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

I agree. +1 OP

Why more characters needed, blizz? Give it a rest!

=>

Let me say it one more time then : your demonstration is trash.

You can put trash in bold type if you like the aesthetics.

So basically you’re saying it’s not possible to estimate the number of smurfs, but then you use your own anecdotal estimates (which are baseless if I refer to what you just said) as a base to evaluate others. That doesn’t sound very logic put that way, does it ?

Prove it.

But you did.

Completely neglecting the fact that you and your friends were actually smurfing, by the way. But there are no smurfs, right ?

Anyway, if you want to play with words, I did not give an estimate of the numbers of smurfs, but of the proportions of smurfs I encountered over regular players at my MMR. I will rephrase that in the first post, for the sake of discussion.

And we thank you for your constructive criticism. Your help has been truly invaluable so far.

Your useful suggestions put aside, I may propose something to concerned players if they appear to follow this with some interest, and agree to follow a replicable protocol.

2 Likes

Thanks Aeligos. I knew players actually having to deal with the issue would feel differently about this. :wink:

I don’t think what I said actually contradicted that. I even gave a link towards a player highlighting precisely that getting mostly if not only victories was the aim behind it.

Now there is a subtlety here, that being that aside of Bronze to Masters runs, most smurfs don’t want to get back to their level. They already have their original account for this. So they will freelose, either regularly or by streaks, in order to keep winning the games they do actually play.

Absolutely. If you’re a master, you have a master execution, and so you will win because your execution, and not because of the strategy used. There would have been a precedent with Crank winning against a platinum player… with a mass probes : 12 nexuses, producing only probes, and going for the kill only with said probes. Sort of a Mengsk co-op applied to 1v1. :sweat_smile:

So yeah, aside of actually doing builds tutorials (as there are some builds which would not apply to all levels), the actual educative value of trashing noobs during Bronze to Masters series could be seen as rather low. :zipper_mouth_face:

1 Like

Lol, you are never going to get people to take you seriously like this. Enjoy whining =).

Oh but some will, because my demonstrations aren’t limited to “because it’s true” or “because I’m better”. As soon as I ask you to prove something you either dodge or hide behind some authoritative arguments. Claims of knowledge cannot fill empty demonstrations.

You weren’t there to be constructive in the first place, so we’ll do without your highly valuable suggestions.

1 Like

Okay, so as some mentioned the proportion of smurfs quoted in the first post as difficult to interpret, I figured I would give more details about those in the future. So here are the stats about the smurfs I encountered over the two last weeks :

SMURFS REPORT - W18 & 19 2020

How to read :

  • Confirmed smurfs are users who had multiple freeloses (2 or more) in their recent games history.
  • Unconfirmed smurfs are users that seemed very suspicious to me (significantly higher leagues in the past, abnormally low total career games (for example making it to P1-D3 in 20 games), unusually high APM with matching skill) but who hadn’t multiple freeloses in their recent history. Hence, can’t say for sure if they are smurfs or not.
  • MU smurfs : % of confirmed smurfs who freelosed only one match-up in their recent games history.
  • Smurfs ratio : proportion of confirmed smurfs over total players (regular players + unconfirmed). This is a low estimate of the ratio of smurfs played at my MMR. This method probably underestimates the ratio of smurfs, as freeloses streaks made prior to recent games history, or non freelosing smurfs won’t be taken in account.
  • +Unconfirmed : proportion of smurfs, confirmed + unconfirmed, over total players. This method probably overestimates the ratio of smurfs.

Users played twice in one day were only counted once.

TL;DR :
Over 90 users played :

  • 15,56% of confirmed smurfs.
  • 12.22 of suspicious users.
  • 84,44% to 72.22% of regular players. :slight_smile:

For trivia, special mention to one user who was simultaneously a confirmed smurf, a first seconds trashtalker AND a probable map-hacker. A 3 in 1 formula so to speak. :sweat_smile:

Last two weeks’ stats about the proportion of smurfs encountered at my MMR :

SMURFS REPORT - W20 & 21-2020

How to read : cf. above post.

TL;DR :
Over 80 users played :

  • 17.50% of confirmed smurfs.
  • 18,75% of suspicious users.
  • 82.50% to 66.75% of regular players. :slight_smile:

About those « suspicious users », those are the players which had profile inconsistencies strongly suggesting this was not their main account, but for whom I couldn’t find freeloses in their recent history. The problem here is that in some cases, it was obvious they were indeed smurfs :
— one user playing at D3 MMR with only 25 total career games on his account
— two of them had no loses at all in their 1v1 history
— one just confessed, etc.
but I still couldn’t find back the freeloses in their history. So couldn’t consider them as confirmed freelosers, even though they were smurfs…

I decided not to stray away from my initial protocol, but this highlights that the freeloses searching method provides an estimate which is in fact lower than the real proportion of users smurfing (which is consistent with first post, as we saw freelosers are only a part of smurfs).

