Smurfs: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly - Q&A

[Cheezecake-1895]

@Trias-2243

You didn’t answer the question. What was your method to confirm smurfs ?

We are much better at being able to tell when someone is in the appropriate league than you are. Marginal increases in things like micro are much more noticeable to us, and we can tell directly after the game whether someone was in the appropriate league or not.

@Trias-2243

What you did there with the highly factual “ I know 'cause I’m higher level ” completely non standardized biased method, wasn’t in fact evaluating the probability of playing a smurf, but the probability of a smurf playing another smurf.

No, this would be the probability of any randomly chosen game being between two smurfs.

You don’t even understand the difference and it would take me way too long to explain the simple basics to you.

** I am not telling you that you are wrong because I have some sort of agenda, I am telling you that you have a very biased and inaccurate estimate of the proportion of smurfs because its true**

@Trias-2243

As for having the sample randomized, it is as I don’t choose the opponents I am matched against.

Its not by definition a random sample means that any member of the population has an equal chance of being chosen. There are many many populations that you are not going to touch (for example the people in different leagues, players who play at different timezones)

@Trias-2243

Now if you want to submit a new and improved double blind randomized smurf trial on a population sized sample, you’re welcome to post it here. But currently, I am under the impression that your method is even less commendable than mine.

There is no good way to estimate afaik, the only thing i might be able to think of would be to grab the entire ladder statistics if blizzard has that data publicly available.

** This does not mean that we can just use biased methods and just go on pretending that they are good **

@Trias-2243

Actually to a player who is of a determined level, small differences in skill compared to his will be more keenly felt than to others. If your silver 3 is struggling to reach gold, and has never made it past silver 2, then playing a silver 1 or a gold 3 will be quite challenging for him.

Now if your player is a master 1, chances is are he won’t notice the difference between a silver 2 and a gold 3. More over if he cheeses and both fall rapidly due to inadequate micro/reactions.

This isn’t completely contradictory with what Cheezecake said though, as the more experienced a player will be the more he will know about skills acquisition through the levels of play. But he won’t feel as much difference when playing against two users of a level too inferior to his. Whereas the lower skill users won’t know about how the skill is acquired depending on the levels, but will feel more keenly when facing a stronger opponent.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but as someone who has coached hundreds of people I highly highly disagree, lower leagued players are ** very ** bad at trying to analyse their own games, so they cannot identify these “small” differences in skill at all.

@Trias-2243

The first part would apply best before they disabled MMR decay I think, so I’m a bit more convinced by the last reasons given if the starting point is bronze. Anyway, Thanks for having answered ; I am ever curious about the motivations behind it ; and with more and more smurfs disabling communication there aren’t that many opportunity to analyze those.

You are completely in denial here, if you don’t believe me then ask people who have not played in several seasons.

@Trias-2243

You are absolutely right. Though, they are first hand source regarding their motivations, and sometimes, I did get some answers. But as I’m gathering data about them, my case is special.

But for most players, most of the time, noting and ignoring them is the way to go. Getting trashtalked or flamming them serves no purpose. Not that it serves against any opponent, that being said. ^^

Mate, you literally tried to explain to me how probability works and you were completely wrong in your implementation of it. Do you understand how biased and out of touch that was? Consider, just for a second, that you could actually just be wrong and smurfing isn’t that big of a problem.