I can understand why someone wastes time to derank and stay in low ranks with the sole purpose to grief people. Smurfs might be antisocial idiots who throw their time to garbage just to annoy others, but their intent is clear.
What I never understood and still can’t understand are the people who defend smurfs, and in the same time they claim they aren’t smurfs. I mean, what’s the point in defending smurfing? What is the loss if these griefers get banned?
Note: Like op, I define smurfs as someone who deranks on purpose to grief people. Don’t confuse them with alt accounts
You know your rank, and you don’t need more than 2 if you wanted to play comp with a feiend or something.
All these “unranked to GM” challenges from streamers and stuff, it just ruins the game for so many people.
“Smurfing” by that definition is definitely an issue in Overwatch, among many other video games. And I’d be willing to bet a lot of players who defend smurfing are probably regularly smurfing and just don’t want their fun to be ruined so that other people can actually have fun for once. I think it makes them feel good about themselves, perhaps they don’t like the real challenge that comes by going against people of their own skill level so they’d rather stress other people out instead. Yes, that is selfishness and probably even psychotic.
While a good way to learn a game is to play against people who are better than you, when the skill gap is that drastically different, you are immediately dying and the only thing you are really learning is to simply not leave the spawn. It doesn’t make the game fun for the people who are genuinely trying to learn the game when even just two people in the game, on the same team, are high ranking smurfs playing against a full team of bronzes. People will act like smurfing isn’t an issue, but it is.
This factor is vastly overestimated in competitive gaming tbh.
I’m a 23 y/o female, and apparently my average reaction time is faster than my 15 y/o brother and my 12 y/o cousin.
I’ve also met people way older than me (with slower reflexes probably) who have much more SR than I do. They have gamesense and experience I can only dream of having, and great mechanics.
I’m not disagreeing with the main point of your thread tbh, just saying you shouldn’t believe you are destined to be Bronze forever because of age.
Jeff recently said that they are going to have a system that detects smurfs when 222 role lock comes out, so we’ll see.
I don’t smurf, but personally I think it should be allowed. I think you should be allowed to shed SR with the click of a button. I’m around 1900sr. I think everyone that has an SR higher than that has not only the right, but also the duty, to shed SR with the click of a button and enter my games and stomp all over me.
I feel this way because I think stopping sandbaggers brings about more problems that it solves. Note: I don’t think Plats and GMs entering my games is that big of a problem.
Overall I’m happy with my match quality. I just have a different outlook/philosophy about how a multiplayer ladder should be administered.
I blame my lack of time more than my age. If I played for hours every day I think I could at least be gold. Another thing that bothers me is that thanks to match manipulation by smurfs I’ll never know what my true SR should be.
Well you know, I figured out the trick to keeping myself sharp is having a 26 year old boyfriend. As long as he’s young, so am I… or something.
Actually I really only notice my slowing reflexes on certain heroes and in certain situations. I’ve also kind of started to move away from melee-based characters in RPGS and MMO’s to ranged characters, as I feel like the distance gives me more time to react to situations.
When I really notice it is in the winter, because as I’ve gotten older my hands have started to get really, really cold in the winter, to the point where the aforementioned boyfriend bought me these USB handwarmers shaped like pieces of toast with anime faces (they are called toasty hands lol) because I just can’t play games at all when my hands feel like blocks of ice.
How do you even cope with a 26 yr old? My youngest daughter is 30 and I am gramps for two wonderful girls, I find young people endlessly dull and too much into cell-phone trifles.
Apart from physical appeals, which I find aesthetic but not appealing, they are all blanks. Even my students, who are supposed to be smart, are just…not smart.
If it makes you feel better, I started this game in low Silver and one of the best friends I made in Comp is 40 (when I met him, he was in low Silver as well). Exact same age as you.
At the moment, I am in the High Gold/Low Plat bracket and he is already in High Plat/Low Diamond. He refuses to play DPS and is almost exclusively a tank player, but I think the biggest difference between us is: I am actually impulsive when playing and make a lot of very stupid mistakes. He doesn’t.
what smurfs are doing shows a mental deficiency, I agree. However I think the problem we need to look at is how the matchmaker handles these types of people. Because there will be smurfs until the end of time, we just need to create systems where they cannot flourish.