Has everyone seen this post going around on youtube and reddit? I think everyone is missing the point that Uthermal AND hundreds of other players are smurfing at the same time. It isn’t like you just face Uthermal and then never see a smurf again. Smurfing is a HUGE problem in this game and was a bannable offense in the early days of WOL. Why isn’t it now? If you want to “smurf” as a streamer, go into your chat and find low league players. Don’t do it on ladder.
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did you watch pig today
Yeah, what a lot of people fail to realize is that the higher levels of the SC2 ladder are absolutely dominated by smurf accounts. Probably 2/3rds of the accounts in Grandmaster are smurfs, and a good portion of those will be pro players. If you can get into Grandmaster with the rampant smurfing, you are actually substantially better than Grandmaster in skill. The 5100 mmr player you beat wasn’t 5100, it was a 6200 mmr pro terran playing on a smurf. The same is true for most of your opponents.
If you plotted the frequency of MMR ranges in a histogram chart, you’d see it’s a fairly normal distribution but with huge double-hump in the GM region. Ergo, GM level MMR occurs far more often than it should, which is cut and dry proof that smurfing is very common.
That’s why rank-sorting accounts by absolute MMR value isn’t an accurate way of figuring out who the best players are. You take the mean MMR value and standard deviation and you perform a test from statistics called a “Z test”. You then compute the P-value for that z-score such that 1.0 / P(x>X) and that’s your account’s actual ranking. Technically you should calculate a confidence interval, but that’s a bit more complicated and frankly not worth the effort.
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Lots to unpack there. Here’s PiG’s video :
- Uthermal is doing it for content, doesn’t smurfs too far below his skill with the mentioned strategies (he often starts in masters), and doesn’t prevent the rise in MMR. PiG argues that the skill gap between M3 and a progamer is still considerable, and while this is true, it’s not fair to present Uthermal as a smurf Masterchief when BeastyQT has been doing the same for years starting his runs in platinum.
- Neither Uthermal, nor BeastyQT nor PiG having to smurf for content is actually that much of a problem in itself. The issue is that some use said content in order to present smurfing as a reasonable, alternative way of playing. The failure here being that streamers’ content actually encourages playing, while smurfing yourself actually discourages your opponents to. Most smurfs will deny this, but at one hand they often have no idea of what they’re talking about (lots of smurfs don’t even know what “smurfing” is) ; and at another hand when interrogated about their motivation to to so, they are most of the time trying to evade the very elements they induce in the players they get matched with.
- Current chart/ToS does not explicitly punish smurfing, but only the toxicity that often surrounds it. And even if it did, Bli² doesn’t have the means to even fight offenses that are clearly disallowed, so don’t expect them to punish any individual smurfing.
- Smurfing for content is an extremely small part of the whole smurfing scene. You might encounter BeastyQT some day, and get trolled by him during one game. But it’ll remain only one game. The issue are the smurfs that ensure they stay at the same level, by freelosing (freelosing smurfs) or repeatedly creating new accounts once they’ve reached an MMR where they start being challenged. Bli² could easily implement highly dissuasive countermeasures against freelosing smurfs. Heck they even had a precise survey with the proportions of smurfs in each metal league, and detailed suggestions about how to solve the issue, all suggested by an user they used to listen in balance-feebacks… but did choose not to do so for years. So I would be surprised if that changed now that the game entered long-term mode.
TL;DR
- Uthermal smurfs for content, but this is a non issue compared to the extent of problem that those who smurf to play represent in the current game.
- Realistically, do not expect Bli² to help solve that problem.
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Why does smurfing matter when ladder can assign you players 1k mmr above and below you?
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Because SC2 “celebrities” are being trolled by ornery 12 year olds who dominate that subreddit. No adult in their right mind cares, at all, about losing a game to a smurf. It’s a video game for crying out loud. It’s one game. It’s one game in a ladder system that will automatically equalize your win-rate (putting you against an easier player as a result of the loss). This entire thing reeks of 12 year old drama.
