I started the surveys as purely observational ones, by just reporting those I faced as a player. And so it started at EU’s P1-D3 MMR, and I choose to keep on that region for my randomized studies, for them to be as comparable as possible between them.
So all this data is EU. As the question didn’t seem to get people enthused, NA is missing (though as zone changing is an easy way to get an alt, I expect it not to be that different, personally) ; and I didn’t survey diamond and masters leagues either.
Thanks for your appreciation, Dallarian.
That’s quite the tough question, PeekaChi ! A lot of smurfs do conceal their original league.
However, if by smurfs we refer at players playing under their true level, there are some who do that on their main account, or who do ladder climbs from bronze to their original level.
So, for those if we take the example of the bronze league :
BRONZE SMURFS
24 smurfs over 105 players = 28.6% of smurfs
Among those smurfs :
12,5% of silver players.
20,9% of gold players.
4,2% of platinum players.
33,3% of diamond players.
4,2% of masters.
25% can’t tell.
So there are smurfs from nearly all leagues, but this suggests a majority of those smurfing in bronze are diamond players. That’s interesting because that’s also the feeling that I had around P1/D3 MMR. It could be informative to take a look at the other leagues surveys though, because I recall there were a lot of golds smurfing in silver.
I don’t understand the point of smurfing in this game… the whole reason it’s fun is pushing boundaries, and trying to increase your skill. It’s not like League of Legends, where playing amongst weaker players is at least fun.
If someone plays rankeds only in current season and has 75 wins, no loses (100% win-ratio), on a way Bronze 2—> Platinum 2, is that smurf?
I guess it falls into:
Being « good » is something very relative in this game, as there is always someone better or worse than you. Which is why most players reaching an acceptable skill in most of the game’s domains prefer to say they’re « decent » rather than good.
I think it’s partly because of that because there are so many smurfs from diamond, because they don’t feel that good (due to the matchmaking eventually placing them at a MMR where they have 50% defeats), while they start wondering if they have reached their skill ceiling. And from there, instead of trying to overcome a glass ceiling they’re unsure/unwilling to invest themselves into, some of they turn towards smurfing instead.
It’s also a league where they can more easily get convinced that their limits are related to balance. Which gives people freelosing only specific match-ups.
I think those two events can happen similarly often in diamond and masters, but as there are much more diamonds than masters, in the end this implies more diamond smurfs.
I think that’s indeed why most of us do play SC2, as it’s one of the most difficult/competitive games of the e-sports scene, and so it wouldn’t make sense to try oneself at it if disliking challenge.
But the amount of challenge a player is ready to accept varies wildly among individuals. And so if they reach a point where they are convinced the challenge is unfair (due to balance… but also to higher leagues smurfs, or even to the matchmaking range), some players choose to forsake challenge and seek fun only.
Some also need victories in order to feel good, or can’t stand defeat anymore (which is a form of increase in ladder anxiety) and so they freelose in order to avoid defeats as much as possible.
I’ve found quantities of reasons behind that behavior ; most of them being rather bad. I’ve noted them all somewhere, in case if the devs would wish to understand the motivations better.
It’s either a walk in the park type described above (the ones who can’t stand defeat), or someone doing Bronze to Masters tutorials. The latter are extremely rare (about 1% of smurfs at most), so chances are that you found a bad one.
Nevertheless, your target indeed fulfills the criteria for a non freelosing smurf. You’ve successfully hunted your first smurf, Dallarian ! ^^
So I took a closer look at your smurf. Quite an interesting specimen indeed. Here’s a sample of some of his accounts :
On top is the one you’ve met, with a zerg account. He meets two criteria for non freelosing smurfs, with :
More than 70,0% winrate with ≥ 20 games played
and career games < 80 for platinum MMR reached
You’ll note that he started at an extremely low MMR (1728 which is bronze 2), so he must’ve freelost some games, but those aren’t registered into his league winrate. He also has 245 games career. So my guess is that he freelost some games, in this season and possibly the previous one, and then left league in order for those not to be registered.
The second one is his terran account. Way less spectacular than his zerg one, with only 53% winrate upon reaching platinum MMR. Though there might be some freeloses among those, I can’t be sure. There probably were when he went from mid gold to mid silver MMR.
Last is one of the oldest account. As you’ll have noticed, the historic starts in gold with about 60% winrate. This suggest even this account isn’t his main one. He still has a positive W/L difference upon reaching diamond 3, which suggest his true level might be one tier or two above this one.
