SC2 is dying. You cannot argue that fact. The game needs new players to continue and the smurfing that goes on in the lower divisions has killed of any excitement from the new blood. Since you can make account after account after account with no checks or balances, why would it stop?
Smurfs who take some disturbing joy out of a demolition of a newbie or any lower league player to boost a diminished confidence is why the game is sounding it’s death rattle. If it can’t be fixed, the game will be well and truly finished
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I feel you there. Though I’m slowly existing from the ladder area where there are the most smurfs, there are a surprisingly amount of them (≈20% according to my surveys). That’s a proportion high enough to deteriorate the ladder gaming experience for the players of the metal leagues. And I have already seen users from beginner level who have reported temporarily resolving to stop the game because of that.
I’ve created a quite documented thread on that theme, with a rather extensive description of the phenomenon, of its consequences, and of the fixes which would hinder smurfing the most while having minimal impact on regular users. If you feel it’s an important matter, leave some thoughts onto it : the more we define and discuss the issue, the better our chances to get heard by the blue ones. 
Not yet. As a matter of fact, there are more games being played now than at the start of the F2P. However, if the quality of play continues to get ruined by some, it might eventually finish in a situation just as bad as LoL’s one.
I feel you that smurfing is bad, and it feels bad to play against a smurf. I definitely wish people either just didn’t do it, or blizz would put more effort into stopping it.
However I don’t think it is killing the game. The decline in RTS as a whole is what is causing people to leave. Look around at other RTS games. None of them even come close to SC2 in population. This is because RTS just isn’t a popular genre. That coupled with the fact that it is a 10 year old game at this point. Honestly Its amazing this many people still play it.
I also don’t believe the smurfing issue is enough to keep people from advancing in leagues/skill. I see people getting promoted all the time, so I would say its a negligible issue in those regards. But even still, I agree it shouldn’t be an issue at all.
Best advice I can give is to fight through it. You will get where you want to be through practice and patience regardless of the crappy smurfs.
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yes i mean smurfing is kindof annoying but after a while of playing sc2 u get used to getting owned. when i was in platinum i got really sad when i get wrecked, now i dont really care.
In my experience, smurfing is far more common in masters. You also have to consider that players don’t want to smurf that far below their own skill level. It’s utterly pointless for a M1 player to go below D1, no matter what strategy they want to execute. You can make anything bar pure workers work there.
You’d be surprised.
Aimless players are aimless. Absurdity is a bottomless pit.
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The game is dying because its a bit old and people for the most dont like learning hard games.
Game design has shifted to provide reward for little effort and quickly.
Battle royals are an example of this.
Simple to learn, mostly group focused.
But I’m sure the game will never fully die. People still play broodwar.
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haahhahaha what is that graph.
how drunk would i have to be for that to happen?
This is the problem of all the multiplayer games and especially when they are F2P. I have no idea how could they fix it.
What was he doing? What were his build orders?
he left at the start of the game duh
0 second>leaves
Well if a diamond 1 can get to smurf in silver, why wouldn’t masters be able to smurf golds ? I’ve got a handful of others just as spectacular than that one, surveying Bronze 3 was a treat from that point of view. 
Anyway, that graph goes over several months. And there is a sorely disturbing fact that strongly hints this wasn’t done anything but willingly. More about it in this post, if you’re interested, in the fun-facts section.
I do not know what his build orders were, profile API’s only include basic game history (such as duration, game type and, result).
Though in fact… I found this one via his clan, so I could’ve have checked. But if my memory doesn’t wrong me, this one’s freeloses were beyond his recent history, so I only had his past leagues to tell. But when you’ve been master several time in one race and then drop down to silver gold with the same race, you can’t be anything but a smurf. 
But on the most recent, visible portion, he wasn’t freelosing. So the most probable scenario is that he freelost around 100-120 games in a row, and then climbed the ladder back by playing normally. Which leads to that kind of thing :
Exactly.
I was more interested in what he did when he won. Like is he trying to win every game with 1 action per minute?
Why would you censor his name in his match history but not in the match reviews lmao
Nah when he won he had 205+ APM, good workers production, and very little supply-capped time, which is in line from what I would expect from a master. Didn’t search further, I had a lot of profiles to inspect at that time, so couldn’t really spend 15’ on just one. 
Because I misclicked and uploaded the unfinished image instead of the one I intended to. Gonna edit that, thanks for reporting.