Sc2 is unplayable smurf fest

General Discussion
1

I am done with sc2 unplayable smurf fest

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2

You’re missing out but that’s on you.

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3

He’s not missing out on anything. Same as the ~90% (vast majority let’s say) of people that have quit and not looked back.

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4

So?

Idk if you still play the game but it’s still enjoyable to play and the ladder climb is satisfying. It’s just very niche. Also, even this community is almost dead yet, we should just all 1v1 each other or other type of games and that would be a lot of fun I feel like.

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5

What do you mean so…? Just countering your opinion with mine. That’s all there is to it. By the way, 1v1 ladder now means very little (to me and very many people). 2020 and earlier it actually meant something. By 2021, it meant less and less. I pretty much quit 1v1 ladder late 2020 or so.

6

Said the account with 8 played matches… smh

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7

The point is, not because you (and some others) stopped caring about it that it doesn’t matter anymore or the game isn’t worth playing for everyone. It’s okay even if there’s not a whole lot of people playing.

I mean, I know your opinion from other threads already, but I’m wondering why you’re still even here anyway. Maybe you really enjoy this little community, so do I, but most of what I see is complaints and just being negative about the game.

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8

Contrary to one would think, a lot of smurfs don’t like to be smurfed. Keep in mind the main objective of freelosing smurfs is to get easy wins, and so if they were to be matched against equally skilled opponents or above, that would defy the purpose.
And so I’ve had some of them go haywire just because they thought I was one of them as well.

And there likely are now so many of them in some MMR zones that the probability for them to play another smurf isn’t low anymore. As I often say to them, they are literally sawing the branch they’re sitting on. :roll_eyes:

The player base has indeed decreased. However it hasn’t dramatically decreased. Some have sad the game had lost 90% of it’s player base, while if you base yourself on the amount of games per day, if we compare it to 2017 (just after the game went F2P), we had 220K games a day in 1v1, whereas it’s 150k currently. So that’s a -40% decrease, not a -90%. And that’s not even mentioning coop and 2v2. :mag_right:

https://i.postimg.cc/fbXPrzfh/2022-08-04-Ladder-population-RFTW.jpg

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9

Maybe he’s European?
I’m European, this account only exists so I can post here.

10

I can feel you, but after my recent break from sc2 I found i dont care anymore and it was, surprisngly a good feeling. The ladder climbing seems totally broken, i see bronze accounts beating me up with 200 apm and grandmaster accounts that i manage to beat in macro game, with a fair number of smurfs.Because of all this , even normal players are usually out of place. So to put it short, I tottaly stopped caring about ladder climbing, I care only about getting better (and i do care about this, i watch every replay). I used to get very upset by smurfs, and I find it tottaly justified, but with this approach I find I dont care much, and its quite liberating. I mean smurfing is bad, but it doesnt seem it will ever stop, so better to learn to deal with it somehow.

The game is still good, and still a lot of poeple playing, as I rarely have to wait more then 30 seconds, dont miss out :wink:

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11

How about this:
october 2020 - global player population - 504 k players
last season end: 240 k players
Source: rankedftw

That’s over half compared to what was in 2020. I don’t think this is negligible. It surely has impact on what is happening on the ladder. I assume majority of people who quit the game are from “middle leagues” - gold - plat - dia. If that’s true it means that there simply won’t be enough room for master players and half of them will have to get to diamond, diamonds to plat etc.

12

No, your point was he was missing out. He’s not missing out on anything.

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13

It is an unplayable smurf fest. Is SC1 scene with the revival better?

At some point after the merger Microsoft will do something, eventually, but at the time being it is what it is. You never know who you play with, lots of getting pounded, lots of free wins and bugs for the ranking. The game is still golden but pretty much everything else is going downard.

14

That’s just a matter of opinion anyway, nothing I’ll say and nothing you’ll say will change our minds.

15

Two points :

  • The data you provide is NOT the amount of players, but the amount of 1v1 ladder teams. A player can have several 1v1 teams (at least one per race played), even on a single account. Thus, since the separate MMR per race, it has become a quite unreliable population estimator. Hence why I prefer to use the amount of games played/day. :slight_smile:
  • There is a decrease alright. I didn’t say it was negligible, just that it was closer to -40% than -90%.

As for people being forced to smurf, they aren’t. One could even say that the more they smurf, the more they are responsible for longer waiting-queue times at their original level.

16

I can’t really speak for other people but I often take breaks from this game for long periods of time, and as a consequence my MMR has been reset several times. So I typically end up “smurfing” in Plat or lower for a time. Until I work up back to my usual position in Diamond hell. At which point I typically end up losing interest in the game again somewhere in Diamond 2 or D 1.
Hence, although I’m a player that really should “belong” in Diamond or maybe even Master if I were more consistently active (technically I have a GM finish on my other NA account). I take breaks from the game for so long that while I’m grinding my way back up, sometimes I’ve been accused of being a “smurf” in Plat/Gold league.

Frankly-speaking, there would be more people playing this game and less quitting, if this game was more fun and less focused on being a frustrating, “challenging” mess.

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17

Yep. Glad you figured it out

18

Well, what can I say.

  • Technically being ranked at a gold MMR while having been GM would indeed make you categorized as a smurf. Note that due to provisional MMR mechanics, this is different than having a gold league border, as before you MMR stabilizes you could completely have a provisional silver or gold league but still a platinum MMR (and thus be matched with platinum players.
  • This would be a case of non-freelosing smurfing. While still technically smurfing, as long as you didn’t freelose any of your games, this is both
    • not deliberate,
    • and way, way less troublesome than freelosing smurfs, as in our case your MMR will get close to your current skills rather quickly, and so you won’t keep bashing players who’re not match to you all the time.

One remark though : there would be less chances for your MMR to reset if you always played on the same account.

I completely agree. While he had some good ideas, this is the main point which made me disagree with a lot David Kim’s initial decisions. It took quite a while to recover from those from a balance point of view, and SC2 is still a quite punishing game to play.

Now, you mentioned Diamond league as being hell, is it related to that ? :slight_smile:

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19

this doesnt really happens to me.
i just play the game and enjoy it.

20

Kind of, but I mostly meant that Diamond is the largest league with the most players in it and takes awhile to grind out of, at least if you’re not a pro player winning every game.

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