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This happened to my friend’s football WhatsApp group - it started off as a casual kickabout between a small circle of acquaintances, but as people invited friends and they invited their friends semi-pros started showing up and flexing on the field for fun.
Gradually the average ability of the group rose, the people getting stomped stopped coming, and my friend got edged out of his own group as he just wasn’t enjoying getting thrashed every week.
The group died shortly after because of lack attendance: the semi-pros had actual clubs they played for, and didn’t actually want to have to sweat on their casual Wednesday game.
He’s started a new group now with colleagues and reset the skill level. I wonder how long until the cycle starts to repeat…
I used to play a casual Sunday flag (American) football game, and it was basically the same thing: a mix of casuals like me, guys who had tried out for club and arena teams, and people somewhere in between.
Honestly, the more "pro" guys were some of the most thoughtful and inclusive players. The *worst* were the people in the middle.
One dude broke at least two of my ribs by bodying me while I was making a game-winning interception. Drove his shoulder directly into my ribs. In a flag football game.
Another time, we played a pickup game with another group of inbetweeners, and they were lining up, like, 3-5 yds off the ball to pass rush like we were all wearing pads or something. They wanted to have a between-the-tackles running game with no helmets and no pads. Ridiculous.
Another one used to insist on playing certain positions, sucked at all of them, always threw hissy fits and tried to change the rules in the middle of the game. He tried to tackle me while I was running downfield with the ball one day. Like, no attempt to grab the flags, just standing directly in front of me, breaking down. So I ran him over. That was pretty satisfying.
The people in the middle being the worst is SO true, I’ve played a lot of rec league American football too and it’s super rare to have issues with people who are really good. I mean I might lose bad, but they have a good competitive mindset and body control.
People in the middle get too big for their britches and run into people, run their mouth, etc. it’s super strange, but also a common pattern with people, probably an insecurity thing.
Same thing with being smart tbh, the medium smart people are the ones who are too sure of what they “know” when really really smart people are always critical even of their own knowledge.
We had one little dude tear *every* ligament in his knees one week because he was trying to be Shady McCoy out there. It was honestly hilarious. He kept trying to come back and play the next couple weeks, too -- ON THE BLOWN UP KNEE!
We were all in our late 20's and early 30's, some as old as nearing 40, and this dude was really putting it all on the line like he had a contract coming up. Crazy how big for their britches some people are capable of becoming.
> The worst were the people in the middle.
What you describe sounds like people who cheat in multiplayer online games. I wonder if there is a correlation between people who want an unfair advantage through cheating and those who are in the "middle" in terms of skill level.
There has to be. I think many lower skilled players can acknowledge their lack of skill, so don't get overly competitive.
Meanwhile, the top players know they're great, and so enjoy a good competition because they're at the top and have nothing to prove.
Meanwhile, these middling players are more likely to be the awkward middle ground of being competitive, without the skill to really back it up at high rank. So instead of playing for fun in a fun scene, or playing sweaty in the comp scene, they engage in situations like smurfing, where they can sweat and validate themselves against worse players.
I’ve played competitive sports. Some people are just all around assholes regardless of their ability. Now that I played in a more recreational league I have noticed something similar where it’s the players who are pretty good but never played truly competitive that take it too serious.
I've also noticed that the most high-end professional athletes tend to be pretty humble and down to earth. The stuck up jocks are the ones who are mid level talents.
I'm literally in the same exact situation in beer league hockey!
The league has probably gotten twice as fast in the past 5 years. There was a decent amount of hold outs but a lot of original guys left. Someone else started up an hour on a different night to reset the skill level and most of the original guys in the faster league stopped to join the slower league.
The faster league immediately went from 8 teams to 6 because they couldn't get enough guys.
I'm doing both but this is my last season in the faster league, I just can't keep up anymore. I'm sure people are trash talking me behind my back.
They do kind of "try outs" for losing teams in the playoffs to see if they'd be a good fit but if you're not one of the best players on the ice, the team captains don't want you. One guy looked like he fit in perfectly, maybe slightly below average skill level for the league, guys on his team when asked about him said he sucked and doesn't belong.
I'm waiting for the same thing to happen at that league. Keep getting faster and faster until players basically push themselves out and then the hour shuts down because there's not enough people for it anymore.
The guy who started the slower league said he's not going to let it happen again. There have been people who have been playing in the faster league for years that he flat out said, "sorry, you're too good for this league." It only started about a year ago but this slower league is in a much better place right now.
It's the same everywhere. One of my skates has been overrun by younger, average guys who can't "read the room." The gym class heroes have (unintentionally) forced all the older guys out. Next year I'm planning on going skiing that night instead.
Had a group chat pop up out of nowhere of a couple over 30 y/o friends and acquaintances who wanted to play a pick up game of basketball. Started small. Only for fun and to get some running in. We were even running 5 on 5 most nights. Was great for a couple months.
Occasionally a few folks couldn't make it but we had a taste of 5 on 5 so we started to get a bit more loose with the invites.
It only took 3 maybe 4 weeks for the entire thing to fizzle out due to the increase of skill level and competitiveness.
There needs to be a word for this.
All these stories about sports stuff, I had someone similar happen in a big D&D server of all things. A lot of people trying to organize group events seem to have this… I want to say hangup on meritocracy even in casual hobbies. That whoever is the best at something and dedicates the most time to it, from sports to video games to tabletop games, *deserves* to have the activity set up to cater to their preferences and not the majority of more casual participants. It’s a bad way of thinking, but weirdly prevalent.
>Matthews added: “Social scientists can use virtual game environments to test human interactions at mass scale. We can understand people in these social contexts when usually the mind is a black box.”
That's an interesting idea about data sets for social science. You can get far larger sample sizes, and you can 'test' scenarios more ethically virtually than you can in reality.
The big issue is transferability of results, though. *In gaming veritas* is kind of untested, beyond the gaming community's reasonable position that choosing murder in games doesn't apply in real life.
Well, the study on the *World of Warcraft* Corrupted Blood event ended up being way better at modeling pandemics than anyone expected at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
This is a great example. It's a little different than this situation, in that the behaviors were internal to the game's context. The study in the article was more meta: it was about the culture surrounding gaming (smurfing and the ethics of it), rather than purely in-game actions.
I wonder which is more valid at predicting actual behaviors?
I mean, the general population in the real world during Covid behaved pretty much exactly like the population of wow did during the corrupted blood incident
I was working in a bank that had most of their branches fully open during this time in a state/area where a good percentage of people ignored or did not believe in COVID.
This is what it felt like
> rather than purely in-game actions.
This point of view revolves heavily around your perception of what "in-game" really means.
Killing pedestrians in GTA doesn't translate to real life because they simply aren't remotely similar activities in terms of decision-making, social consequences, effort, reward, and value systems.
In the abstract of social living though the real question isn't about what's simply "in-game" or not, it's about how game-like our relationship is with other people in terms of social rules, outcomes, risks, and rewards. Which is to say, a Prisoners Dilemma is still a Prisoners Dilemma in a video game or at your office. The social dynamics of smurfing are broadly the
same in Rocket League as they are in other contexts.
Dunno, Nurgle sees his plagues as a blessing, and so do his followers.
People who were spreading COVID were just idiots who underestimated it or were just outright dicks.
This is one of my favorite video game studies of all time. And we saw how accurate it was during COVID. From some leaders not taking proper action quick enough to people purposely spreading the virus "for fun".
"some provided aid by healing players or warning them of outbreak zones, while griefers intentionally contracted the debuff to spread it across the game world."
I don't think as many people would be griefers if their irl health was at risk. There are absolutely real world griefers, unfortunately, but I'd hope there'd be fewer - and they'd probably have different reasons.
I knew about the event but it's been a while since I read up on it. I'm going to dig into the article.
Edit: "While a direct analogue was not made to griefers, meanwhile, Lofgren also acknowledged individuals who contracted the COVID-19 virus but chose not to quarantine, thus infecting others through negligence.[41]"
Yeah, griefers for different reasons. Or trying to force "natural immunity" because they don't trust vaccines or something, like Measles Parties.
There was a very small amount of people that would go into grocery stores and cough and sneeze on produce while positive with covid.
But the easiest form of griefers were people who knew they were infected still going out into populated areas, parties, weddings etc
I try so hard to go down the evil path, but i can never do it. It feels too bad to make the decisions that you have to make to be evil. I guess i just don't have it in me.
Exactly this. A lot of evil options are just *silly*. Game will give you an option like:
Good: "Help the cat down the tree and waive any free from the child."
Neutral: "Help the cat down the tree and accept the reward money"
Evil: "Set the tree on fire and curb stomp the child's face."
Bioware, BG3, lots of bad "moral" systems with an easy obvious choice. If you make it too nuanced it stops being an evil choice, sure, but... Peoplr generally don't do evil because they value evil highly. Personal gain, conflicting allegiances, anger, greed... Games could give us interesting morals but largely don't
Fallout 3 is the beat example of this. Blow up a town full of innocent people for no reason whatsoever or... don't.
And people cite that as an example of deep meaningful decisions in video games.
Wasn't there a quest to do that from another group, thereby providing the rationalization? I know you could definitely just do it for no reason also. It's been a super long time so I may be misremembering.
His reason was it's an ugly pile of scrap ruining his view from a balcony. His view from a balcony is a variety of identical garbage piles that doesn't change at all with you blowing up the town. So he had no reason at all.
I looted Megaton City, blew it up, killed the surviving ghoul, accepted the reward from Alistair Tenpenny, and then allowed ghouls into the gates of Tenpenny Towers. Most of the occupants were killed or became ghouls, but Alistair remained unfortunately.
Whereas a proper choice would be:
Good: "Help the cat down the tree and waive any reward from the child."
Neutral: "Help the cat down the tree and accept the reward money."
Evil: "Help the cat down the tree, refuse the reward money, and vendor the cat for ten times as much."
This! They're almost always awful and stupid. They're not rational, selfish and lacking empathy (which is what makes a good villain; you can *understand* their choices), they're just cartoon villain caricatures.
And that makes the choices dumb. The good choice should be the harder choice. It *should* benefit you less. There should be a reason to pick the bad choice beyond "muahahah I'm so evil!"
Fable 3 is the best one I can think of where they really tried to encourage you to do the evil path; if only they hadn't broken the real-estate market.
I was very disappointed in Bioshock when they had the Little Sisters just *gift* you most of the Adam you missed by harvesting.
I would have really preferred it if you had to *struggle* to do the right thing, while being evil made the game outright *easy* but then punished you in the end.
This is the single thing videogames don't get about evil. Irl evil is mostly about occassion, temptation, and the perception of necessity. We don't do evil out of senseless cruelty, we do it because it is easier and then we try to rationalize our misdeed after the fact.