I can’t tell if pig is genuinely sorry that he did the “big bad” of smurfing, or if he’s just trying to get in on the drama and stir up attention for his channel. Often times, internet celebrities try to insert themselves into any situation they can merely because they can, and I have to admit that, when I saw this, that’s what came to my mind.
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Smurfing or not, I think the best argument for it is that you shouldn’t need to play on your main account if you are a serious player, having an alt account is fine for practice. Pro players are always chasing a peak MMR, and any losses significantly affect your MMR gains whether that you get less points for wins as the system begins to expect where your MMR should be, or as you need more games to end up at where you should be. Pro players in many games often make new accounts for this exact reason.
An argument for why it is irrelevant is unless that player is queue sniping a player that ‘smurf’ is unlikely to play against the same players multiple times as they will rise through the mmr range where they are likely to queue into them. Because they are within an acceptable mmr range to be paired the mmr loss for the non-smurf will be minimal and is negligible overall.
Why it is bad, it is when it encourages other players to smurf which when done in large amounts has an impact on the ladder itself. Essentially low ranked players will be pushed even lower and the high ranks will become less populated as the smurfs begin to inhabit them and the mmr values they entail on accounts they no longer use. As the higher mmr values are taken by smurfs less active players are available to siphon mmr from making gaining mmr at ranks above the smurfs more and more difficult without sufficient time for the mmr ranges to even out.
Really I think detrimental smurfs are pretty much limited to freelosing type smurfs. These are the smurfs that will push lower ranked players down the ladder consistently. You can look at someone like me (whos only ‘legitimate’ build order is 3 rax reaper proxy) who plays unranked, the system for unranked is perhaps shaky in that my sc2replaystats want to tell me that I have 2300 mmr which is most likely due to the total 5 games I have played in ranked when someone or two have invited me to play with them. It is not uncommon for me to get matched versus players with a silver border however it also likes to match me in the same day of play against diamonds as well, that is astronomical mmr gains for a few games but I often view the gains/losses of the other players and they are not too unordinary for them, and for example one game I am put with a 3k ally against a 3k player and a 4k player, that is simply not correct if I was a 2k player. However even after a few days of not playing or a few losses in a row and I can go back down from the diamonds to the silvers again. I think the system is robust enough to handle the mmr values properly but freelosing smurfs are simply outside of handling in this manner, as they will propel players who did not have a right to win the game when they leave of whom will likely not do anything useful with that mmr, and then continue to push down players who did not have a chance.
One game? Stop win trading with your own accounts and you might see the hundreds of smurf players between 4.5k-5.5k. Its more like 1/3 games are going to be a smurf.
The truth about smurfing is very simple. People in GM are simply bored and need to be more entertaining. Beastyqt explained in one of his videos that if you get to top 25 gm you are literally playing against 5-10 same people every day. That surely must be boring. Thats why most GM players are trying to be entertaining by doing some sort of B2GM series or smurfing on alternate accounts. However even this is not a valid excuse for smurfing - it has very bad impact on overall SC2 society:
GM smurfs master player - masters are frustrated and start smurfing diamond players. Diamonds are frustrated and start smurfing plats etc - it is a domino effect. In the end ladder is literally full of people sitting in various leagues with completey different skill levels they should be.
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hilarious to me people complaining about running into a smurf in 1v1. who cares lmao, you play him one game and move on.
in 2v2 on the other hand you play against the same smurf 100 games in a row which ruins the game.
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The whole thing from Pig has nothing to do with smurfs. This was just Pig destroying the reputation of a competitor using the whole smurf topic. The YT-channel of uThermal got big very fast. Much bigger than Pigs YT in all those years. He is just getting rid of a rival. This happens all the time in the normal world. And now it is happening in the world of SC2 content creators. And then he pushes some half baked apology video to his channel and continues his rant about uThermal. Look at the pinned comment in uThermals latest videos: he stopped making videos for now. uTherma got rl death threads after Pigs video. So congratulations to Pig. It was a disgusting move, but he achieved his goal.
