one action every 2 seconds? yeah i can get diamond ezpz
It’s a problem in D1 and master 3 as well.
I do play terran bio without spamming at P1-D3, and I can tell my 100-110 APM aren’t enough to macro correctly while playing the style actively (which you need vs P/Z). Now lesser APM might be enough if you proxy 5 rax every game, but 40 APM to play bio as it’s intended doesn’t sounds convincing to me. Nor have I ever seen a diamond or platinum bio player with 40 APM either.
So I am not convinced, but we’re free to think differently. 
Possibly. Due to the time consuming nature of the task and the apparent lack of support (though the topic is very viewed, and continues being so), I stopped my investigations with platinum, so I don’t know what’s the reality of it in the upper leagues. I’ve been told by some (such as Nordy), that there was a drop in frequency starting with D1, but those were only a player’s impressions. 
You’re probably like 30 workers down and you expect a player to attack into you. Man, anyone playing against you would be a smurf.
It’s such a huge problem in team games that I cannotplay RT anymore. In order to to retain masters MMR in teams I have to AT from my Btag list.
If no one is logged in on btag I can’t play teams.
What usually happens is a GM/High Master (for instance I played the real Bomber on Polka in 2v2 just this morning with an average of 430 apm) purposely keeps their 2v2 RT MMR low (they leave at start of game half the time).
Bomber had his 2v2 RT MMR at 3100 (plat 1/2). The system gave me a REAL PLAT ally.
I literally opened triple CC mech and made mass tanks and turrets and PF’s and told my my real plat ally to just go straight carriers.
Bomber was on 6 base parade rallying ravens, tanks and marauder and nukes at my three base turtle for about 20 minutes (with his ally warping in blink stalkers on 5 base).
Eventually my three base plat RT ally got the critical mass of only 2-1-0 carriers. I dumped my minerals on hellbats and barracks, lifted the 16 barracks and had them follow my tank/thor/hellbat ball while we base raced and won the game.
Now…do you really think I had fun facing a pro-gamer smurf? No.
Do I think I had fun employing a 3 base mech turtle all in strat with a 10% chance of victory? No.
When you watch the replay it’s awesome, it’s like I played 300 Sparta. But during the actual game itself it’s very stressful and horrible.
Smurfs are killing this game. I agree with the OP.
And if Bomber actually backed off and massed bc’s on his 6 base, we would have lost. He already had 4 starport raven. If I played him again I’m sure we would have gone bc’s. So I stopped queuing for the rest of the morning.
sad.
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Yeah. Apparently it gets worse in 3v3 and 4v4, because just leaving at the start doesn’t necessarily ensures defeat. So that gives users teamkilling their allies or just being AFK so the resources don’t get shared among the remaining team mates. 
Well, first, congratulations for your victory : your knew your opponent was a smurf, and adapted your gameplan accordingly ; managing to pull out a success where most people would’ve raged and given up. Hopefully, this game also is about tactics ; even more in 2v2 where coordination is of utmost importance.
I agree about your statement though : while you were among the rare ones that managed to learn something, most people don’t ; and it’s even more stressful than the regular ladder (which some smurfs can’t withstand in the first place) .
I’ve made a small thread (well, not so small right now. Don’t mind the length, I intend to make it easier to read in the future ) dedicated to this. I’m not sure we’ll ever get the devs hears on this, but the more we are, the greater our chances. Yet in the eventuality we’d be left on our own against this, I believe we can learn to deal with the issue ourselves.
It would be great if you could provide there some advice derived from your experience against teamgame smurfing. 
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Its pretty ridiculous honestly. Im 4100 mmr and played a guy yesterday who was Grand Master. Said he was just trying new builds on a different account.
Blizzard wont do anything about it because they like to see inflated numbers of registered accounts. Not that many people are still playing this game at lower levels.
I would love to know when I was playing them so that I could make a decision to play tryhard/standard meta against them. Honestly to get out of diamond 3 sometimes you have to just 3 rax every single game because none of these kids are playing safe. But against the smurfs you need to play a little smarter?
Check this, and CTRL+F “Recognize a smurf”. Sadly I can’t link you to the exact part (I should’ve reserved some posts at the start ). If enough people are interested I may give my tricks to guess smurfs at the loading screen.
The reverse is more efficient, cheesing smurfs while being used to play macro. Anyway, the key point is to make tactical bets rather than mechanical ones.
That’s was what some of them present as a motivation, testing new things, strats, etc. Likely only part of the truth. You don’t need to lower yourself two leagues below to test builds.
The bulk of the population is at intermediate levels. Smurfs only aggravate that by going from their leagues to those.
As for the devs not doing anything, that’s probably more related to them not seeing the phenomenon as dangerous.
