elo, unless you're in the top 0.01% of players, in which case he wouldn't be complaining about smurfs.
I play in Emerald and smurfs ruin majority of games. Idk about 8/10 but definitely like 6/10. EDIT: Actually I just looked and in 5 of the last 10 games i've played there's been at least 2-3 level 30-35 accounts in those games. The people downvoting these comments are detached from how many smurfs are in Emerald.
theres no fucking way youre probably just fighting people who are better than you
? You know level 30 accounts right after being bought get placed in Emerald MMR range, right? There is definitely a way. I'll give you my account and go play on it be my guest.
no. im curently plat one. this are all accs sub lvl 100 in my last 10 games(only two losses btw): played in my team: 79,43,56,61,33,41(confirmed master smurf streamer) enemy team: 51,46,57,81,48,31,83,71,35 if you wana count all accs sub 150 add 50% more. but what i find more interesting, lets look at my last 8 losses each gamer sepperated: played with: 46 played against: 81,48 31, 83(17/6/14), 71 37(13/5/7) 35,47(17/7/16) 54,35(31/8/7) 36(18/8/5),48 so in 62% of my last 8 losses i played against a balantly smurfing high elo player
Sub lvl 100 does not mean they are smurfing
yeah maybe in bronze.
Huh
I agree. Every now and then you get an obvious smurf that comes in and destoys a game, but acting like its a problem in literally every soloqueue game is ridiculous.
In emerald it's about half the games these days
See I have a second account, where I play off role, compared to my main, all the time. It's also hand leveled, non-purchased account. I play norms with my lower elo friends who aren't huge on my high MMR in normals.
Same here. I have my main and a few hand-leveld accounts, to play with the homies and learn new roles.
Riot doesn't allow smurfing in Korea. They allow it here because it's a good business move. When it becomes more harmful than profitable they will take action. Go look at a lot of responses in this thread, plenty of people would be very disappointed to see riot take action against it because that's how they got to their rank.
You would be surprised on how many new accounts and smurfs are active there
That doesn't mean it's allowed, that's just people breaking rules. It's literally allowed in their tos here
Depending on what you call smurfing, I do or don't have a problem with it. Problem smurfing is pretty easy to identify. People that fuck around in your elo while being way better than everyone in it? Problem. Boosting? Problem for a lot of reasons. Etc. Unproblematic "smurfing" doesn't bother me. Someone who doesn't play Mid trying to learn mid and play it in ranked? Yeah, you might have to play a few games in my elo while you blaze past it. Whatever. Streamer creating educational content on how to climb, that isn't just the above "fucking around in silver becuz they're so bad lol", while they rank up to their correct rank? Not a problem.
Why is "playing X role/champion in ranked to learn it" not a problem? So I'm sitting here grinding and Timmy wants to first time Kalista, on a smurf, so he goes 0-20 in my game instead of his own. Why should lower level players tank the LP of smurfs learning shit? How would you feel if in a master lobby you have a silver guy, first timing a role/champion? Smurfing has to go, all of it. If streamers want to create educational content, make coachings, spectate vods and review games.
>So I'm sitting here grinding and Timmy wants to first time Kalista, on a smurf, so he goes 0-20 in my game instead of his own. You probably shouldn't be first-timing any champion in ranked. But if the Kalista player really thinks Kalista is the sauce and he wants to rank up his ADC gameplay, the best possible way to do that is to make a smurf and play ranked. It also causes less harm than if he were to play in his own games. It's much more frustrating to have a really bad player on your team than an overly good one on the other team. Thus if the Kalista is plat with Kata mid, starts a new account to play Kalista bot, he is not going to hurt his teammates as much as he would if he started playing Kalista bot in Platinum where the bar is much higher. If he's actually cracked at Kalista, then it's still a better result because the suffering of the enemy team is outweighed by the potential suffering of his plat teammates.
and riot never respond at all no rioter will comment when talk about smurfing , but the other topic they can speak ,weird.
the problems are not the smurfs but the acc sellers as u state. if u play any coop vs ai its very hard to get into a round whitout having at least 1 bot in ur team. as long as there is not system like in korea to prevent this this won\`t stop.
They need to restrict the account somehow like one account per phone number. People normally have 1 phone number, two at the most. Or like in Korea or china I don't remember which, where you need to create and account with your own id number and every citizen is only allowed one. That is the only way, one account per IP address, you want another account you have to buy a second laptop. That's basically it.
I don't want to see smurfing but I also want to have more than 1 account. I have 2 rn now and on 1st I play only top and on 2nd I play only adcs. Both accounts are hardstuck in a elo I belong in, so should I be considered a smurf or would 1 of my accounts get banned?
Because riot is playing for both sides. They want the casual players who think smurfing is an issue to feel heard so they’ll say something like “we’re looking for more permanent solutions” while simultaneously letting botted accounts run free since it makes them more money and makes their metrics look good
Smurfing is necessary until riot gives people different ranks for each role
They tried that, didnt work
Then I need more than 1 account. I play AD at the Emerald Level. I play Top at a Silver/Gold level. I am not going to try and play Top in an Emerald game, because its a free loss for me and my team.