One could suggest to change the protocol to include those, but then at one hand it may not allow to merge the future data with the previous, and that would require to define other objective criteria.

So for the moment, I’ll include the averaging between suspicious users and confirmed freelosers, which we could call Averaged Smurfs. But I’m not satisfied with this, coming up with objective criteria for smurfs without recent freeloses would be a better option in the future.

So we’ve got :

  • Confirmed smurfs : 17.50% (low estimate).
  • Averaged Smurfs ≈ 26.87% (average estimate).
1 Like

Nice, I feel like it agrees with my experience on the ladder

1 Like

Thanks Firestorm.

Well searching evidence about it, gathering it into stats, and then confronting it to the feelings one may have is an interesting exercise. As you can see, I felt like there were 1 smurf for 4 regular users (once you’ve played a few in a row, you tend to see them everywhere ^^), but those I could confim were closer to 1 over 6. Which estimate seemed closer to your experience ?

The other thing is that the amount of smurfs (specially freelosing ones) must vary with the MMR. I think the problem must be more acute in silver-gold than in diamond-master, platinum probably being somewhere between those. :thinking:

hahahahaha now smurfs are good, they are destroying the game since many time ago. Now please explain why natural disasters are good or not eat for a month is good and so on

It’s about the same than natural disasters as you said : isolated ones, as destructive as they can be, will create brief damage, and the locals will most of the time deal with it.
Too frequent ones however would be a whole other story, as local life will be incited to move on to others, more favorable areas. If you get flooded once in 50 years, you won’t react the same than if it happens once a month.

It’s the same for smurfs. As long as they were only Bronze to Masters tutorial makers, they were so infrequent than some leagues never even realized they were there. Now, at 16-20%, they are beginning to be a cancer that significantly deteriorate the experience of play of intermediate levels, but also of beginners. And I’m not convinced that demonstrating toxicity to beginners will be good for the community on the long term.

Yet, since you’re talking about natural disasters, people do use lightning rods and lightning arrester systems to prevent their electronics being damaged by it. Addressing the repeated freelosing issue would be easier than that, and just as effective. :bulb:

1 Like

Soemthing between i think:)
Usually i feel like for 15 games i encounter smurfs 1-3 times.Also some guys im not sure if they are smurfs…The ones 100% are the one throwing ing ames at start, and you can see fromt heir history streak of wins, then throwing in games at start.
But the unranked ones im not sure. Some are really much better then me, and got a alot fo games despite unranked but i dont know really…

It’s indeed obvious when they just freelose in your face. Yet for the others, checking their game history and profile could provide you with answers significantly often.

That’s also the impression I’m under as well. If I included the ones I sure are smurfs but for whom I didn’t spot the freeloses at the time I played them, I think we’d reach 20%.

I’m going to define some objective criteria for those in the future. :thinking:

1 Like

SMURFS REPORT - W22 & 23-2020

How to read : cf. above post

Quickie :
Over 67 users played :

  • 22,39% of confirmed smurfs
    (19,40% of freelosing smurfs + 2.99% of non freelosing smurfs).
  • 77,61% to 59,7% of regular players. :slight_smile:

I ended up defining criteria for non freelosing smurfs, as even if quite in minority, there are some of them which were definitely not regular players :

  1. Total career games too low for MMR ( < 50 for platinum, < 100 for diamond)

  2. ≥ 2 leagues ≥ 2 times with the same race.

  3. ≤ 2 leagues of his opponent outside of provisional MMR.

  4. ≥ 75% global 1v1 winrate with ≥ 20 games played.

I have also revised my criteria for freelosing smurfs, as in the future, I will only take in account those with ≥ 3 freeloses in recent history (rather than ≥ 2 previously), to better differentiate smurfs from raging players.


And now, for the fun facts :

  • A lot of smurfs go for the default avatar, but when they don’t, they interestingly often go for female avatars, and choose female names as battletags (such as Monika, or Marion for example). You’re being matchmaked with a player with Thatcher’s avatar and “Cindy” as battletag ? You can already guess you’re being trolled. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

.

  • I’ve become quite efficient at spotting them, so efficient that I could with a reasonable accuracy sometimes guess that my opponent is a smurf right since the loading screen. And so, as I mentioned in the first post, go for extra risky strategies in order to defeat them. And… well it worked more often than I would have guessed :
    Smurf GG — Postimages
    Smurf G — Postimages

The last one in particular made my day : he had such a particularly stupid battletag that I remembered having confirmed him as a smurf a few months ago. So I decided not to play into his web, and went for my first ladder proxy 3 rax ever. It succeeded better than I thought it would (though the transition was trashy AF), and so the guy, who was from a higher league, started to doubt that I, myself, was from my displayed league.