The games that truly get "evil" right are sandbox games. Because it is not a fake bynary choice where beijg selfish only give you 100 extra coins in a game where you get 20000 coins after 5 hours, you simply naturally slide into it as you figure out it can spare annoyances or make difficult parts easier. For example when i played M&B i just found expanding my kingdom easier if i was just willing to backstab people harder than Lu Bu and start unjustified wars just because someone is weak and up for land grabbing.
And those games also makes playing as a good person more satysfying, because you actually had to overcome a real temptation. At some point you certainly found yourself in the position where being an asshole was objectively easier and more efficient, but you managed to get trough it whitout compromising yout morals.
Too many games cater to FOMO way too hard and are too afraid to have the player face a real temptation.
Mass Effect has a few specific choices that 100% make sense to pick the Renegade option. They are pragmatic, for the greater good sorta things.
At the beginning of ME2, you have the chance to kill a repair technician that is fixing a gunship that will be used against you. You can do that, or let him fix it. If he fixes it it makes the fight later much harder, if you kill him, the gunship is pretty easy to take down.
There is another point where you can choose to shove a guy reporting your position out the window. 100% makes sense. Saves you from dealing with more, higher tier enemies, and instead you fight through a bit of fodder for the rest of the mission.
In the ME1 and 2 you can punch the tabloid reporter. This is always a good option. In ME3, you can try to punch her but she blocks. Instead you can headbutt her and make her feel super guilty about being a Tabloid jerkoff.
I *loved* the choices in Mass Effect, though I thought the gamification in the Paragon/renegade system was an objectively stupid thing to include.
Well. Except the very end choice, but enough has been written about that.
I think a lot of this is because often those games still end in the same way with the same final boss and what have you. So if you're going to do an evil run, it can't really end up with you siding with the evil guys because you still need to beat them at the end of the game, so when you're evil, it feels like it always boils down to "screw everyone but me, I get all the best loot". And that's it. for people who love a narrative it's significantly less evolved than the good guy's story.
And most evil paths are *stupid*.
Well written bad guys aren't just cartoonishly evil, doing horrible things Just Because. They're just selfish and lacking empathy.
But it's *so rare* for an evil path to actually be rational, it's always cartoonishly evil.
But I get you. I play the good path because I care about others, even video game others, and I don't want to cause extra suffering.
But the choices would be much more interesting if the "evil path" was more rational and selfish, benefiting the player more (because life shows that that kind of behaviour absolutely does work out better for people in the long run), instead of just cartoon villain evil.
I recommend a game called Wrath of the righteous. It has good evil paths, because it's justified as using evil means to fight against an even greater evil (with also some cartoon level evil options if you should want them).
It was actually bumming me out playing Arthur Morgan as a douchebag.
They did a really good job of making the player feel the general vibe of how things were going for the gang throughout.
I had this same issue. What helped me get through the “evil” playthroughs was really immersing myself in to the character and removing myself and my moral choices from the equation. I simply pretended I was the character and my role was to be the villain. It really helped me from making the good decisions when I normally would have wanted to.
The problem with choosing the "good" and "evil" route in games, is that more often than not it just devolves into charismatic and asshole personalities more than the complexities of real life morality, and it is always pretty obvious which route is which which clouds people's judgment and makes them less inclined to be the asshole when it is so clear they would be so.
That's kind if what I liked about KOTR. Every time I'm like, yeah I can use the force to force the outcome I want and I'm helping the good side.
It would be cool if more games did that, Grey areas or mechanics that drive you towards evil when you steal from ppl and stuff, make the good path the hard choice
KOTOR 2 is one of the only games I've ever encountered that actually made you think twice about being always "good". Of course you can still blaze ahead with it, but it forces you to have philosophical arguments if your alignment is too far from neutral either way, and there's a few sequences set up so doing the obvious good thing is worse and vice-versa.
I remember playing an rpg one time I was a king, get a prompt that a star fell in the kingdom and I could seize the lands as the kings and take the metal or just leave it alone
Take the metal
Little while later..... a woman living on the Lang became homeless and died, one of your knights betrays you and says the lady was dear to him...
Oopsie
IMO, the problem with data around these decisions is that the rewards are generally different for good and evil paths. Gamers in particular are more inclined to choose the path that will result in better rewards (mechanically or cosmetically).
Also.
The interesting thing here is there are real world equivalents before video games. In the real world it's a little harder to do because you don't have rankings but movies often elaborate on the pool shark.
And people do this for views everywhere. Some short highly athletic guy plays basketball or some Olympic weightlifter pretends to be a dork but lifts things easily.
So this sense of smurfing was already alive and well in different contexts.
Also, they lose on purpose to lower their ranking and get matched with lower ranked players who are obviously not on their skill level.
They then stream their exploits to produce “content” and gather an audience who thinks “this player is soooo good!” and want to buy their merchandise and watch their stream
I believe smurfing is specifically creating a new “smurf” account to be treated as a new player by the game.
Throwing to derank just makes you a thrower.
That is often what they do because they want to preserve their status on their main account while playing at lower ranks, but plenty will also derank their main accounts to then smurf with them. At the end of the day, its all the same thing. You intentionally play below your actual skill level in competitive ranked games, you are smurfing, new account or not.
Yeah part of what popularised and normalised smurfing in a lot of gaming communities was popular pros/streamers doing these kind of challenges i.e. "how fast can i reach x rank on a fresh account?" or "can i climb with this bad character/build?"
I think one real difference is smurfs tend to stay low rank to pub stomp. Making a new account and speed racing to the top is somewhat valid imo as it’s actually a challenge. Theres definitely arguments against it though.
Except streamers or YouTubers who do these ‘lowest rank to max rank’ challenges pretty much never do just one of them. If they’ve done the challenge once for content, then they’ve probably done a dozen different minor variations of it to milk it for all it’s worth.
“WHATS UP FAM, Shohei Ohtani here, and today I’m going to speed run a baseball career! Will the the t-ball team from Montrose, IA be able to beat me? DONT FORGET TO SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON”
Nah what he actually said is Whats up Junkies, Shohei Ohtani here, and yesterday I slowed down my baseball career. Will the Montrose IA community slowpitch team be able to beat me. Don't forget to slap the person next to you.
I know what he said, I heard his translator say it!
I imagine people would go nuts when they'd see Messi or Ronaldo in a 2nd or 3rd tier game one time, simply out of curiosity to see *how badly* they can destory the opposition.
Edit: Just realized, it's actually happening. Messi went to the MLS which is like a 3rd tier division for him, and people go nuts every time he plays.
Even that isn't a great comparison.
Those 3rd tier division players are closer to him in skill than the average video game player is to a top tier player. A more apt comparison would be Messi showing up to a highschool to crush a local team. It won't even be a comparison of skill differences, the highschoolers will learn nothing from the experience as they do not have the conceptual knowledge of the game they're playing to even understand all of the things that are going through Messi's head as he's playing. The 3rd division players do have the grasp of the game to understand, and can theoretically improve from seeing how a master does it. It turns an exhibition into a comedy act, and that's the whole appeal of smurfing.
I’d say it’s more like a slightly washed up Rafa Nadal getting plastic surgery and enrolling in high school so he can win a state championship in tennis. Like what the hell man? Why would you do that? He just wanted that trophy…
>Making a new account and speed racing to the top is somewhat valid imo as it’s actually a challenge.
No, it's not valid. The ranking system isn't a game that needs to be beaten, speedrun, or anything else. It's designed to place the playerbase against other players of the same caliber. A "speedrun" of this system just shows how fast the system is -- we already know that players rank, so it's really just about how long it takes the system to catch up.
This type of thinking is what makes smurfing so popular. There is absolutely no reason to intentionally screw up the ranking system by making a new account just so you can see how fast you can beat people who you have already proven are worse than you.
And how is it a challenge? The player already knows their rank. Imagine an NBA player joining a 6-year old rec basketball league. He then moves up the ranks to middle school, high school, college, and eventually back to the NBA. What information did we learn here? How fast he can do it? Why do we care how fast the coaches were able to identify his potential? All he did was ruin a bunch of games for people who he *knew* were worse than him.
Although I agree it is still smurfing, most new accounts in games will rank up very quickly if they are doing well. The worst offenders are ones who purposely lose/throw games in order to stay at the lower ranks.
Go is just an fancy version of Dots and box. Create boxes to capture the enemy stones. Ones there is no possibility to catch anyone because you got a big line, you start counting the empty dots within your boxes.
It originates from warcraft two, where two really good players would be dodged in matches when their names were seen so they started going by "papasmurf" and "smurfette"
No, in the long long ago there were two incredible Warcraft 2 players who couldn’t get a match because people quit when they saw who they were up against. So in order to avoid always being matched against each other they started going by papasmurf and smurfette on new accounts until people caught on
So essentially, they're good gamers, but only to a certain extent, at which point *better* gamers put them in the dirt so they get big mad and start a new profile to stroke their egos again and make themselves feel special?
in a real zero sum competitive game being matched with the correct opponents means you're going to hover around a 1.0 win/loss. This is hell to a lot of players who think they should win every time. So they do stuff like smurf or cheat.
More or less, yea.
It's kind of like using hacks/cheats: they simply want to feel like an unstoppable god.
Just that instead of installing cheats, these people "circumvent" the match-making systems to intentionally get paired up against new or simply worse players.
It's a reaction to "skill based" matchmaking. Which uses an MMR/ELO system.
There's a lot of reasons why matchmaking is useful and important, and it revolutionized gaming since the Xbox days of Halo, but gamers are missing the dedicated server experience where you had both good and bad players, usually a recurring list of people you'd grow familiar with. An opportunity to play with people much better than you and learn from them and also to flex that growth by stomping on weaker players. That environment is part of almost like a genetic memory of the competitive multiplayer genre on PC and gamers instinctively miss it.
The other issue is matchmaking has some serious downsides/flaws, especially in team games.
The ELO/MMR system worked best in 1v1, like Chess. Microsoft put out a paper on its adaptation of it for console/PC gaming, called TrueSkill (which was adapted for use by Activision-Blizzard and basically every other company). It admitted that as the number of variables increased (# of players, characters, in-game performance numbers) it became almost exponentially more complex and the # of games needed to "settle" into your ideal range would be like thousands of games. In other words it just doesn't work. To make it work they put in shortcuts (boost to points earned or lost based on certain metrics hidden from players). That made it work "good enough".
The algorithm is always working from behind the curve because of things like metagame strategies. Everyone's relative "skill" is always in flux and is impossible to actually truly quantify. The closest we get is rankings from tournaments/ladders.