It’s worthy to mention that those 3 accounts are fully independent from each other, so one isn’t the offrace of the other. However, they have the exact same capitalization for the pseudo, and do share the same portrait for two of them, the last one being a typical smurf’s default avatar.
From his forum activity, we could gather a considerable amount of whine threads regarding terrans and protoss races, which I won’t quote for him not to be recognizable, but among those we have things like Zerg is unenjoyable ; when will zerg have cool and viable units ; had enough as a Zerg in ZvT ; Z can’t keep up with protoss economy, on and on…
If we sum-up :
Multiple smurfs accounts, some > 2016.
Zerg main.
Probably around D2.
Seems to look his race at weak balance-wise, and seems not to have fun at his real level.
So what we could think is that for this individual, having fun = having victories, and that starting around 2016 he charged his decreasing fun/victories over a balance perceived as unfavorable. The fact he has two zerg smurf accounts, and that one of those is much older than the two others accounts IMO indicates that he smurfed in order to find back his winrate (= fun to him) rather than to seek new challenges.
To summarize : a perceived imbalance and a notion of fun associated more with victories than challenge. Interesting case.
I got a few of those points myself (also checked similar accounts), but your wider explanations are simply great.
How do you track and distinguish accounts from other players? For example there are 165 data entrys for GhostDragon, but that includes many servers, races and gamemodes. The phrase could appear in mind of few players (SC is pretty popular after all ^^) so there could be a few different people with exacly same nick.
Also I see you have not tracked his original nick. He changed it around time when he became a barcode, however there are ways of recovering it (I am proud to succeed before you ). There are 120 data entries for this and similar nicks, but as I said, it could be multiple players.
Is there a way of filtering such results? One of them is M3 since June 2020 (rankeds played since April 2020 on lvl of D3), with a result of 15/7, but well, it could be a different person, or he uses many nicks.
I mean, I don’t suspect people to be desperate enough to create 30-50 same nick accounts (and unique emails for each!) and play them on different servers with different races to generate 150 data points, but I still know little on smurfers. Such thought genuinly can’t appear in my mind.
Well you can’t, that’s the whole point of smurfing.
Jokes aside, there are small clues that might help. In that case it was the distinct capitalization of his name. Aside than that, general smurfing indications (low amount of career games, default avatars, MMR big fluctuations, winrates etc. etc.).
It would be hard to tell. There are minor clues that might be exploitable :
Common friend-list (which can be guessed by looking at his 2v2 or 3v3 fixed teams)
Common builds.
Common control groups.
Same APM range.
Some of those require to have met him ingame, which is quite limitating ; but can be quite efficient nonetheless. Heromarine recently identified on stream one of Lambo’s smurf with the builds and control groups. It was quite the interesting investigation work.
For the sake of demonstration, he mentioned having played zerg since around 2010, so you can eliminate all the accounts < 2016 as not being the main ones. As for knowing his previous nick, that’s an advantage you indeed have ; but it’s more reliable to have the profile sheet (with the numbers), as the battletag can be changed.
It’s highly improbable he has that many accounts. But 3, 5, 10 ? Not impossible. He has several smurfs aside of his main one, that’s the only thing we know for sure.
Well, I didn’t release it yet, but stress and anxiety are among the main reasons the smurfs mention upon being questioned about their motivations. Some see it as a solution for their problems, though it’s in fact more akin to dodging the issue, and shifting it to others.
So it’s indeed indirectly related to the topic.
To answer that, the main question is what exactly do you refer by ladder anxiety :
Does it happens when your points/ranking are at stake (in which case it happens only before ranked games) ?
Or does it happens during the game, with signs of agitation (shaking, misclicking, sweating, having accelerated heartbeat and so on) ?
The first one, which is real ladder anxiety, boils down to caring too much about one’s 1v1 rating. The second, is a reaction to stress issue, about about reacting to fast stimuli, keeping a cool and clear head. Those are different issues.
About the first one, I guess everyone’s different, but for my part I think that it lessened :
By stopping playing to win all the time, but having sessions where you play to improve. Having clear, defined and reachable objectives are a help for this. For example you could start working 2 bases allins, with an SCV objective at 6’00, and
an army value benchmark at 8’45. You practice it in unranked, and with time you will start focusing on those objectives (and some more opened by those), and less about the rest. And then you put that to the test in ranked, by alternating both.