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Dude, I sit between 4.3k and 4.9k depending on if Im grinding games or not. All I play is GM players on diamond/masters accounts. I’ll maybe see a true 4k-4.7k MAYBE 2/3 times out of five. It doesn’t just stop with one player. Hell, I lost over 500 mmr in two days from a massive losing streak facing constant smurfs. It’s so easy to tell too. Just watch the engagements, are they playing like Scarlette or Heromarine? The amount of people I see split marines like a 6k+ player in 4k is truly insane. I don’t even enjoy playing the game anymore. I’ll win 5 games in a row and play a 3.9k GM smurf and lose all the MMR I gained from those 5 games.
Yeah sure because you run into a smurf in 1v1 maybe in one game and then you run into another. You believe that there are only FEW smurfs in 1v1 games ?
2v2 - i no longer play this mode but i don’t think smurfing is a problem here: from what i know matchmaking is the real pain in the butt. You can be master and get a partner from gold. That’s not smurfing - it is not enough players to play this mode. That’s why matchmaking system finds whoever is searching for game.
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I made a new account. Named it “noob sausage”, and crushed opponents for days. I never had so much fun playing sc2!
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I once made an account with the clan tag <MEAT> and the name “grinder”. It was good fun. There’s about 5 million people who play SC2 and that reddit thread, whining about smurfs, has about 300 upvotes. Those people are the definition of irrelevant. Why pig gave them any attention at all is astounding as far as I am concerned. I don’t think anyone, in their right mind, cares, at all, about smurfing.
Almost everyone who ladders cares about smurfing. It is why it was a bannable offense for most of this games life.
The moment this game went free to play nullified any criticism about smurfs. By design, you can make as many accounts as you want to play whatever you feel like. There is zero incentive or reasonable guideline with which to reign it in.
If they want smurfing to be a thing in sc2, atleast give the option of a seperate matchmaking system, thats completely random and has nothing to do with any form of mmr.
Just get bronze to play GM’s in the matchmode, completely randomizing the enemies. That way people can make ‘fun’ videos.
Without ruining the game for someone who only has a few hours a day to play. Smurfs are a reall problem. the amount of barcodes i see on EU is wayyy too much. And yea i know not everyone with a barcode is instantly a smurf. But i know it happens in like half of my games.
That’s very true, but also the fact that the ladder is self-equalizing: if you lose a game, it puts you against easier opponents to compensate and your rank quickly heals. Getting wrecked by a smurf has zero long term damages. Imagine if you tried to sue in court over a car crash but cars automatically repaired themselves for free. The judge would think you are nuts to sue over something for which there were no damages.
That’s a good way to evaluate how important something is, by the way. If you can’t assign a dollar value to something, and this dollar value is not substantial, then it is the definition of irrelevant. Put your attention onto the things that matter. That’s what adults do. If someone is crying about something that doesn’t matter, there is a 99.9% chance they are <18 years old. Rank-order your problems by how much money you are losing by not having them fixed and then work to fix them (taking into account the cost to fix them – so it’s the net gain that matters). It’s literally that simple.
If you have a hard time deciding between a bunch of them / their value is hard to quantify, then you put them onto cards. You put the cards into a drawer and you pick two out at random. You decide which of these two is more important. If you can’t decide between two things, then pick one at random. You note which one is the “winner” on a notepad, and put them back in the drawer. You repeat this experiment until each card has been scored a few times. Then, you rank sort them by the net number of times that they won. This is literally a tournament format. You focus on the ones that won the most times.
I’ve literally been faced 5-10 matches vs someone 500+ mmr over me. I assume you get this as well considering you have replays of you cheesing people 500mmr above you as well. Why do you talk out of your behind???