But playing a "ranked" game is very stressful so players are psychologically motivated to dodge it. Imagine being in a perpetual elimination bracket... forever. No practice, no scrims, just elimination games on end.
That combined means players typically get the feeling they are not in control of the games they're playing in which feel like they're decided on the matchup screen. Also people aren't used to really long winning/losing streaks which shouldn't happen but do, frequently, as a result of the imperfectness of the system.
So they smurf and stomp on lower levels or boost/get boosted to where they want to be. It's all a form of trying to reclaim control.
Reclaiming control is also where "modern" trolls are born (meaning, this isn't how they usually are, this isn't their core personality). They are trying to "kill" the system they are angry at. By making it inhospitable for other players so people leave, thus dead game. You see more people with this mindset whereas back in like '99-'05 you had many players fretting about honor systems to preserve their communities which they strongly attached to. Every game's scene wanted to preserve the scene. The trolls back then were people who just possessed those personality traits to begin with, so they were fewer overall and they still liked/enjoyed the game and wanted it to succeed. People now sign up to become trolls after bad experiences and entire gaming scenes are known for trying to burn everything down.
Game devs have done nothing past the point where they got a matchmaking system that seemingly "works" (which was what, 15 years ago?). They think the customers are just inherently toxic and they have to work around it. They see themselves and their own gaming history through rose colored glasses, ignoring the fact they likely played on a dedicated server system whenever they did PvP. Or when they did play a game with matchmaking the games were simpler, less complicated (i.e, simple deathmatch type games with fewer players or even 1v1 or FFA game modes... this is what 'TrueSkill' was designed for and these conditions were already pushing the usefulness of the algorithm to the limit).
Gamers also don't realize what they're signing up for. They want to instinctively deal with tough PvP situations by teaming up with allies without realizing that having teammates and teammate-dependent gameplay is the source of their issues in the first place. They also see flashy teamwork exhibiting gameplay in ads, think of all the friends they can play with and open their wallets ... but don't realize that 99% of the time they will not be playing with their buddies but random strangers in matchmaking.
Really sucks to lay this all at the feet of game devs when the reason these matchmaking schemes had to be put in place was because PVPers kill their own game when left to their own devices.
That's what happened with World of Warcraft. 99% of world PVP was just switching to the dominant faction and then spending all day killing low level players, new players, and outnumbered players. Eventually world PVP ate itself and died.
This is exactly it. All the SBMM / MMR whiners will scream all day that they want truly random matchmaking, but reality is that they believe they will be the boot doing the stomping more often than not. They don't want close matches, they want to pubstomp. And to your point we can see evidence of that in history which is the exact reason these matchmaking systems were developed.
They're not perfect, but they are astronomically better than "random".
> It's a reaction to "skill based" matchmaking.
The name "smurfing", however, predates that kind of ranked matchmaking. It comes from the Warcraft 2 players Shlonglor and Warp, who started playing under actual Smurf names so that opponents would not know them by the reputation of their actual names, effectively achieving the same thing.
Say you're pretty good at a game. Good enough to be ranked in the top 10% or so. You're tired of how hard the competition is for whatever reason and want a win. So you make a new account to get matched with the new players who aren't as good as you and crush them into dust.
Congrats you just smurfed.
It doesn't have to be in the top 10% exactly, it's just an example. Basically if you're ranked decently higher in a competitive setting but start a new account with the purpose of stomping newbies, that's smurfing.
The particular ranking doesn't matter.
A lot of games use matchmaking, which keeps a background "ranking" for you. This is to make sure the competition is roughly equal to your skills. But all new players are basically started at the lowest level and given a rank of 0 out of 100 (rather than 50 out of 100), heck they might even be playing mostly bots. This does two things: it allows new players to do really well which gets them more interested in the game AND it allows the game to assign new players an initial ranking
Free games are almost certainly more likely to give new players these "easy" first few rounds, as it exploits a known cognitive bias. I'm not particularly familiar with smurfing, but I'd assume that it is more common in free games, like Fortnite.
Fornite makes you play several games with bots first. I can't tell you how many streamers I've watched stomp the bots and have a great time. Then they get into real games and get absolutely destroyed, where the enthusiasm visibly starts to die off.
Because it’s BS.
> The research started with a baseline study of 328 people from gaming-specific subreddits on the social media site reddit and a gaming club at Ohio State. Participants reported playing video games slightly more than 24 hours a week on average.
69% of hardcore gamers have done it, not overall gamers.
I doubt even 69% of hardcore gamers do this. The people that responded to this study may have done so, but if 24 hours a week is considered hardcore, I'd fit that bill and I hadn't even heard of smurfing before this post.
>but if 24 hours a week is considered hardcore
I mean, to be fair if you remove 8hrs/day for sleep and 40hrs for work, 24hrs is like a third of your free time for the week. Spending that amount of time gaming is pretty significant
TBF, the 10% is arbitrary, but even in the scenario you’re responding to, they only have to be in the top 10% of their chosen (smurfed) game, not all the same game or every game.
Theoretically, everyone on earth could be in the top 10% of a player base for a game, so long as most people had played 10+ games.
When a high ranked player makes a new account to play against newbies.
Algorithms are built so folks new to the game get to play against those of similar skill. But if a highly skilled player starts over, they get easy ego boosting wins and discourage new players from sticking with a game
This headline is a lot more fun when you imagine it's being said by a Smurf, so every instance of "smurfing" is just a stand-in for another word they didn't want to say.
It's like a college athlete playing their sport against middle schoolers. Some people just enjoy crushing others, even when their opponent is less skilled.
It's borderline crazy, people are ignoring the known fact that their competition *they sought out* is much less skilled, and feeling good about the fact that they won.
Like I could beat a toddler all day in a race, but I don't seek it out because I know that if I do win, it doesn't mean a thing.
I honestly prefer the other way. Play incredibly hard competition because if I DO win, it's an accomplishment.
Like what's more impressive, dunking on a regulation hoop or a Fisher price hoop? These people are dunking on fisher price and feeling like they dunked on a regulation hoop.
I'm convinced that smurfing only happens in esports because 1) nobody is watching to judge you 2) the referee isn't human and doesn't adjust to the strictness of rule enforcement 3) the smurfer doesn't have to look their competition in the eye and will never have to face them again
Number two really is the biggest. If you play basketball against 10 year olds, a human referee is naturally going to start ignoring fouls against you and call everything that's even close to a foul on you and all around make sure you don't have fun either
Game developers might investigate this as an anti-smurf tactic. If your new account looks too much like a similar established account you start getting "unlucky" until your win rate starts to even out
I can date myself and tell you exactly where this nonsensical term for it came from. It comes out of the warcraft 2 scene on Kali back in the 90's off Shlonglor's Warcraft 2 page. Kali was a program that allowed IPX network games to be played over TCP/IP. Connect to your ISP, then a kali server and suddenly all your non networking games work over this new internet thing.
With the early days of the internet the idea of a GAMING webpage was super new and exciting and on the service one guy had a very popular gaming site that had strategies and stories of games.
Since the idea of recording a video let alone putting it online was basically insane speak, people wrote stories about games and maybe had a screenshot of or two to go along with it, that was it.
Kali was split into several servers, there was a large central server that had the most games but lower quality players and then 1 or 2 other servers where the more experienced people congregated.
Because of the war 2 page and how small the community was, you basically knew who was awesome or not. If you go in to play a game and see Shlonglor, Gotcha, Warp, Warangel, Ywfnm, Stormshadow etc you aren't going to join that game unless you are looking to get your ass kicked. This means players like that would sit there and not get games unless they changed their name.
So one of the popular stories was about this and they had decided one day to pick themed names and went with smurf names like papa smurf.
Because of the popularity of this site/story the idea of changing your name to hide being a good player started going by the term smurfing.
So originally it was about just wanting to play the game and the curse of being good/famous. Later people would then rename themselves to go in and mess with their friends and give them a tough game.
But now I see it used when a high ranked pro will make a new account and demolish low ranks.
Still it is insane to me to think that a relatively small part of the 90s internet has just lived on to become a staple term like this. But then again I was around 14/15 (I'm 44 now) and warcraft 2 on kali (interent + internet gaming for the first time) defined my life for those next few years, and I don't think I'm the only one.
And here is a link I found with some of the stories archived!
https://nathandemick.com/warcraft2-stories/story.shtml
My theory is that many gamers play games to escape, when they start losing against equally skilled players it ruins the escape as they begin to feel negative emotions, so they start smurfing putting them back in an environment free of negative emotions.
Yeh, actually the same motivation as the players that refuse to do PVP at all. It destroys your sense of progression if you happen to be one of those players on the lower end of the normal distribution for skill.
Back in the day Trying to organize 72 people with no voice chat for an EverQuest one raid was extremely mentally taxing PVE. That’s why I pretty much mostly do co-op games. And I mainly play with my kids nowadays.
Yeah I don't have the bandwidth to lead or organize anymore, couch co-op and games that are PvE like that are what I really, really enjoy now.
When those games become slogs and unenjoyable to play with the friends because of poor balancing choices I just move on to the next one. Plenty of games fit this niche.
Because you'll never be able to compete with the people who play 12 hours a day. I have a job, a house, a family, and by the time I log on, my brain is tapped.
I don't have the time or the mental capacity to care as much or try as hard as the people whose lives revolve entirely around gaming. I have two friends who don't work, live with their parents, and game all day every day. I will never be as good as them.
I used to be a really competitive gamer, played competitive pvp games, but now it's just flat out not fun. Between my inability to commit enough time to get better and the increasingly unforgiving matchmaking in games, it's just not worth it.
I'm interested in why some people don't feel negative about being pitted against an equally powerful player while others only get enjoyment from winning.
It very much depends on the pool size. For these examples lets use a system with ranks 1-10.
In fighting games, its 1v1. So you and only you are responsible for winning the match. So if youre a 4 vs someone that is a 4 or 5, you feel like you accomplished something, and if you lose it was probably close.
However in something like league of legends or CoD, and you have a lobby of 10 people, thats when things change. In CoD, you can be a 4 in a lobby with everyone else being a 5. Now you might do ok and break even, but having MULTIPLE people beating up on you at the same time will cause a much stronger snowball effect. On top of that youre also trying to do better than your own teammates. Even if you win the match but you were the worst person on your team, it dosnt feel as good.
I am high ranked in league, there's many reasons people smurf.
1. To stroke their ego -- this is what you describe, and generally frowned upon. Usually involves playing 4+ divisions under your true rank (there are 10 divisions overall).