By caring less about your immediate ranking. If you are playing to improve during the week, eventually your performances will improve, and so any ranking lost will be found back.
By modifying your reactions after a loss. I was once struck by Polt’s reactions after defeat, he just said "GG ! " cheerfully, and then immediately went into replay, searching for mistakes to pinpoint “here. If I hadn’t been supply blocked there, I would’ve been able to defend this”. I didn’t always agree with him, but with time undestanding why you lost ends up taking priority about mourning over your lost. And so anxiety (and rage) do fade simultaneously, little by little.
By playing regularly both ranked and unranked. Experience is also a way to care less about defeats, and more about the reasons of defeat.
If it’s the second form, which isn’t just ladder anxiety, but stress reactions in general, I can’t give you advices directly as I did not experience that.
You’ll find a guide here that looks like a conglomerate of players advices and forums exchanges. It’s worth to read, interesting to consider the solutions, but I would advice using caution about some of those (the one mentioning to drink beer in particular), as reducing anxiety shouldn’t come at any price, and getting used to alcohol to solve it is a particularly bad trade-off. But, the read can help to understand where exactly your situation is, and some of the proposals may be valid. So it’s still an interesting read.
Anyone who tries to justify smurfing is honestly a piece of garbage. These people are only playing the game to make other people feel bad about losing. The person smurfing is on another level compared to the opponents they are matched up against and would never lose in a 100 games. This circumvents the way the ladder is supposed to work and does nothing but piss people off and drive them away from the game.
Mark my words if people haven’t quit starcraft yet it wont be long before they do. There wont be any games at lower levels, I’ve already noticed wait times triple in the last couple of weeks, with larger gaps in MMR between opponents. I cant even believe that there are people in this community so pathetic that theyre killing the game simply because they can’t compete at the level theyre supposed to.
So I will make a new account every week and smurf the sh*t out of gold league until something is done about it.
I cant hear you down there from way higher, so there are smurfs ya say?
im playing a mobile game and I spent hundreds on it ( I didnt want to knowing it will be like some casino except you always be in loss), the game is about attacking weaker… I hate that but that’s what every one who plays this does, it is like playing master vs silver except you simply dont have as much as them, it’s like playing with few pawns vs someone who has all figures in chess simply because over time you can buy those figures…
What do you think about such game? And what does Blizz think about making such game?
There are good and bad sides to most phenomenons, smurfing just happens to have a lot more of bad ones. To the extent that most people trying to justify smurfing are in fact smurfs themselves. Don’t forget that about one user over five is a smurf after all.
I’ve always wondered if they didn’t feel somewhat bad about it. I think the truth is that what they say to others, is what they might be repeating in order to convince themselves in fact.
It’s clearly a bother to low and intermediate levels. It can create irritation, rage, and indeed in some cases discouragement. And at higher level, hatred erroneously directed towards balance or unranked. I’ve witnessed all of those.
An interesting fact about it is that a minority of smurfs will revel and enjoy in triggering those emotions in their opponents, by making various unpleasant comment during and after the game. That, however, isn’t the case of the majority, most of them just being players having lost the will or courage to face the regular ladder’s challenge.
Hence the very title of this thread.
Erh… not sure to follow your reasoning here !
You have to realize that the ones you’re gonna punish by smurfing here, are only the regular players. That’s a curious mindset to try to denounce an affliction by joining it.
That wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen that reaction though, there has been about 3 players in this forum deciding to smurf because of smurfing. Some of them did it by discouragement, others to try to punish the devs for their inaction. I’ll repeat you what I said to them : the only ones you would be punishing by that are your brethren.
Jokes aside, I’ve been listened a handful of times by the devs on balance questions. I’ve been trying to about smurfing since a few occasions, but hadn’t finished surveying the metal leagues at that point. Maybe I’ll be able to get to them in the next feedback, but we have to prepare for the eventuality of them not wishing to do anything.
We’ll agree that in that case it would eventually ruin the game ; but hey, its not like they weren’t warned. However, we players also have a couple of things we can do on our side against it. So this thread is really aimed both to the blue ones and us regular players.
I think that’s not exactly comparable to smurfing. A smurf cheats the matchmaking, not the game itself. The race, the tools he is using is the same than the other players. It’s just like playing against a more experienced chess player, only against one that would pretend not to be. Smurfs are liars, not cheaters.