Smurfing is NOT great for the game. You really can’t argue with it. It may not ruin it, but it sure as hell doesn’t improve it for anyone but the smurfs. I find it so pathetic when streamers do that bronze to gm garbage. I actually find all the sc2 streamers pathetic. Not the pros, just the full time streamers…most of them are…kind of gross, character wise.
thats a lie, masters smurf
smurfs are cancer, they ruin games
masters/ gms smurf too and they think they are better then everyone
There’s no way 30-50% of your games are smurfs at that rank. You lose 50% of your games on ladder, and obviously not all of your games are smurfs, and obviously you aren’t facing smurfs every 3 out of 5 losses.
I think you are exaggerating here, some people are just leveling up a alt and if they didn’t intentionally drop rank I don’t think we should blame them.
Smurfing below M1 level has a few good consequences, and a lot of bad ones. Truth be told, most of those advocating it was beneficial were in fact smurfs trying to view themselves in the mirror.
It is at least questionable to put players with masters mechanics demonstrate things in bronze. Heck, I’ve seen some do bronze to diamond series…
The randomness of the matchmaking can make it momentarily look that way. Evidence hints that the reality of smurfing at this level is closer to 20% than to 30.
As for leveling an alt (which is the very definition of a smurf account), there are people who do that repeatedly, and in a fashion about as toxic than regular freelosers. F2P has made this mode of smurfing more accessible than before.
Yeah but there are less masters than diamonds. So the higher the level, the less freelosing-smurfing at it will be accessible.
Anyway, he’s the second one who says there’s a drop in frequency starting in D1, Nordy being the first. Only way to ascertain that feeling would be to make a randomized study, just like I did for bronze-silver-gold. 
The smurfing at that level gets closer to what it originally was though, with people using smurfs to play anonymously (and failing most of the time, btw, high level players do check at the control groups and builds to see through barcodes) rather than lowering their MMR to get easy wins.
As for becoming pretentious upon reaching M1-GM, we’ve got an example in this forum (who spams his spit about anyone below his level in 50% of his messages). But if you see some streams you’ll see that this is not general. There are players way above this level who are pretty chill guys. 
I think there is a difference between bannable smurfing and smurfing. If you level up a alt I don’t think you can ban that, but if you intentionally drop rank and play on ur main than it should be punished.
I mean, are you gonna ban every single alt in the game? You can’t tell the people who are intentionally making a alt for fun and the people who just want a second account.
First, I’d like to highlight that smurfing isn’t liable to ban, and IMO shouldn’t be.
Second, there is nothing bad in having an alternate/smurf account in itself. It’s the use you’ll make from it that make it a bad or a good thing.
- Freelosers (with repeated/large amounts of freelose) evidently are bad for the matchmaking, as they maintain themselves deliberately under their level.
- Non freelosing smurfs could be divided into 4 categories :
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- The walk in the park adepts, who won’t freelose aside of the first placement games, and will then grind the ladder from the bottom to the top. There are users who do that repeatedly.
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- The look I’m bronze type, who will deliberately stop at each season before the exit of the provisional MMR state, and then switch to unranked. The aim being to end up defeating masters with a lower league border.
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- Those starting back after some years, who will then be placed normally but be then carried by mechanics coming back (instead of never acquired).
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- Those simply changing region or wishing to play anonymously, which will get at their real MMR in no time.
Obviously the two last types aren’t problematic, and aren’t doing anything reprehensible. I did never suggest to take measures against them ; but only against freelosers. They are still smurfs though, and so it’s only logical for me to take them in account when surveying their amounts.
You can’t always, but you’d be surprised of how often you can. 
Yeah I agree on Freelosers being the only problem, I’m even currently doing the 10 days of unranked for an alt because I want to create an anonymous account.
Although I feel like it would be hard if someone lies in between those options.
Wow, i didn’t realize you were M1/GM ! Well, you’re at the level where smurfing is indeed mostly done for anonymity purposes. Though attentive replays analysis could unmask that anonymity, specially for progamers. Saw Heromarine do that detective job on one of Lambo’s barcodes accounts, it was quite interesting. 
Well as we said, it depends on the intent. That being said, there are about 3 times more freelosing smurfs than non-freelosing ones in metal leagues. So even if a part of the later are doing it with an in-between intent, in proportion they’re not the core of the problem.
That’s why I started by describing the progamers/top of the ladder case at the beginning of my thread (I made one dedicated to smurfing). To highlight there are some legit uses to smurfing, and that a distinction should be made between the different types of smurfs.
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Take notes from a trash player really? No one on this forum not even baitz is worth learning from
That’s called a losing attitude! There’s always lessons to learn if you look for them.