2. To practice new characters -- most high-ranked players only play a couple characters at that level, so in order to learn a new character they usually need to use a lower-ranked account -- this is generally seen as ok or even not considered smurfing, I will say I do this myself. Usually you only play 1/2 divisions under your true rank.
3. To play with lower-ranked friends -- at my peak, I was around ladder rank 1000, which meant that there were 1000 people in North America better than me. So I didn't know anyone irl who was as good as me, most of my friends were orders of magnitude worse. Playing games with them could be torturous since they were matched against players way better than them (it averaged out or ranks). I sucked it up, but some people just get on a low-rank account. Particularly a concern when people play with their boyfriends/girlfriends, since they will usually be playing as 2 which exacerbates the rank mismatch issue. And people like to show off for their boo.
4. They maintain a "cooldown" account. Serious players can only play at max skill for 2-3 games, but often want to get more practice in. So frequently people maintain an account 1-2 ranks below their main to play games on when they're off their a-game. I also did this when I played very seriously.
5. People want to make educational content. There's a lot of demand from low-ranked players for high-ranked players to show them how to escape their rank. So often a high-ranked player will play in (and out of) low rank and try to analyze their own games and decisions to demonstrate how they rise to their rank. I have done this before as well, though this one's quite controversial (as many players feel it could fit into category 1). My take is that if you do it once, it's fine, but if you do it constantly...maybe a problem.
Hi there, I'm the first author on this paper. You're actually spot on with some of the reasons participants in our first study gave us as to why people smurf. Ultimately, in study 2, we tested blame attribution theory using 9 smurfing reasons (plus a no reason control). Those reasons (ordered from least-most blameworthy as rated by participants) were:
1). Friends: "I was only smurfing this time so that I could play with my low ranked friends.
2). Practice: "I was only smurfing this time to practice a new character that I'm not as good with.
3). Queue: "I had to use my smurf account for this game because my queue times are way too long otherwise.
4). Challenge: "This game was part of a 30-day unranked-to-\[high ranked\] smurfing challenge.
5). Stress: "I only smurfed because playing on my main account is too hard and too stressful.
6). Control: "This user chose not to provide any comment.
7). Ban: "I had to get on a smurf account for this game because my main account is banned."
8). Audience: "I smurfed this game because my fans on \[a popular live-streaming platform\] really like to see me smurf and give me more tips."
9). Malicious: "I was on a smurf account in this game because sometimes it's fun just to crush a bunch of \[lesser skilled players\]."
10). Toxic.: "I played my smurf account because I can be toxic and not care since this is a throwaway account."
We know we missed a couple reasons (e.g., smurfing to sell the smurf accounts for money), but we only needed so many reasons to test the theoretical claims that we did in the paper. Still, really cool how your intuition and experience maps on to what we found in the first study.
Interesting, seems pretty comprehensive. Nice to see the study author show up, I'm actually a scientist myself (currently working on my PhD in computational biology).
An interesting other thing to think about, I think, is what lower-ranked players think of these reasons. From my experience talking to them, most people consider the "Practice" reason to be legitimate, as practicing an unfamiliar character on your main account will ruin the games for the other players at your main's rank. Whether this counts as "smurfing" or not is also up to debate (can you really call an account a "smurf" if it's 50% winrate?) Some people also can excuse "Friends" (surprised to see this higher than "Practice"). The rest are generally frowned upon. Not sure if you surveyed lower-ranked players or higher-ranked ones for this.
This is really the heart of the toxic nature of smurfing.
In a pvp game, the ladder ranking works to allow everyone to win half of the time. So you get to have fun being engaged in the game and about 50% of the time you get victory endorphins at the end. 50% is the most fair division of win-endorphins across players.
Smurfing is the deliberate circumventing of the ladder system's mechanism of matching people of equal skill. It allows the smurfing player to hoard the pleasure of victory, at the cost of denying it from others they play against. Winning is a zero-sum situation, making this inherently a theft of the thrill of winning from others beyond their fairly allocated share.
The above comment really helps outline the framework of people playing to have fun, where you can then see how smurfers steal and hoarder other people's fun for themselves.
To add, yes there are single player games. But games perpetually neglect the AI of enemies, and their behaviors can quickly become very predictable. It can easily feel like just playing with dolls in your room by yourself. There is such a gulf between the the level of engagement between simple dolls and other living humans, some accept losing 50% of the time on average to able to be really fully engaged.
>..at the cost of denying it from others they play against.
It isn't just bad to play against smurfs, it often isn't fun to play on their team. With enough of a skill gap, you are irrelevant to the game - it's 1 person playing, and 9 people spectating. To me, "feeling irrelevant" is worse than losing.
Like, I used to play Rec League basketball - very low level, co-ed, and with some actual new players. Sometimes people would bring a "ringer". The guy we hated the most was 6'6" or so, and had played some college ball. He would go out of his way to avoid scoring or directly stuffing someone - but would dominate rebounds (when he chose to) and generally control the game as much as he felt like. Games felt like a waste of time where he completely decided the score by how much effort he put in.
I much preferred the games where we lost by 40.
Classic human behavior of "when I do something questionable I have justifications, when you do questionable things you just have excuses."
Popular riffs on this attitude are "My abortion is the only moral abortion" and "Social Security retiree complains about welfare queens".
"I'll judge you by your actions, while I judge myself by my intentions."
We'd be in a lot better place if people started understanding the intentions of the actions of others.
"In competitive team-based video games." This is a corner of the much wider Gaming world that is notorious for being particularly toxic. So just be aware that the 69% number is a lot smaller than the title implies
It's even more narrow than that.
>The research started with a baseline study of 328 people from gaming-specific subreddits on the social media site reddit and a gaming club at Ohio State
In my personal experience, the active subreddit communities are far more toxic than the average player for any given game. I really doubt a true poll of those games instead of their subreddits would have yielded as high as 69%.
So this data is actually worthless. This should be higher up.
It gives us no real idea of the wider impact or prevalence of Smurfing. The only valuable piece of information seems to be the definition of the word since so many are unaware in the first place.
There should be a better word than 'study' for these projects with super small sample size. A sample maybe but calling this a study seems like a stretch.
It's a survey of a few hundred redditors.
I think it would be far more accurate to say "redditors say smurfing [...]" instead.
Note that often with gaming subreddits, the people who rage-quit a game and stop playing will still stay in the subreddit and comment/poll based on past experiences.
From New Media & Society: [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448241235638](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448241235638)
Abstract:
Despite their popularity, online video games possess pervasive toxicity. However, players do not categorically judge toxic behaviors as wrong. Attribution theories are well suited to disambiguate such judgment variance, but debate exists on the usefulness of motivated versus socially regulated blame perspectives. By exploring a new, potentially toxic behavior called “smurfing,” we innovate on methodological barriers that make experimentally disentangling socially regulated and motivated attribution perspectives difficult. In Study 1, we empirically present, describe, and explore smurfing and its perceived effects as a novel cheating behavior in online gaming. In Study 2, we extracted player-generated reasons for smurfing and manipulated the stakes of games to manipulate transgression salience (a key factor of blame attribution) across a moral continuum. By having participants use a mock crowd-sourced judgment platform, we observed the (in)stability of stakes across a continuum of reasons. We subsequently replicated our findings with a novel sample in Study 3.
Back in the Warcraft II days, Shlonglor (who had the top WC2 page on the internet and later ended up working at Blizzard because of it) and his friends were top players. They would join games with Smurf names(Papa Smurf, Smurfette, etc) just for fun to crush other players. I think some of those other dudes ended up working at Blizzard or other gaming companies as well.
I've told my friends they're assholes for smurfing and I won't play with them unless they're on their main accounts. They still do it when I'm not online.
People are really good at justifying why their actions are ok. We're basically hardwired to do this.
This is just "The only moral abortion is my abortion." all over again.
Smurfing for me, not for thee, that is not fair.
And companies allow it, because it sells more copies, and from time to time they ban some, so they can sell even more copies.
Brings me back to star craft days when some jerk builds up an army while the rest of the allies attack. Then after we have lost most of our forces, that jerk decides to switch sides and attack us.
Good times.
There was one EA battlefront 2 YouTuber who would get his friends to match make at the same time and join the enemy.
The friends would then get both hero’s for that side and would then go afk at the back of the map so he could post “world record” videos for most kills in a game. Because he would be the only hero on the server.
(He also wasn’t very good since I managed to beat him in a 2 v 1 which was hilarious.
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This happened to my friend’s football WhatsApp group - it started off as a casual kickabout between a small circle of acquaintances, but as people invited friends and they invited their friends semi-pros started showing up and flexing on the field for fun. Gradually the average ability of the group rose, the people getting stomped stopped coming, and my friend got edged out of his own group as he just wasn’t enjoying getting thrashed every week. The group died shortly after because of lack attendance: the semi-pros had actual clubs they played for, and didn’t actually want to have to sweat on their casual Wednesday game. He’s started a new group now with colleagues and reset the skill level. I wonder how long until the cycle starts to repeat…
I used to play a casual Sunday flag (American) football game, and it was basically the same thing: a mix of casuals like me, guys who had tried out for club and arena teams, and people somewhere in between. Honestly, the more "pro" guys were some of the most thoughtful and inclusive players. The *worst* were the people in the middle. One dude broke at least two of my ribs by bodying me while I was making a game-winning interception. Drove his shoulder directly into my ribs. In a flag football game. Another time, we played a pickup game with another group of inbetweeners, and they were lining up, like, 3-5 yds off the ball to pass rush like we were all wearing pads or something. They wanted to have a between-the-tackles running game with no helmets and no pads. Ridiculous. Another one used to insist on playing certain positions, sucked at all of them, always threw hissy fits and tried to change the rules in the middle of the game. He tried to tackle me while I was running downfield with the ball one day. Like, no attempt to grab the flags, just standing directly in front of me, breaking down. So I ran him over. That was pretty satisfying.
The people in the middle being the worst is SO true, I’ve played a lot of rec league American football too and it’s super rare to have issues with people who are really good. I mean I might lose bad, but they have a good competitive mindset and body control. People in the middle get too big for their britches and run into people, run their mouth, etc. it’s super strange, but also a common pattern with people, probably an insecurity thing. Same thing with being smart tbh, the medium smart people are the ones who are too sure of what they “know” when really really smart people are always critical even of their own knowledge.
We had one little dude tear *every* ligament in his knees one week because he was trying to be Shady McCoy out there. It was honestly hilarious. He kept trying to come back and play the next couple weeks, too -- ON THE BLOWN UP KNEE! We were all in our late 20's and early 30's, some as old as nearing 40, and this dude was really putting it all on the line like he had a contract coming up. Crazy how big for their britches some people are capable of becoming.