However, toxicity tends to add to itself, and I think there is a higher proportion of hackers and botters among smurfs than among regular players. And so if smurfing by itself doesn’t makes one a cheater (matchmaking put aside), most hackers I’ve confirmed were also smurfs simultaneously. And some use botting as primary smurfing mechanic.
So it’s possible fighting smurfing might also help against other forms of toxicity.
It might look counter-intuitive but smurfing is also partially to blame for the whine in this forum. Remember the meme “i have to play 10 times better”?
Yes, all sane persons only scowl and laugh with this meme, but what if there is a grain of truth in that?
In a classiacal case of smurfing a bronze/silver is obliterated by a Diamond, it is indeed true that the Bronze has to play 10 times better in order to compete with 50% winrate in Diamond.
SC2 is a fog of war game. Which means that most of the time you don’t see what the opponent is doing, and so unless there’s a spectacular micro gap from the start (which is rarely the case, good micro being acquired very late in most cases), you don’t realize if you’re being mechanically outplayed until you see the result.
Putting the blame of the defeat onto external factors is also a classic. Doing it blindly is most of the time faulty, but it’s a psychological protection mechanism, and so it’s not surprising it to be often involved considering the fog of war nature of the game.
From there :
Balance is the most obvious, visible target of such accusations. If you didn’t see the opponent macroing better than you, and didn’t realize you had less, it’s indeed easy to think your units are underpowered (instead of just in insufficient numbers/upgrades/badly engaged/badly microed etc.).
Smurfs have by essence better mechanics than the players they are matched with. And so the above situation is indeed more likely to happen. Even more considering a play that would’ve been good enough for the level would lead to defeat against them. And if there are 20% smurfs encountered, this is not a rare occurrence.
So yeah, it’s possible some users mistakenly blame the balance whereas they were just ouplayed, and the probability of this happening is increased by smurfing.
It has also happened for some modes (Unranked in particular), as some players failed to recognize if they were matched with smurfs or not, and so started to believe the entire more was a way to cheat ranked matchmaking.
Notwithstanding this, and that’s part of the thread’s vocation (part II and VI, more specifically), it’s also important to know when you didn’t meet a smurf. So you can avoid wrongly putting the blame on smurfing, and start looking for your own mistakes. That’s why :
Writing GG.
And learning to confirm smurfs
have their importance, IMO. Hence this topic.
Might’ve to tailor a bit part VI to highlight that more.
Trias I would like to thank you for all the efforts you put in this. Your work is great for the community, especially on this forum which is made of whining freaks. I lost hope and stopped to read the forum months ago, but it’s reliefing to find some good content from nice people once in a while.
Regarding the smurph argument: in my experience (Plat 3) at least 1/5 of my games are against smurphs, maybe 1/4 if I include the uncertain ones. Honestly I don’t care too much about them, it’s like playing in very hard mode, but they remain good training sessions. However sometimes the skill gap is so huge (I would say people from high diamond or maybe even master) that the match is so one-sided I can feel it during the game aleeady, and I wouldn’t consider those matches as training anymore. It’s strange because I imagine me beating a silver league hero and it would be boring and a waste of time, no challenge at all.
It seems to me the smurphing grew up after the Blizzard announcement of stopping support to SC2, I hope this is just my impression. As I said, I don’t care too much about it but things would be different if smurphs should become the majority of my opponents.
Keep going the good work dude, it’s amazing.
According to my EU stats, there were between 20 and 24% smurfs at the MMR area you’re playing in. So between one over five and one over four players indeed, your impressions are spot on, Quaggot.
You’re taking this in the best possible way : dealing with it, and trying to learn in the attempt. Yet, for the training to apply, the army sizes and timings must be somewhat comparable, otherwise you get stomped whatever strategical choice you did.
And so the most common reactions after such an unequal confrontations are :
Rage (which is why ≥50% of the smurfs have comments disable aside of their friendlist).
Despair, which can convert itself into
Balance whine ^^… which can later turn into smurfing
A stop of the game (or its 1v1 ladder), temporary or not
A refusal to continue playing at the same level, bringing some users to deliberately lower their MMR to play at a lesser one. In other words, to smurf themselves
Take a look at that :
So in a way, smurfing either frustrates regular users (even very poised ones, such as you), or induces more smurfing. If that goes on, the regular players base will thin and the smurfs proportion will increase simultaneously. In other words, little by little, they’re going to kill the game. Which is what I’m trying for quite some time to warn the devs, as countermeasures could be implemented rather easily.
