How do you keep a positive attitude when smurfs ruin you?

General Discussion
1

New player here. Basically, subj.

I play 1v1 in EU for about a month, somehow got to low gold, and I totally don’t mind an occasional smurf, as it’s a free training/showcasing what people can do on higher levels. Or two smurfs. Or maybe even three. But beyond that… honestly, SALT OVERWHELMING.

Like the last player with 2400 MMR (EU) and legit 200 APM, I mean he was microing and macroing behind it… as it wasn’t some kind of tight timing or all-in, which I cannot defend because skill issues, I could play this card that I’m getting a training session, blah-blah… but it’s getting old.

So, do you nice people have any tricks to “change the goal” of a clearly unwinnable game to something positive and leading to improvement?

PS: I don’t think it’s killing the game for me… yet, but I can see this as a potential major issue with noobie players retention.

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2

Although there weren’t as many smurfs back when I used to play, I would try to do my builds over and over against AI whenever I had a bad day… gets the execution training done without having to deal with this kind of bs.

3

I stopped playing ladder 9 months ago. Now i only play A.I. Cheater (insane) just for fun and practicing against an opponent who has better macro than you (A.I. gets extra resources so it simulates an opponent who has very good macro). I also practice some build orders vs very easy - medium A.I.

Btw there is some “anti-smurf” campaing in SC2 community (mostly on reddit) where people propose their solutions to deal with smurfs:

  • penalty for insta-quitting (x amount of minutes for delay before queueing again)
  • temp or perma-bans
  • algorithm which analyses win-loss pattern as well as player stats (career games, highest MMR etc)

Sooner or later this dumb company will have to do something to deal with this epidemic otherwise people will abandon SC2 completely.

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4

I mean they never did in wc3 and i play that all the time the meta is leave 60% of games with loss botters until you geta real game but the community is now so small mmr in those kinds of games is mostly not relevant.