Blizzards definition: “A Smurf is when a player purposely loses matches to artificially lower their rating in order to play with less skilled players.”
The internet and gaming community definition: " In online gaming, a smurf is an experienced player who uses a new account to deceive other players into thinking he’s a noob (newbie). The purpose is usually to play against less skilled opponents"
So if there is a conversation around smurfing… are we all actually talking about the same thing? or are we getting lost in translation?
When you search smurf in google the second definition is most likely going to be at the top of your search. So does Blizzard have the right to re define the term just for their game?
After being on the forums for a few years now, I see a lot of people argue over smurfing and it has suddenly occurred to me that we are not talking about the seme definition of the term.
Should we all use Blizzard’s definition or should we use the definition used by the wider gaming communities and which has been around for longer than OW?
I think the issue is Blizzard wants us to make a distinction between smurfs and alts
Smurfs meaning a new account that a good player deranks on, alt meaning a new account in general
All smurfs ARE alts, not all alts are smurfs basically.
The problem is, how tf are you supposed to recognize a smurf from an alt when you only play one game against them, they’re all low levels, and there’s one per lobby if we’re being conservative (on console you can make infinite free alts, and trust me people abuse that fact)
Yeah exactly so the rude people who throw on purpose to get to bronze and silver are typical smurfs. Or in my opinion what we should call it.
But i gotta say after role q its even harder for masters/gms/top 500s to place master right away. u usually end up placing gold, plat or diamond even if u try.
ML7 a 4700 SR support player placed gold even though he was playing like a madman.
I myself placed 3006 sr on my “smurf” or well alt account even though im master. Within 4 hours I was able to climb my way to 3761 sr at lvl 29.
Conclusion: Even with the SR boost you get after placing you can be unlucky as a mid/higher sr player and lose even if you’re playing insane.
Some games cannot be carried. I had 84 elims and 34500 hero damage my first game on the acc that placed barley diamond. Yet I lost it, and it was only a 17min long game.
Due to this and it being harder to carry certain games someone whos higher sr can often times place gold/plat.
Not to forget that its far harder for blizz to figure someones comp mmr out because its only 5 games unlike the 10 we had before role q so 17 and before.
I know qp mmr counts but the fact of the matter is this: Most people get gold or low plat as their first game on a new acc in comp, no matter their QP mmr.
Note: Some have lower mmr/sr accs due to playing with friends on them. They usually get stuck with their friend/friends at that sr too. Due to their friend not really deserving higher. Therefor a “so called smurf” might play better than others. Yet not really climbing.
If you somehow fool newer players into thinking you’re also a new player, you don’t gain much of anything, other than maybe in something like Poker where they might play differently if they think you don’t understand the game.
If you fool the system into thinking you’re a new player, you’ll presumably get easy wins against new players, since you shouldn’t be matched with them in the first place.
smurf is when some low elo player is less sufficient in game than you, so you have options to play where ever you want and another guy can’t, cause he is bad at the game, so he need a term to excuse his incappability to have same fun as you do while “smurfing”. So he call you out for having more fun than he does.
But I’m not talking about the difference between alt account and smurfs… I’m talking about the different definitions that are out there for what a smurf is and which definition we should use and why?
The terms “alt” and “smurf” have been used interchangeably by every competitive gamer I’ve ever known. Overwatch is the only place I’ve encountered where “smurf” is sometimes expanded to include players who do non-account-creating things that cause the same type of problem as repeatedly creating new accounts does.
you did, but that was basically Blizzards definition.
So are you saying that Blizzards definition of a smurf is the correct definition? and if so why? given that there was already a different definition of a smurf long before OW was released.
In this context the end goals can be to deceive matchmaker, or players, or both, or neither. So there can be some variation on the goals/outcomes.
I do think the semantics of smurfing come down to how matches are formed/made/ranked more than player intentions (tryhard/trysoft/gonext/throw) or account perception (new vs. veteran).
I put the blame on matchmaking. It tries too hard to performance-track and mine intent. It tries too hard to rigg close matches. If you go back to fair, naive, random matchmaking you basically erradicate the means by which smurfing can occur (regardless of definition).
The term has been around forever. It’s similar to hustling or sandbagging and generally is intended to deceive at least at first. It came into use before matchmaking was even a thing. It used to be all games used a server browser system. Both definitions are correct.