As for the gap in skill being too high to learn, I’m currently around P1-D3, and look who I found at my door two weeks ago :
The most remarkable fact being that they’re unaware a lot of their profiles, choices an attitudes are common between smurfs. And so I’ve built for myself a small algorithm to recognize them before even checking their profiles , and he checked a lot of items. So I knew he was a smurf in the game’s first seconds, and took my chances. I didn’t beat that one of course (best I’ve beaten are masters), but in that very case, since I knew he was a smurf, I realized I made small mistakes who might’ve been game changing against a player of this level.
As it’s good to read from people who value that, and kind enough to highlight, it Quaggot. Balance related debates, being the most passionate, are the ones who get the most attention. So it’s not easy for a thread, however well constructed, to get recognition. Thanks for your words and appreciation, both help.
Has someone repeated the statistical analysis done lately? From a few random sessions (D3 EU) it appears well over 50%, on a bad day/time more like 90% of the 1v1 player base are some kind of freelooser/smurf.
I suppose I have mostly myself to blame for not having taken the time to start the game earlier (formed a family during the start and peak of SC2), and for not being clever enough to find the correct mistakes to learn from among the responses to troll builds and even just crisp timings and strong micro, but it would strongly improve my motivation if my wins were not only freelosses and the occasional failed troll attempts.
In regular human endeavour, an opportunist fraction of 5-10% is to be expected, so already the 20% seen by @Trias is high.
Hello! No issue here but Definatly some Great Advice for the Development Team.
You guys should add a little area on the left or right side of the current 24 unit page on the bottom center (when you have units selected) That allows you to click a square of what looks like just 1 unit but in reality selects ALL UNITS of that Type Example, A Marine square will select all Marines!
This next part is also a good idea
Select All Military Units ON SCREEN Button. This way you don’t pull unit’s off screen that are supposed to stay where they are
And Finally, there should be a hotkey that removes 1 unit from the front of the line off the list. this will help with quicker discernment of units. If you don’t understand. Check my replays and when I play Zerg, How I Split the Overloards by clicking the bottom middle and removing 1 overloard from the group (wile holding shift of course) and then sending all units to new location. Or splitting marines much more efficently agains Banelings
IRL takes priority of course, so if by succeeding at life, you got a bit less in shape at an e-sports game, this is no big deal. Now, of course we are the main responsible for our mistakes, and so learning from them is a way to keep going up, however slow the process might be.
It can be frustrating though not to be rewarded from a good tactical choice just because you were matched against an opponent whose mechanics are several league tiers ahead from you. Or irritating to have the same clown freelose you twice in a row just because he’s trying to play mechanically inferior players. Or to get trolled too often.
Yet, here we are. This game is based upon challenge, and due to smurfs it gets more challenging for low to intermediate level players. That’s how it is, the sooner one accepts it the better.
Well the figures are what the figures are. Specially those collected via the API (which are free from my habits’ influence) . The issue there, is that having one player over five smurf is a thing, but in some leagues, this ratio rose even more (one over three in gold, and it was even worse in bronze 3). It gave an idea of how cancerous it could be to have to climb the ladder up at those levels.
AFAIK, not only it hasn’t been repeated, but it also had never been done before. Which isn’t surprising, because why it was a quite interesting statistic exercise applied to gaming, it was extremely time consuming the way i performed it (manually collecting and checking all data). As for why I didn’t screen the ladder once again, it’s because it was done with two objectives :
Provide players with some objective data over the subjective idea they had.
Provide the devs with accurate data so that they could realize what was happening, and take action if they had the will and/or means to do so.
And so it happens that while the devs listened to my views quite a lot of times regarding balance (including some ideas I was the original author of)… they never did so regarding smurfing countermeasures. And that while they had been provided with simple to implement, low cost, and efficient ways to deal with it.
So my conclusion was that either
they had a philosophy to let the users deal with the toxicity that was within the boundaries of the current code of conduct (and smurfing is) ;
or that they didn’t have the means to act anymore (and some time after, the devs teams was disbanded and the game was placed into legacy mode).
TL;DR — In other words this survey was time consuming, and I got solid hints there was no will/means from the devs to adress the smurfing issue. Thus why I didn’t update it after having reviewed all the metal leagues. However, this thread still provides a lot of info about the phenomenon and how to deal with it as a player, so I feel it still has its uses.
). There are 120 data entries for this and similar nicks, but as I said, it could be multiple players.
),
