Smurfing ruining games

Let me help you “THE GAME IS 12 YEARS OLD, ITS DEAD, GET OVER IT!”

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Here is another ogre of tanaris who had nothing to do but shoot yet another nonsense.

I’ll give you simple examples, which obviously you will not understand because the only thing your rusty mind can understand is that the game is not a good or a service (instead it is, it is simply a service for profit, which is free to play or buy to play, company earn money through this service):

example 1: today I buy a logitech mouse, a model 10y old, on amazon, they still sell. Do I have a guarantee from lgoitech? Yes (stracraft 2 case)

example 2: today I buy a logitech mouse on amazon, a model 10y old, and they do not produce, you cannot buy from the direct logitech store, but you find residual stock on third party sellers like amazon. Do I have a guarantee from logitech? Yup

Example 3: Microsoft has discontinued Forza Motorsport 7, no longer allowing the purchase from the official store, but it is still possible to buy the boxes from third-party sellers, activate them, and enjoy the game in every part (although without further dlc). Here, even here microsoft knows its obligations and has not closed the servers, nor stopped providing assistance to consumers (this is not the example of starcraft which, although it does not receive new content, is in full and regular marketing)

Your rusty brain thinks that by virtue of the fact that the game is not yet played as it once was, the company is, by law, exempted from its obligations (by virtue of which rule it does not known). Until it retires the sale and official support, the same duties (for the company) apply from day1.

Can your mind grasp this enormous simplicity or are you a 100% ogre?

I’ll do you a favor, I’ll also explain why your brain can’t grasp these simplicity. You like your counterparts are so used to a bond of subjection by these video game companies that you have never developed a rudimentary critical thinking as a consumer. Why did it happen?

  • because on the one hand they (blizz) give you what you want, like the parents who gave you the 5 dollars to buy ice cream, or permission to play video games an extra hour when you were a child, or the teachers permission to go to the bathroom,
  • because these companies assume the right not to listen to users, not to respect the duties of a fair and transparent service in any way. They simply do what they want, mandatory, with no confrontation with you (just like parents in a family with young childs or teachers at school)

Since you have been offered this, you have convinced yourself that you have no rights towards these companies, and probably also due to a lack of education, as well as an intellectual polish worthy of the worst ogre of tanaris, you have not developed any reflective consumer thinking.

Before responding with some other nonsense like criticizing my examples or worse, ask yourself these questions: do they legally have obligations? Is it true that these companies trade products / services (including sc2) in a market regulated by laws? Is Starcraft 2 still on sale / are servers deployed?

If all these questions (which you will not ask yourself because you are an incorrect troll and you want nothing more than to have some satisfaction with others, rather than reflect, activities that you are not used to doing) have a positive answer, you are on the wrong side.

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Did you just call me stupid and then agree with me? Ya got all 3 brain cells firing today, bud!

I’m glad you chose to use “law”, as that is what my education is in. You are 100%, objectively wrong. There is no legal responsibility for a game creator to support an old game, whether or not it is still being bought. That isn’t how law works, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Let me help you out here, 1. NO 2. YES 3. YES
Don’t talk about legal implications when you have zero understanding of the legal system. What are you like 18 and you just read your first micro economics book?

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Eh, they do have a little bit of a point with needing to support older games due to “implied warranties” but not all jurisdictions have an implied warranty.

That doesn’t mean they have to continue to submit balance patches or whatever though, that just means they have to keep the servers live to honor the implied warranty (which means the product sold has to be fit for it’s intended use; online and solo play).

I sincerely doubt that’s what they meant though because that argument requires some pre-cursor knowledge on contract law.

Basically, a broken clock is still right twice a day :rofl:

How do you know they are smurfs?

I’d say about 1 out of 10 games, I get accused of smurfing, but I’m appropriately placed for my MMR. I’m low diamond.

I think what you start to see around this area are people who are situationally very good.

They have one build that they are excellent at. They are really good at macro, they are really good at micro. Whatever. And if they are allowed to perform within their comfort zone they are really powerful… But when forced out of their comfort zone they really struggle.

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The only way to make sure an account is a smurf is to study its profile. If you can spot repeated freeloses, then you are 100% sure the player is bypassing the MMR system, whether it’s willingly or not.

Depending on the type of smurf, there are other minor usable criteria (such as an amount of career games way to low relative to the MMR, or a winrate considerably higher than the usual over a significant amount of games, etc.). More on the dedicated thread if you’re interested.

Now there are plenty of elements which can make you suspect your opponent is smurfing before delving into his profile, but as you highlighted, none of them do constitute an element of certainty. :mag_right:

Ur method is bad. I have a lot of free loses and im not smurfing. Sometimes i have 5-6 free loses in a row, because i dont like TvT and usually leave this match up in first few seconds. But i play every TvZ and TvP. And i know many terrans hates TvT as well. I play unranked usually but meet many ranked players in my games.

You may not be smurf by decision, but you are still a smurf in a way:you freeloose more or less 1/3 games, so you are really at significantly lower mmr then you should be in reality.
I sympathize with the cause, but the effect is what it is: you play against poeple who are weaker then they shoud be.

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Sometimes u r right, sometimes not. It depends how many terrans i meet. But its a problem of system: i cant choose what matchups i play on UNRANKED! Blizzard makes me “smurfing” this way. Anyway difference in mmr is not so huge. Even if i leave 5 games in a row, my mmr do not drop that much.

Maybe you are right, being a bit better is not such a problem, its not as frustrating.