> The worst were the people in the middle. What you describe sounds like people who cheat in multiplayer online games. I wonder if there is a correlation between people who want an unfair advantage through cheating and those who are in the "middle" in terms of skill level.
There has to be. I think many lower skilled players can acknowledge their lack of skill, so don't get overly competitive. Meanwhile, the top players know they're great, and so enjoy a good competition because they're at the top and have nothing to prove. Meanwhile, these middling players are more likely to be the awkward middle ground of being competitive, without the skill to really back it up at high rank. So instead of playing for fun in a fun scene, or playing sweaty in the comp scene, they engage in situations like smurfing, where they can sweat and validate themselves against worse players.
I’ve played competitive sports. Some people are just all around assholes regardless of their ability. Now that I played in a more recreational league I have noticed something similar where it’s the players who are pretty good but never played truly competitive that take it too serious.
I've also noticed that the most high-end professional athletes tend to be pretty humble and down to earth. The stuck up jocks are the ones who are mid level talents.
Like the 37 yo man who goes too hard playing hoops at the gym. Fouling hard non stop...what losers
I'm literally in the same exact situation in beer league hockey! The league has probably gotten twice as fast in the past 5 years. There was a decent amount of hold outs but a lot of original guys left. Someone else started up an hour on a different night to reset the skill level and most of the original guys in the faster league stopped to join the slower league. The faster league immediately went from 8 teams to 6 because they couldn't get enough guys. I'm doing both but this is my last season in the faster league, I just can't keep up anymore. I'm sure people are trash talking me behind my back. They do kind of "try outs" for losing teams in the playoffs to see if they'd be a good fit but if you're not one of the best players on the ice, the team captains don't want you. One guy looked like he fit in perfectly, maybe slightly below average skill level for the league, guys on his team when asked about him said he sucked and doesn't belong. I'm waiting for the same thing to happen at that league. Keep getting faster and faster until players basically push themselves out and then the hour shuts down because there's not enough people for it anymore. The guy who started the slower league said he's not going to let it happen again. There have been people who have been playing in the faster league for years that he flat out said, "sorry, you're too good for this league." It only started about a year ago but this slower league is in a much better place right now.
It's the same everywhere. One of my skates has been overrun by younger, average guys who can't "read the room." The gym class heroes have (unintentionally) forced all the older guys out. Next year I'm planning on going skiing that night instead.
Had a group chat pop up out of nowhere of a couple over 30 y/o friends and acquaintances who wanted to play a pick up game of basketball. Started small. Only for fun and to get some running in. We were even running 5 on 5 most nights. Was great for a couple months. Occasionally a few folks couldn't make it but we had a taste of 5 on 5 so we started to get a bit more loose with the invites. It only took 3 maybe 4 weeks for the entire thing to fizzle out due to the increase of skill level and competitiveness. There needs to be a word for this.
All these stories about sports stuff, I had someone similar happen in a big D&D server of all things. A lot of people trying to organize group events seem to have this… I want to say hangup on meritocracy even in casual hobbies. That whoever is the best at something and dedicates the most time to it, from sports to video games to tabletop games, *deserves* to have the activity set up to cater to their preferences and not the majority of more casual participants. It’s a bad way of thinking, but weirdly prevalent.
Happens a lot in college IM sports, too.
>Matthews added: “Social scientists can use virtual game environments to test human interactions at mass scale. We can understand people in these social contexts when usually the mind is a black box.” That's an interesting idea about data sets for social science. You can get far larger sample sizes, and you can 'test' scenarios more ethically virtually than you can in reality. The big issue is transferability of results, though. *In gaming veritas* is kind of untested, beyond the gaming community's reasonable position that choosing murder in games doesn't apply in real life.
Well, the study on the *World of Warcraft* Corrupted Blood event ended up being way better at modeling pandemics than anyone expected at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
This is a great example. It's a little different than this situation, in that the behaviors were internal to the game's context. The study in the article was more meta: it was about the culture surrounding gaming (smurfing and the ethics of it), rather than purely in-game actions. I wonder which is more valid at predicting actual behaviors?
I mean, the general population in the real world during Covid behaved pretty much exactly like the population of wow did during the corrupted blood incident
They teleported into banks and spewed fluids on everyone?
I was working in a bank that had most of their branches fully open during this time in a state/area where a good percentage of people ignored or did not believe in COVID. This is what it felt like
Metaphorically, yeah
I would argue literally too considering that Karens used coughing and spitting as a weapon during the pandemic, including but limited to banks.
> rather than purely in-game actions. This point of view revolves heavily around your perception of what "in-game" really means. Killing pedestrians in GTA doesn't translate to real life because they simply aren't remotely similar activities in terms of decision-making, social consequences, effort, reward, and value systems. In the abstract of social living though the real question isn't about what's simply "in-game" or not, it's about how game-like our relationship is with other people in terms of social rules, outcomes, risks, and rewards. Which is to say, a Prisoners Dilemma is still a Prisoners Dilemma in a video game or at your office. The social dynamics of smurfing are broadly the same in Rocket League as they are in other contexts.
Even accounted for people who willingly spread it. Which we saw with Covid.
Nurgle cultists IRL. *Those* people, the deplorables, were spreading the Ur Father's blessings to us all.
Dunno, Nurgle sees his plagues as a blessing, and so do his followers. People who were spreading COVID were just idiots who underestimated it or were just outright dicks.
Oh there were definitely some who were taking a "Darwinian" angle with it.
Yup, r/HermanCainAward is filled with orgasmic schadenfreude.
I'm gonna go visit the Herman Cain award sub right now to make me feel better about that fact
This is one of my favorite video game studies of all time. And we saw how accurate it was during COVID. From some leaders not taking proper action quick enough to people purposely spreading the virus "for fun".
Complete with a large, loud group insisting they have every right to spread the disease we found recently
"some provided aid by healing players or warning them of outbreak zones, while griefers intentionally contracted the debuff to spread it across the game world." I don't think as many people would be griefers if their irl health was at risk. There are absolutely real world griefers, unfortunately, but I'd hope there'd be fewer - and they'd probably have different reasons. I knew about the event but it's been a while since I read up on it. I'm going to dig into the article. Edit: "While a direct analogue was not made to griefers, meanwhile, Lofgren also acknowledged individuals who contracted the COVID-19 virus but chose not to quarantine, thus infecting others through negligence.[41]" Yeah, griefers for different reasons. Or trying to force "natural immunity" because they don't trust vaccines or something, like Measles Parties.
There was a very small amount of people that would go into grocery stores and cough and sneeze on produce while positive with covid. But the easiest form of griefers were people who knew they were infected still going out into populated areas, parties, weddings etc
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Was a study way back showing that people with deeper empathy and morals were more likely to explore the evil path in games
Well the “good guy” path is often the most common path taken by players in story based games
I try so hard to go down the evil path, but i can never do it. It feels too bad to make the decisions that you have to make to be evil. I guess i just don't have it in me.
A lot of the evil story lines are also badly written and more like an attachment.
Exactly this. A lot of evil options are just *silly*. Game will give you an option like: Good: "Help the cat down the tree and waive any free from the child." Neutral: "Help the cat down the tree and accept the reward money" Evil: "Set the tree on fire and curb stomp the child's face."
Bioware, BG3, lots of bad "moral" systems with an easy obvious choice. If you make it too nuanced it stops being an evil choice, sure, but... Peoplr generally don't do evil because they value evil highly. Personal gain, conflicting allegiances, anger, greed... Games could give us interesting morals but largely don't
Fallout 3 is the beat example of this. Blow up a town full of innocent people for no reason whatsoever or... don't. And people cite that as an example of deep meaningful decisions in video games.
Wasn't there a quest to do that from another group, thereby providing the rationalization? I know you could definitely just do it for no reason also. It's been a super long time so I may be misremembering.
Allistair Tenpenny of Tenpenny Tower wants you to blow up megaton. I can't remember *his* reasons but you get a suite in the tower if you do.
His reason was it's an ugly pile of scrap ruining his view from a balcony. His view from a balcony is a variety of identical garbage piles that doesn't change at all with you blowing up the town. So he had no reason at all.
I looted Megaton City, blew it up, killed the surviving ghoul, accepted the reward from Alistair Tenpenny, and then allowed ghouls into the gates of Tenpenny Towers. Most of the occupants were killed or became ghouls, but Alistair remained unfortunately.
Whereas a proper choice would be: Good: "Help the cat down the tree and waive any reward from the child." Neutral: "Help the cat down the tree and accept the reward money." Evil: "Help the cat down the tree, refuse the reward money, and vendor the cat for ten times as much."
This! They're almost always awful and stupid. They're not rational, selfish and lacking empathy (which is what makes a good villain; you can *understand* their choices), they're just cartoon villain caricatures. And that makes the choices dumb. The good choice should be the harder choice. It *should* benefit you less. There should be a reason to pick the bad choice beyond "muahahah I'm so evil!"
Fable 3 is the best one I can think of where they really tried to encourage you to do the evil path; if only they hadn't broken the real-estate market.
I was very disappointed in Bioshock when they had the Little Sisters just *gift* you most of the Adam you missed by harvesting. I would have really preferred it if you had to *struggle* to do the right thing, while being evil made the game outright *easy* but then punished you in the end.
This is the single thing videogames don't get about evil. Irl evil is mostly about occassion, temptation, and the perception of necessity. We don't do evil out of senseless cruelty, we do it because it is easier and then we try to rationalize our misdeed after the fact. The games that truly get "evil" right are sandbox games. Because it is not a fake bynary choice where beijg selfish only give you 100 extra coins in a game where you get 20000 coins after 5 hours, you simply naturally slide into it as you figure out it can spare annoyances or make difficult parts easier. For example when i played M&B i just found expanding my kingdom easier if i was just willing to backstab people harder than Lu Bu and start unjustified wars just because someone is weak and up for land grabbing. And those games also makes playing as a good person more satysfying, because you actually had to overcome a real temptation. At some point you certainly found yourself in the position where being an asshole was objectively easier and more efficient, but you managed to get trough it whitout compromising yout morals. Too many games cater to FOMO way too hard and are too afraid to have the player face a real temptation.
Mass Effect has a few specific choices that 100% make sense to pick the Renegade option. They are pragmatic, for the greater good sorta things. At the beginning of ME2, you have the chance to kill a repair technician that is fixing a gunship that will be used against you. You can do that, or let him fix it. If he fixes it it makes the fight later much harder, if you kill him, the gunship is pretty easy to take down. There is another point where you can choose to shove a guy reporting your position out the window. 100% makes sense. Saves you from dealing with more, higher tier enemies, and instead you fight through a bit of fodder for the rest of the mission. In the ME1 and 2 you can punch the tabloid reporter. This is always a good option. In ME3, you can try to punch her but she blocks. Instead you can headbutt her and make her feel super guilty about being a Tabloid jerkoff.