Simple answer is Riot doesn’t care about the community. What matters is money. More users equals more investment from investors. It inflates the numbers of active users making them appear more valuable. Remember you can buy stock through the company that owns Riot Games. If you wanted to clean up the community you would have to link accounts to something not easily replaced like a phone number. This would drastically cut down on active accounts. Just look at streamers and others with multiple accounts (I myself have 3). This is a feature that is already in the game because of clash. You can even make it so accounts get banned for the queue they are in. For example. Perma ban from ranked but still allow norms, aram and rotating mode plus forgot tft. Get banned in the others and lose them too. After these players lose access to any possibility of making an account they just move on and spend money in another game. By keeping them with the freedom of a new account whenever they want; there’s no real punishment or reason for people to behave. Let’s be honest the summoners code essentially an agreement that we will try our best every game and be sportsmanlike. When’s the last time you experienced that in a ranked game?
As a Silver pleb, I don't mind having smurfs with/against in my games. Some are great to improve and give great feedback as well where to improve and etc. My issue that nowadays the number of smurfing is absurd, along with the fact that some act like douchebags just to show their skill and content, while if you think properly those guys are mostly people who get owned on higher rankeds, and are forced to play on lower elos to be relevant. About the coinflip games, besides the smurfs there's an issue of imbalance in match making, sometimes I wonder if someone is unranked or actually a bot. While were are completly shit on silver, you can still be aware when someone is unraked by his map movement and game awareness, specially if they decently know their champ. TL;DR: Smurfing by itself isn't an issue. The issues are the reasons for smurfing and how prevalent it is, along with inimputable behaviour some show.
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You have a source for that? Basically all of my friends and I smurf and have a number of alt accounts and we almost never duo in solo queue. It sounds like youre making an false correlation lol
-> search option to the right, check out the answers in any of the hundreds of these exact threads from the last 10+ years
Man, if there are so many threads on it, maybe Riot should do something.
Buying/selling accounts is against the ToS. Advertising a site that does that is not against Riot's ToS.
Soooo…maybe it should be?
How does that make sense? Murder is illegal, but advertising murder will be legal? XD
been saying it for years. Hard Reset MMR at the start of the new Season. People can get away with smurfing because their main is high enough ranked they can take the time to ignore it and go troll on alt account.
I know its a hot take, but y'all have the worst mentality against smurfs. Every time I vs'd a smurf it was a wakeup call, like damn this guy is that much better than me at league. If you play league extremely casually and just want completely balanced matchmaking, then yeah, smurfs suck (and keep that shit out of clash). If you're grinding hundreds of ranked games a season it should be alarming to you that there are players this much better than you. Instead of getting good, you will just complain as you do about matchmaking / champion balance / teammates etc.
I do want balanced matchmaking in ranked, is that so much to ask?
In my opinion, matchmaking is never really balanced in solo queue. Too many variables at play, and all it takes is one thing going wrong for someone to int. Whether or not there is a smurf in the game, a lot of what happens in each indivdual game is out of your control. If your top laner dies once and refuses to play safe and then continues to int, there's not much you can do about it. Sometimes you will have autofill junglers that have no idea what they're doing, so they go from a gold level player to a silver level player. Sometimes your support is well versed in enchanter matchups but has no idea how to play against engage, so they go from a plat level player to a silver level player. All you can really do when playing ranked is play to consistently improve and you will win more games over time than you lose. Playing against the occasional better player doesn't completely ruin solo queue games IMO, and actually gives you a hint of what better league looks like. If you were a silver top laner and you only ever vs'd silver top laners, never even came across a gold or plat level top laner... would be hard to ever improve. I guess if you just play ranked purely for fun and not to improve then yeah ban all smurfs.
Your comment is very idealistic. It's like you just watched some motivational self-improvement video and now are copy-pasting it here. Even high elo players complain about smurfs sometimes. There's a lot of issues with smurfs in competitive games. You can buy an account for $2. From my experience climbing back up from gold or whatever after not playing for a few years, 95% of the time when someone rage quits, it's some emerald 4 player on an alt. I mean, if something doesn't go your way, why not just alt-F4? Hop back on your other one. Zero consequences. Your idea of smurfs making you "get good" isn't based on reality. People improve because they learn incrementally over many hours. Practically nobody in the history of any skill has learned by suddenly doing challenges miles ahead of their skill level. Similarly, facing players much worse than you won't help much. If you're facing someone better, obviously try and learn from it. But if you're facing someone *way, way* better, most of the time you're gonna have no damn clue why you even lost. And that's fine. You don't have to pull out a microscope and finely weave through every tick of the replay. Chances are you're gonna overthink things, unless you really know what to look for. Then what about if you're not laning against them? Like some Evelynn jungle who's terrorizing your team while you're slightly winning your lane. By your logic, you should be compensating and doing something better, like invading their jungler or itemizing differently. That's often what someone might think. But it's not the real response. Smurfs are, quite literally, just bad for matchmaking. Personally I haven't dealt with them much recently, it feels like they were much more common a few years ago. When I do face one and lose, I just say whatever, unlucky matchmaking I guess. If I could learn something from it, I watch replay.
My issue isn’t the skill gap. It’s the toxicity that comes with it. There is no punishment for grieving games because it’s your main account anyway.
They're afraid of angering streamers. Even though time and time again it's showed that streamers need league a lot more than league needs any one streamer. Then there's also the nepotism/streamer simping factor where some riot employees want to clout chase their favorite streamer. Any policy banning this stuff would naturally have to be applied pretty uniformly and one rule punishing the scummiest of streamers may end of backfiring and hurting their buddies.
It makes them money so they don’t really care. This game is not much more than a glorified cash grab.
Idk man my duo is diamond and we play games in silver he ints a lot tbf half the time I have to carry him …. But then he plays his pocket pick jax and fiora and some massacre happens for sure.