A freelosing smurf is a player which deliberately lowers his MMR by quitting non lost games in order to be matched against players of a lesser level than his real one. Whether it’s only for a single match-up, two match-ups, or regardless of match-up doesn’t changes the fact that freelosing will lower your MMR anyway. -20 MMR is -20 MMR whether it was a TvT, a TvZ or a TvP, it’s a simple as that. Thus the final result is the same.

Thus, in practice, you are a smurf ; and the only differences between a classic smurf and you is

  • that you don’t seem to realize the impact on the MMR system (while those who leave 20 games in a row fully understand what they are doing) ;
  • and that the magnitude of the MMR mismatch is generally lesser for match-up smurfs (about one league tier or less in general, though depending on the onset of the hated race at their level). :mag_right:

In fact, a lot of regular freelosing smurfs start as match-up smurfs : they freelose one match-up, because they feel frustrated by it (often after cheesing it without success). Then, there are different responses to frustration : some will stop playing, some recriminate about balance on the forums ; and others will leave more match-ups (I even encountered one who freelost TvP and TvZ, and played only TvT). The step afterwards being to freelose regardless of the match-up.

Anyway, let me warn you : you won’t learn to deal with frustration by avoiding it. And by only playing lesser players and limited match-ups, your progress in skill will stale sooner than it should’ve. From there it’s a downwards slope.
Either you start learning to deal with that frustration and play normally again, either decadence and boredom will conclude your career sooner or later. :neutral_face:

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It’s not fun but just because someone has reached masters before doesn’t mean they’re really master league.

Starcraft 2 bugs out some seasons and placed bronze players and other players if I’m not mistaken like silver and gold all into the master league. This means lots of players have been in master league “highest achieved” but they’ve never REALLY been in master league it’s just because of a bug.

U dont understand my point of view. I know how to play (and win) every match up. My career ladder winrate - 55%. And my TvZ - 55%, TvP - 55% and TvT - 55%. So there is no difference at all. Every time i start to play ladder again - i gain mmr and ranks. There is no single season i have < 50% wr (exept very first season probably, not sure here). But i dont like TvT! And ladder makes me play all match ups. Thats fair, no problem. This season for example i have only 2 ladder games (both TvT, 1-1 score). Nowdays i dont play too often. Sometimes its 1 day a week, sometimes few days a week, sometimes 1 day in 2 or even 3 weeks…
So in this sc2 day i want to enjoy the game (and play only match ups i like). Thats why i play unranked games, where i can leave even 5-6 TvT in a row and do not care about mmr or record. But i always play near my ladder mmr (3700-3800). Since i have many unranked games played, my mmr do not change that much even after win/lose streaks. Sometimes i can meet somebody with 3300-3400 mmr, sometimes - 4000 mmr. But most of my games against 3500-3800 mmr. Since i do not practice too much these days, i guess my “real mmr” is lower then ladder mmr. But i dont need progress in mmr right now! I know sc2 want practice a lot for mechanical skills, timings, reaction, feeling of the game. I dont want to invest my time into sc2 right now.
So i think its far from smurfing. I have ~ 3500 games at account. When i meet players with 10-15-20k+ games at my mmr, i feel they r smurfing much more, cuz years of practice gives a lot of experience and knowledge.
Anyway even this way i dont meet real smurfs really often. Usually its a random zerg with 250-300 apm, who did EVERYTHING better then average zerg-player at this mmr. Lose to such player is not a big problem at all. And its a great feeling when u bet them.

In that case I may have presumed a bit much regarding the motivations of your freeloses. While this still isn’t completely ruled out, the “unfun / not having fun” reason was indeed a secondary motivation frequently alleged (≈ 30%) by the smurfs that accepted to tell me about those.

About your 55% winrate in all match-ups, they either imply that you played too infrequently in ranked (opposed to unranked), or that there was some kind of mismatch in your ranked MMR, since the system would increase the level of your opponents along with yours. Which means that if you played regularly and consistently enough in ranked there is no way you could maintain a uniform 55% winrate at 4,0K without getting to the upper league (meaning you’d end up at a MMR where your winrate would be 50%, possibly 4.3-4.4K).

Large global careers aren’t reliably related to smurfing as individual speed limits are greatly variable, so only extremely small careers could consistently mean something.
APM can be a hint, but is absolutely not reliable enough to confirm them as it could be affected by behaviors unrelated to performance (nothing prevents a gold player from spamming APM, and doing so won’t improve his performance in the least).

If I may, I think fact you don’t fully understand what is a smurf. So by that, it’s not surprising you don’t know how to reliably confirm/spot them. Coming from there it’s only logical you didn’t realize that by freelosing an entire match-up in unranked, you became one. :thinking:

If u want to think so - no problem. I guess for me and most of player’s base “smurfing” is not a problem at all. Not “smurfs” keep us far from ranks/mmr we want. There are so many things to improve in our game, so rare “smurf” affect our progress just for a little.

Not everybody that plays unranked is a smurf there are quite a few on ladder though and hackers in general. I mainly play unranked just to get my skill to the point where when i play ranked again I will easily get to the next league with no fear of smurf or otherwise.

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Ranked and unranked players are in the same player pool, so playing one or the other and being a smurf or not are not really correlated.

There are still some types of smurfing that you’d encounter only as unranked though, hence the bad reputation of that mode. :thinking:

If its the same ladder how do they face different opponents ?

What would u do if u were in charge to solve this problem?

They don’t.

The only things that are separated are the MMRs (those for each ranked race, and a global one for unranked). And so if the unranked MMR gets significantly different from the ranked one, you get matched with significantly different players. But, if your unranked and ranked MMR were the same than you’d be playing the very same opponents.