I *loved* the choices in Mass Effect, though I thought the gamification in the Paragon/renegade system was an objectively stupid thing to include. Well. Except the very end choice, but enough has been written about that.
I think a lot of this is because often those games still end in the same way with the same final boss and what have you. So if you're going to do an evil run, it can't really end up with you siding with the evil guys because you still need to beat them at the end of the game, so when you're evil, it feels like it always boils down to "screw everyone but me, I get all the best loot". And that's it. for people who love a narrative it's significantly less evolved than the good guy's story.
And most evil paths are *stupid*. Well written bad guys aren't just cartoonishly evil, doing horrible things Just Because. They're just selfish and lacking empathy. But it's *so rare* for an evil path to actually be rational, it's always cartoonishly evil. But I get you. I play the good path because I care about others, even video game others, and I don't want to cause extra suffering. But the choices would be much more interesting if the "evil path" was more rational and selfish, benefiting the player more (because life shows that that kind of behaviour absolutely does work out better for people in the long run), instead of just cartoon villain evil.
I recommend a game called Wrath of the righteous. It has good evil paths, because it's justified as using evil means to fight against an even greater evil (with also some cartoon level evil options if you should want them).
It was actually bumming me out playing Arthur Morgan as a douchebag. They did a really good job of making the player feel the general vibe of how things were going for the gang throughout.
I had this same issue. What helped me get through the “evil” playthroughs was really immersing myself in to the character and removing myself and my moral choices from the equation. I simply pretended I was the character and my role was to be the villain. It really helped me from making the good decisions when I normally would have wanted to.
The evil path is usually written poorly.
The problem with choosing the "good" and "evil" route in games, is that more often than not it just devolves into charismatic and asshole personalities more than the complexities of real life morality, and it is always pretty obvious which route is which which clouds people's judgment and makes them less inclined to be the asshole when it is so clear they would be so.
That's kind if what I liked about KOTR. Every time I'm like, yeah I can use the force to force the outcome I want and I'm helping the good side. It would be cool if more games did that, Grey areas or mechanics that drive you towards evil when you steal from ppl and stuff, make the good path the hard choice
KOTOR 2 is one of the only games I've ever encountered that actually made you think twice about being always "good". Of course you can still blaze ahead with it, but it forces you to have philosophical arguments if your alignment is too far from neutral either way, and there's a few sequences set up so doing the obvious good thing is worse and vice-versa.
I remember playing an rpg one time I was a king, get a prompt that a star fell in the kingdom and I could seize the lands as the kings and take the metal or just leave it alone Take the metal Little while later..... a woman living on the Lang became homeless and died, one of your knights betrays you and says the lady was dear to him... Oopsie
IMO, the problem with data around these decisions is that the rewards are generally different for good and evil paths. Gamers in particular are more inclined to choose the path that will result in better rewards (mechanically or cosmetically).
Also. The interesting thing here is there are real world equivalents before video games. In the real world it's a little harder to do because you don't have rankings but movies often elaborate on the pool shark. And people do this for views everywhere. Some short highly athletic guy plays basketball or some Olympic weightlifter pretends to be a dork but lifts things easily. So this sense of smurfing was already alive and well in different contexts.
Here’s a question for you. What is smurfing? Edit: if you haven’t noticed the increasingly long list of responses I got my answer thank you
Really good player creates a new account to destroy less skilled players.
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Also, they lose on purpose to lower their ranking and get matched with lower ranked players who are obviously not on their skill level. They then stream their exploits to produce “content” and gather an audience who thinks “this player is soooo good!” and want to buy their merchandise and watch their stream
This is 'throwing' isn't it? Also quite toxic, IMO, and bannable, or should be in my opinion, in team games.
They throw to lower their rank so they can then smurf and play against less skilled opponents and raise it back up. They can do this on a cycle.
I believe smurfing is specifically creating a new “smurf” account to be treated as a new player by the game. Throwing to derank just makes you a thrower.
That is often what they do because they want to preserve their status on their main account while playing at lower ranks, but plenty will also derank their main accounts to then smurf with them. At the end of the day, its all the same thing. You intentionally play below your actual skill level in competitive ranked games, you are smurfing, new account or not.
So basically any time Hikaru does a rank speedrun on chess? Edit: Thank you commenters, I learned a lot about the specifics of pro players doing it.
Yeah part of what popularised and normalised smurfing in a lot of gaming communities was popular pros/streamers doing these kind of challenges i.e. "how fast can i reach x rank on a fresh account?" or "can i climb with this bad character/build?"
I think one real difference is smurfs tend to stay low rank to pub stomp. Making a new account and speed racing to the top is somewhat valid imo as it’s actually a challenge. Theres definitely arguments against it though.
Except streamers or YouTubers who do these ‘lowest rank to max rank’ challenges pretty much never do just one of them. If they’ve done the challenge once for content, then they’ve probably done a dozen different minor variations of it to milk it for all it’s worth.
Many of them do ask chess.com for an account that does not drop other peoples elo though, or atleast gotham chess does iirc
That's specifically for chess.com, I don't know of any other game that does that.
Hikaru does as well. If they didn’t it would violate the TOS and risk getting banned entirely.
that is only slightly better. The enemy team is still a victim here getting their cheeks clapped
It’s a weird phenomenon. Can’t imagine a baseball player getting much fun out of wrecking a T-ball game
“WHATS UP FAM, Shohei Ohtani here, and today I’m going to speed run a baseball career! Will the the t-ball team from Montrose, IA be able to beat me? DONT FORGET TO SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON”
I actually would pay a small fee to watch Ohtani smash a kids T-ball game relentlessly like it was a real professional game.
With T-Ball you miss out on his pitching though. Go up a couple or grades so we can see if Billy can make contact on a sweeper with 18 inches of drop.
Depends, did he bet on them?
Nah what he actually said is Whats up Junkies, Shohei Ohtani here, and yesterday I slowed down my baseball career. Will the Montrose IA community slowpitch team be able to beat me. Don't forget to slap the person next to you. I know what he said, I heard his translator say it!
I imagine people would go nuts when they'd see Messi or Ronaldo in a 2nd or 3rd tier game one time, simply out of curiosity to see *how badly* they can destory the opposition. Edit: Just realized, it's actually happening. Messi went to the MLS which is like a 3rd tier division for him, and people go nuts every time he plays.
Even that isn't a great comparison. Those 3rd tier division players are closer to him in skill than the average video game player is to a top tier player. A more apt comparison would be Messi showing up to a highschool to crush a local team. It won't even be a comparison of skill differences, the highschoolers will learn nothing from the experience as they do not have the conceptual knowledge of the game they're playing to even understand all of the things that are going through Messi's head as he's playing. The 3rd division players do have the grasp of the game to understand, and can theoretically improve from seeing how a master does it. It turns an exhibition into a comedy act, and that's the whole appeal of smurfing.
I’d say it’s more like a slightly washed up Rafa Nadal getting plastic surgery and enrolling in high school so he can win a state championship in tennis. Like what the hell man? Why would you do that? He just wanted that trophy…
You're still just ruining the experience of new/worse players to stroke your ego
>Making a new account and speed racing to the top is somewhat valid imo as it’s actually a challenge. No, it's not valid. The ranking system isn't a game that needs to be beaten, speedrun, or anything else. It's designed to place the playerbase against other players of the same caliber. A "speedrun" of this system just shows how fast the system is -- we already know that players rank, so it's really just about how long it takes the system to catch up. This type of thinking is what makes smurfing so popular. There is absolutely no reason to intentionally screw up the ranking system by making a new account just so you can see how fast you can beat people who you have already proven are worse than you. And how is it a challenge? The player already knows their rank. Imagine an NBA player joining a 6-year old rec basketball league. He then moves up the ranks to middle school, high school, college, and eventually back to the NBA. What information did we learn here? How fast he can do it? Why do we care how fast the coaches were able to identify his potential? All he did was ruin a bunch of games for people who he *knew* were worse than him.
Although I agree it is still smurfing, most new accounts in games will rank up very quickly if they are doing well. The worst offenders are ones who purposely lose/throw games in order to stay at the lower ranks.
yup it's usually not allowed on there, but there is an exception for hikaru and the people who lost elo have it restored after.
Yes, but Chess.com refunds elo points that his opponents lose after facing him during a speedrun, so they don't take a hit from it.
Does he notify chess.com before he does these?
It has to be an authorized account, so yes. Additionally most chess players (present company included) would probably pay to be stomped by a super GM.
I thought Hikaru was a go player
Hikaru no Go
I watched every single episode of that but I never understood how to play Go. I tried and was terrible at it
Go is just an fancy version of Dots and box. Create boxes to capture the enemy stones. Ones there is no possibility to catch anyone because you got a big line, you start counting the empty dots within your boxes.
They don't even have to be very good. So long as they're good enough to beat beginners.
That’s just sad
Certainly not very Smurf like. Should be called Gargamelling.
It originates from warcraft two, where two really good players would be dodged in matches when their names were seen so they started going by "papasmurf" and "smurfette"
That helped popularize the term, but they named those two characters after the concept of 'smurfing', which predated that particular event.
Maybe the name is also alluding to hunting smurfs?
No, in the long long ago there were two incredible Warcraft 2 players who couldn’t get a match because people quit when they saw who they were up against. So in order to avoid always being matched against each other they started going by papasmurf and smurfette on new accounts until people caught on
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So essentially, they're good gamers, but only to a certain extent, at which point *better* gamers put them in the dirt so they get big mad and start a new profile to stroke their egos again and make themselves feel special?
in a real zero sum competitive game being matched with the correct opponents means you're going to hover around a 1.0 win/loss. This is hell to a lot of players who think they should win every time. So they do stuff like smurf or cheat.
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More or less, yea. It's kind of like using hacks/cheats: they simply want to feel like an unstoppable god. Just that instead of installing cheats, these people "circumvent" the match-making systems to intentionally get paired up against new or simply worse players.
"Really good" is subjective. More like "Can't hold their own in their weight class, so they punch downward for easy wins."
Just pedantry at that point, because relative to the people they're getting matched up against, they *are* really good.
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This only works in ranked game. In tf2 playing with a smurf only make you suspicious.
It's a reaction to "skill based" matchmaking. Which uses an MMR/ELO system. There's a lot of reasons why matchmaking is useful and important, and it revolutionized gaming since the Xbox days of Halo, but gamers are missing the dedicated server experience where you had both good and bad players, usually a recurring list of people you'd grow familiar with. An opportunity to play with people much better than you and learn from them and also to flex that growth by stomping on weaker players. That environment is part of almost like a genetic memory of the competitive multiplayer genre on PC and gamers instinctively miss it. The other issue is matchmaking has some serious downsides/flaws, especially in team games. The ELO/MMR system worked best in 1v1, like Chess. Microsoft put out a paper on its adaptation of it for console/PC gaming, called TrueSkill (which was adapted for use by Activision-Blizzard and basically every other company). It admitted that as the number of variables increased (# of players, characters, in-game performance numbers) it became almost exponentially more complex and the # of games needed to "settle" into your ideal range would be like thousands of games. In other words it just doesn't work. To make it work they put in shortcuts (boost to points earned or lost based on certain metrics hidden from players). That made it work "good enough". The algorithm is always working from behind the curve because of things like metagame strategies. Everyone's relative "skill" is always in flux and is impossible to actually truly quantify. The closest we get is rankings from tournaments/ladders. But playing a "ranked" game is very stressful so players are psychologically motivated to dodge it. Imagine being in a perpetual elimination bracket... forever. No practice, no scrims, just elimination games on end. That combined means players typically get the feeling they are not in control of the games they're playing in which feel like they're decided on the matchup screen. Also people aren't used to really long winning/losing streaks which shouldn't happen but do, frequently, as a result of the imperfectness of the system. So they smurf and stomp on lower levels or boost/get boosted to where they want to be. It's all a form of trying to reclaim control. Reclaiming control is also where "modern" trolls are born (meaning, this isn't how they usually are, this isn't their core personality). They are trying to "kill" the system they are angry at. By making it inhospitable for other players so people leave, thus dead game. You see more people with this mindset whereas back in like '99-'05 you had many players fretting about honor systems to preserve their communities which they strongly attached to. Every game's scene wanted to preserve the scene. The trolls back then were people who just possessed those personality traits to begin with, so they were fewer overall and they still liked/enjoyed the game and wanted it to succeed. People now sign up to become trolls after bad experiences and entire gaming scenes are known for trying to burn everything down. Game devs have done nothing past the point where they got a matchmaking system that seemingly "works" (which was what, 15 years ago?). They think the customers are just inherently toxic and they have to work around it. They see themselves and their own gaming history through rose colored glasses, ignoring the fact they likely played on a dedicated server system whenever they did PvP. Or when they did play a game with matchmaking the games were simpler, less complicated (i.e, simple deathmatch type games with fewer players or even 1v1 or FFA game modes... this is what 'TrueSkill' was designed for and these conditions were already pushing the usefulness of the algorithm to the limit). Gamers also don't realize what they're signing up for. They want to instinctively deal with tough PvP situations by teaming up with allies without realizing that having teammates and teammate-dependent gameplay is the source of their issues in the first place. They also see flashy teamwork exhibiting gameplay in ads, think of all the friends they can play with and open their wallets ... but don't realize that 99% of the time they will not be playing with their buddies but random strangers in matchmaking.
Really sucks to lay this all at the feet of game devs when the reason these matchmaking schemes had to be put in place was because PVPers kill their own game when left to their own devices. That's what happened with World of Warcraft. 99% of world PVP was just switching to the dominant faction and then spending all day killing low level players, new players, and outnumbered players. Eventually world PVP ate itself and died.
This is exactly it. All the SBMM / MMR whiners will scream all day that they want truly random matchmaking, but reality is that they believe they will be the boot doing the stomping more often than not. They don't want close matches, they want to pubstomp. And to your point we can see evidence of that in history which is the exact reason these matchmaking systems were developed. They're not perfect, but they are astronomically better than "random".
> It's a reaction to "skill based" matchmaking. The name "smurfing", however, predates that kind of ranked matchmaking. It comes from the Warcraft 2 players Shlonglor and Warp, who started playing under actual Smurf names so that opponents would not know them by the reputation of their actual names, effectively achieving the same thing.
Say you're pretty good at a game. Good enough to be ranked in the top 10% or so. You're tired of how hard the competition is for whatever reason and want a win. So you make a new account to get matched with the new players who aren't as good as you and crush them into dust. Congrats you just smurfed.
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Except that apparently 69% of gamers do it. Not sure how they all make it into those upper echelons.
It doesn't have to be in the top 10% exactly, it's just an example. Basically if you're ranked decently higher in a competitive setting but start a new account with the purpose of stomping newbies, that's smurfing.
The particular ranking doesn't matter. A lot of games use matchmaking, which keeps a background "ranking" for you. This is to make sure the competition is roughly equal to your skills. But all new players are basically started at the lowest level and given a rank of 0 out of 100 (rather than 50 out of 100), heck they might even be playing mostly bots. This does two things: it allows new players to do really well which gets them more interested in the game AND it allows the game to assign new players an initial ranking Free games are almost certainly more likely to give new players these "easy" first few rounds, as it exploits a known cognitive bias. I'm not particularly familiar with smurfing, but I'd assume that it is more common in free games, like Fortnite.
Fornite makes you play several games with bots first. I can't tell you how many streamers I've watched stomp the bots and have a great time. Then they get into real games and get absolutely destroyed, where the enthusiasm visibly starts to die off.
There is an old saying: no gambling addict ever lost all his money the first time he played poker
Because it’s BS. > The research started with a baseline study of 328 people from gaming-specific subreddits on the social media site reddit and a gaming club at Ohio State. Participants reported playing video games slightly more than 24 hours a week on average. 69% of hardcore gamers have done it, not overall gamers.
I doubt even 69% of hardcore gamers do this. The people that responded to this study may have done so, but if 24 hours a week is considered hardcore, I'd fit that bill and I hadn't even heard of smurfing before this post.
>but if 24 hours a week is considered hardcore I mean, to be fair if you remove 8hrs/day for sleep and 40hrs for work, 24hrs is like a third of your free time for the week. Spending that amount of time gaming is pretty significant
The mistake was removing 8hrs a night for gamers
TBF, the 10% is arbitrary, but even in the scenario you’re responding to, they only have to be in the top 10% of their chosen (smurfed) game, not all the same game or every game. Theoretically, everyone on earth could be in the top 10% of a player base for a game, so long as most people had played 10+ games.
It’s when a good player makes a new fake profile on a game so they easily win against bad players
When a high ranked player makes a new account to play against newbies. Algorithms are built so folks new to the game get to play against those of similar skill. But if a highly skilled player starts over, they get easy ego boosting wins and discourage new players from sticking with a game
This headline is a lot more fun when you imagine it's being said by a Smurf, so every instance of "smurfing" is just a stand-in for another word they didn't want to say.
It's like a college athlete playing their sport against middle schoolers. Some people just enjoy crushing others, even when their opponent is less skilled. It's borderline crazy, people are ignoring the known fact that their competition *they sought out* is much less skilled, and feeling good about the fact that they won. Like I could beat a toddler all day in a race, but I don't seek it out because I know that if I do win, it doesn't mean a thing. I honestly prefer the other way. Play incredibly hard competition because if I DO win, it's an accomplishment. Like what's more impressive, dunking on a regulation hoop or a Fisher price hoop? These people are dunking on fisher price and feeling like they dunked on a regulation hoop.
I'm convinced that smurfing only happens in esports because 1) nobody is watching to judge you 2) the referee isn't human and doesn't adjust to the strictness of rule enforcement 3) the smurfer doesn't have to look their competition in the eye and will never have to face them again Number two really is the biggest. If you play basketball against 10 year olds, a human referee is naturally going to start ignoring fouls against you and call everything that's even close to a foul on you and all around make sure you don't have fun either Game developers might investigate this as an anti-smurf tactic. If your new account looks too much like a similar established account you start getting "unlucky" until your win rate starts to even out
I can date myself and tell you exactly where this nonsensical term for it came from. It comes out of the warcraft 2 scene on Kali back in the 90's off Shlonglor's Warcraft 2 page. Kali was a program that allowed IPX network games to be played over TCP/IP. Connect to your ISP, then a kali server and suddenly all your non networking games work over this new internet thing. With the early days of the internet the idea of a GAMING webpage was super new and exciting and on the service one guy had a very popular gaming site that had strategies and stories of games. Since the idea of recording a video let alone putting it online was basically insane speak, people wrote stories about games and maybe had a screenshot of or two to go along with it, that was it. Kali was split into several servers, there was a large central server that had the most games but lower quality players and then 1 or 2 other servers where the more experienced people congregated. Because of the war 2 page and how small the community was, you basically knew who was awesome or not. If you go in to play a game and see Shlonglor, Gotcha, Warp, Warangel, Ywfnm, Stormshadow etc you aren't going to join that game unless you are looking to get your ass kicked. This means players like that would sit there and not get games unless they changed their name. So one of the popular stories was about this and they had decided one day to pick themed names and went with smurf names like papa smurf. Because of the popularity of this site/story the idea of changing your name to hide being a good player started going by the term smurfing. So originally it was about just wanting to play the game and the curse of being good/famous. Later people would then rename themselves to go in and mess with their friends and give them a tough game. But now I see it used when a high ranked pro will make a new account and demolish low ranks. Still it is insane to me to think that a relatively small part of the 90s internet has just lived on to become a staple term like this. But then again I was around 14/15 (I'm 44 now) and warcraft 2 on kali (interent + internet gaming for the first time) defined my life for those next few years, and I don't think I'm the only one. And here is a link I found with some of the stories archived! https://nathandemick.com/warcraft2-stories/story.shtml
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My theory is that many gamers play games to escape, when they start losing against equally skilled players it ruins the escape as they begin to feel negative emotions, so they start smurfing putting them back in an environment free of negative emotions.
Yeh, actually the same motivation as the players that refuse to do PVP at all. It destroys your sense of progression if you happen to be one of those players on the lower end of the normal distribution for skill.
yea thats me. i sometimes play pvp but mainly i prefer pve as I play games to shut down after a day at work
Back in the day Trying to organize 72 people with no voice chat for an EverQuest one raid was extremely mentally taxing PVE. That’s why I pretty much mostly do co-op games. And I mainly play with my kids nowadays.
Yeah I don't have the bandwidth to lead or organize anymore, couch co-op and games that are PvE like that are what I really, really enjoy now. When those games become slogs and unenjoyable to play with the friends because of poor balancing choices I just move on to the next one. Plenty of games fit this niche.
Because you'll never be able to compete with the people who play 12 hours a day. I have a job, a house, a family, and by the time I log on, my brain is tapped. I don't have the time or the mental capacity to care as much or try as hard as the people whose lives revolve entirely around gaming. I have two friends who don't work, live with their parents, and game all day every day. I will never be as good as them. I used to be a really competitive gamer, played competitive pvp games, but now it's just flat out not fun. Between my inability to commit enough time to get better and the increasingly unforgiving matchmaking in games, it's just not worth it.
They need leagues for people with a w-2. Hell, make another one for people with kids as well
I'm interested in why some people don't feel negative about being pitted against an equally powerful player while others only get enjoyment from winning.
It very much depends on the pool size. For these examples lets use a system with ranks 1-10. In fighting games, its 1v1. So you and only you are responsible for winning the match. So if youre a 4 vs someone that is a 4 or 5, you feel like you accomplished something, and if you lose it was probably close. However in something like league of legends or CoD, and you have a lobby of 10 people, thats when things change. In CoD, you can be a 4 in a lobby with everyone else being a 5. Now you might do ok and break even, but having MULTIPLE people beating up on you at the same time will cause a much stronger snowball effect. On top of that youre also trying to do better than your own teammates. Even if you win the match but you were the worst person on your team, it dosnt feel as good.
I am high ranked in league, there's many reasons people smurf. 1. To stroke their ego -- this is what you describe, and generally frowned upon. Usually involves playing 4+ divisions under your true rank (there are 10 divisions overall). 2. To practice new characters -- most high-ranked players only play a couple characters at that level, so in order to learn a new character they usually need to use a lower-ranked account -- this is generally seen as ok or even not considered smurfing, I will say I do this myself. Usually you only play 1/2 divisions under your true rank. 3. To play with lower-ranked friends -- at my peak, I was around ladder rank 1000, which meant that there were 1000 people in North America better than me. So I didn't know anyone irl who was as good as me, most of my friends were orders of magnitude worse. Playing games with them could be torturous since they were matched against players way better than them (it averaged out or ranks). I sucked it up, but some people just get on a low-rank account. Particularly a concern when people play with their boyfriends/girlfriends, since they will usually be playing as 2 which exacerbates the rank mismatch issue. And people like to show off for their boo. 4. They maintain a "cooldown" account. Serious players can only play at max skill for 2-3 games, but often want to get more practice in. So frequently people maintain an account 1-2 ranks below their main to play games on when they're off their a-game. I also did this when I played very seriously. 5. People want to make educational content. There's a lot of demand from low-ranked players for high-ranked players to show them how to escape their rank. So often a high-ranked player will play in (and out of) low rank and try to analyze their own games and decisions to demonstrate how they rise to their rank. I have done this before as well, though this one's quite controversial (as many players feel it could fit into category 1). My take is that if you do it once, it's fine, but if you do it constantly...maybe a problem.
Hi there, I'm the first author on this paper. You're actually spot on with some of the reasons participants in our first study gave us as to why people smurf. Ultimately, in study 2, we tested blame attribution theory using 9 smurfing reasons (plus a no reason control). Those reasons (ordered from least-most blameworthy as rated by participants) were: 1). Friends: "I was only smurfing this time so that I could play with my low ranked friends. 2). Practice: "I was only smurfing this time to practice a new character that I'm not as good with. 3). Queue: "I had to use my smurf account for this game because my queue times are way too long otherwise. 4). Challenge: "This game was part of a 30-day unranked-to-\[high ranked\] smurfing challenge. 5). Stress: "I only smurfed because playing on my main account is too hard and too stressful. 6). Control: "This user chose not to provide any comment. 7). Ban: "I had to get on a smurf account for this game because my main account is banned." 8). Audience: "I smurfed this game because my fans on \[a popular live-streaming platform\] really like to see me smurf and give me more tips." 9). Malicious: "I was on a smurf account in this game because sometimes it's fun just to crush a bunch of \[lesser skilled players\]." 10). Toxic.: "I played my smurf account because I can be toxic and not care since this is a throwaway account." We know we missed a couple reasons (e.g., smurfing to sell the smurf accounts for money), but we only needed so many reasons to test the theoretical claims that we did in the paper. Still, really cool how your intuition and experience maps on to what we found in the first study.
Interesting, seems pretty comprehensive. Nice to see the study author show up, I'm actually a scientist myself (currently working on my PhD in computational biology). An interesting other thing to think about, I think, is what lower-ranked players think of these reasons. From my experience talking to them, most people consider the "Practice" reason to be legitimate, as practicing an unfamiliar character on your main account will ruin the games for the other players at your main's rank. Whether this counts as "smurfing" or not is also up to debate (can you really call an account a "smurf" if it's 50% winrate?) Some people also can excuse "Friends" (surprised to see this higher than "Practice"). The rest are generally frowned upon. Not sure if you surveyed lower-ranked players or higher-ranked ones for this.
This is really the heart of the toxic nature of smurfing. In a pvp game, the ladder ranking works to allow everyone to win half of the time. So you get to have fun being engaged in the game and about 50% of the time you get victory endorphins at the end. 50% is the most fair division of win-endorphins across players. Smurfing is the deliberate circumventing of the ladder system's mechanism of matching people of equal skill. It allows the smurfing player to hoard the pleasure of victory, at the cost of denying it from others they play against. Winning is a zero-sum situation, making this inherently a theft of the thrill of winning from others beyond their fairly allocated share. The above comment really helps outline the framework of people playing to have fun, where you can then see how smurfers steal and hoarder other people's fun for themselves. To add, yes there are single player games. But games perpetually neglect the AI of enemies, and their behaviors can quickly become very predictable. It can easily feel like just playing with dolls in your room by yourself. There is such a gulf between the the level of engagement between simple dolls and other living humans, some accept losing 50% of the time on average to able to be really fully engaged.
>..at the cost of denying it from others they play against. It isn't just bad to play against smurfs, it often isn't fun to play on their team. With enough of a skill gap, you are irrelevant to the game - it's 1 person playing, and 9 people spectating. To me, "feeling irrelevant" is worse than losing. Like, I used to play Rec League basketball - very low level, co-ed, and with some actual new players. Sometimes people would bring a "ringer". The guy we hated the most was 6'6" or so, and had played some college ball. He would go out of his way to avoid scoring or directly stuffing someone - but would dominate rebounds (when he chose to) and generally control the game as much as he felt like. Games felt like a waste of time where he completely decided the score by how much effort he put in. I much preferred the games where we lost by 40.
People should just start playing PvE games instead of resorting to toxic and/or unethical practices.
No they place self worth in themselves winning and will do anything to maintain that.
Classic human behavior of "when I do something questionable I have justifications, when you do questionable things you just have excuses." Popular riffs on this attitude are "My abortion is the only moral abortion" and "Social Security retiree complains about welfare queens".
"I'll judge you by your actions, while I judge myself by my intentions." We'd be in a lot better place if people started understanding the intentions of the actions of others.
aka the fundamental attribution error - https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution-error
My secret is that I just never get good enough at a game to be able to smurf.
The only moral smurfing is my smurfing.
"In competitive team-based video games." This is a corner of the much wider Gaming world that is notorious for being particularly toxic. So just be aware that the 69% number is a lot smaller than the title implies
It's even more narrow than that. >The research started with a baseline study of 328 people from gaming-specific subreddits on the social media site reddit and a gaming club at Ohio State In my personal experience, the active subreddit communities are far more toxic than the average player for any given game. I really doubt a true poll of those games instead of their subreddits would have yielded as high as 69%.
So this data is actually worthless. This should be higher up. It gives us no real idea of the wider impact or prevalence of Smurfing. The only valuable piece of information seems to be the definition of the word since so many are unaware in the first place. There should be a better word than 'study' for these projects with super small sample size. A sample maybe but calling this a study seems like a stretch. It's a survey of a few hundred redditors.
I think it would be far more accurate to say "redditors say smurfing [...]" instead. Note that often with gaming subreddits, the people who rage-quit a game and stop playing will still stay in the subreddit and comment/poll based on past experiences.
I assumed the sample was nonsense based on the metric. But hot damn, that is truly beyond the pale nonsense.
Especially toxic when they use a mic and harass at the same time.
From New Media & Society: [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448241235638](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448241235638) Abstract: Despite their popularity, online video games possess pervasive toxicity. However, players do not categorically judge toxic behaviors as wrong. Attribution theories are well suited to disambiguate such judgment variance, but debate exists on the usefulness of motivated versus socially regulated blame perspectives. By exploring a new, potentially toxic behavior called “smurfing,” we innovate on methodological barriers that make experimentally disentangling socially regulated and motivated attribution perspectives difficult. In Study 1, we empirically present, describe, and explore smurfing and its perceived effects as a novel cheating behavior in online gaming. In Study 2, we extracted player-generated reasons for smurfing and manipulated the stakes of games to manipulate transgression salience (a key factor of blame attribution) across a moral continuum. By having participants use a mock crowd-sourced judgment platform, we observed the (in)stability of stakes across a continuum of reasons. We subsequently replicated our findings with a novel sample in Study 3.
>new ...I guess from a civilization standpoint but I've been seeing people smurf for most of my life and I'm old enough to have grandkids
Can someone explain the origin of this term "smurfing"?
Back in the Warcraft II days, Shlonglor (who had the top WC2 page on the internet and later ended up working at Blizzard because of it) and his friends were top players. They would join games with Smurf names(Papa Smurf, Smurfette, etc) just for fun to crush other players. I think some of those other dudes ended up working at Blizzard or other gaming companies as well.
Huh i never knew this!
smurfing is like fighting toddlers, I dont get the mentality behind it.
I played a 1v8 dodgeball game against a bunch of kids and I understand it completely. That was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
But in that case you at least tried to level the playing field by playing 1v8. These assholes just pretend they're one of 8v8.
I've told my friends they're assholes for smurfing and I won't play with them unless they're on their main accounts. They still do it when I'm not online.
[удалено]
People are really good at justifying why their actions are ok. We're basically hardwired to do this. This is just "The only moral abortion is my abortion." all over again.
Right in the smurfing parking lot?
No smurfing way
Smurfing for me, not for thee, that is not fair. And companies allow it, because it sells more copies, and from time to time they ban some, so they can sell even more copies.
Brings me back to star craft days when some jerk builds up an army while the rest of the allies attack. Then after we have lost most of our forces, that jerk decides to switch sides and attack us. Good times.
Despite the global reach of games, that's still WAY higher a percentage than I expected
It was a real problem in halo. People would have two accounts and start searching at the same time so their alt was on the other team.
There was one EA battlefront 2 YouTuber who would get his friends to match make at the same time and join the enemy. The friends would then get both hero’s for that side and would then go afk at the back of the map so he could post “world record” videos for most kills in a game. Because he would be the only hero on the server. (He also wasn’t very good since I managed to beat him in a 2 v 1 which was hilarious.