He cried about it for about 5 whole minutes ingame, and then continued afterwards. He just couldn’t accept the idea of being defeated by a regular player of one full league under his real level ( Bakana ! Yurusanai ! ).

A 100% confirmed regularly freelosing smurf… who whined about being trolled by a league even above his (which was already one tier or two above played MMR). I had found, a smurf whining about smurfs. :joy:

That remembered me about one user who claimed on another thread that smurfing was fun. Well in fact, I think that for smurfs winning is fun ; while being trolled is just as unpleasant to them than to regular users. Proof being the sore whining specimen I just encountered. :rofl:

7 Likes

Keep up the good work mate, this is amazing

3 Likes

Glad you appreciate !

We recently debated about the harass/mechanical aspects of SC2 compared to the strategic ones. Well, though the mechanics are the most part of what define a player’s level ; if I hadn’t this strategical aspect to exploit (by faking macro while aggressing, but also by faking aggressiveness while going macro), there would be no way for me to threaten and sometimes beat mechanically superior players. :wink:

I must also add that this small write-up about some of my successes against smurfs, kinda reminds me of Van Hellsing , since in vampire hunters stories the direction of the hunt is reversed, with usual predators becoming the target of the usually hunted regular people. I’ma proxy wooden sticks next game. XD

Anyway, I do see that last report was quite liked ; I think I’ll try to keep up with the fun facts/anecdotes part, to balance out the seriousness of the stats.

Thanks for commenting, Daffy ! :smiley:

1 Like

I have an account where I play against bronze and silver, and is really fun play against people that I can see have a really good mechanics being in bronze, when I see that it makes my day, because I can see how this is.

As smurf is not a bad behavior I really recommend to everyone create an account to smurf, because is fun, you can relax and you will get many surprises. I have to say that is a very interesting exercise, just try it.

Hi, Raynor,

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been studying this phenomenom by now (which isn’t exclusive to SC2 btw), so I will give more global answers to your points. However, I’d like to make I sure I really understand your statements first, without possibly influencing you beforehand.

A few questions regarding that :
— Is it fun to be opposed to another smurf because :

  • Of unmasking him, not being abused by the false league ?
  • Of finding someone doing the same than you, sharing a sort of feeling of complicity ?
  • Of the unexpected challenge ?

Several questions again :

— When you say it’s not a bad thing, for who or what is it good or bad ? For the smurf himself ? For the regular players ? For the matchmaking system ?
— It’s not the first time the relaxed play argument is mentioned. Does this implies your feel tensed when facing equal skill opponents, or that there are frustrating aspects to your level ? Why exactly is it relaxing to face less experimented players instead ?
— It’s not the first time the fun aspect of it is mentioned. Do you feel it’s not fun to face equal skill opponents, when not smurfing ? What exactly is more fun when facing less experimented players ?

:mag:

Here my answers

*Kind of, is fun unmasking the other player and also is good not being abused, basically that’s one reason to surf
*Yes that’s the fun part, its like give me five and bye, next game.
*No, when I see the other players is a smurf too, I don’t play the game I laugh and leave

  • I mean, I say it is not bad because Blizzard allow it, if they allow it hence is not bad, right?. Obviously I think is bad for everyone, but blizzard don’t care, because it helps its ladder system to keep players in same league.

-SC2 is very stressful game, that’s why ladder anxiety exist. Basically you play ladder to climb and reach next league, that’s the goal for everyone, but let’s be honest most of the time you dont play equal skill opponents, there are many smurfs, many hackers, even more; the ladder is not meant to be fair, ladder wants to keep you in you current league to keep you playing more and more. Many times when I am about to reach diamond 3, next opponent are always an unranked master player or a diamond with a big different in mmr, for instance I have played people with 3700 mmr when I am attempting to reach 3200. Even this happened to Ragnarok too, a top Zerg player, he was smurfing in some videos where he went from diamond to master, he lost one game to a no one, how can a top korean gm can lose a game in strong textdiamond league? how a top gm korean can lose a game in diamon?? how? well he lost while trying to climb the ladder, imagine what happens to a regular player, that’s what ladder is, it wants to keep people the most time it can in its current league, and this tend to frustrate people, simple because is not fair, that’s why I encourage everyone to smurf, if blizzard dont want a fair ladder lets break the system.

-Its fun because you can play without the stress and frustration the ladder gives, and also you can try many things, just having fun, and seeing how your opponent reacts.

AFAIK Blizzard is okay with people creating fresh account, because if they are playing normally, the MMR system quickly puts them where they belong.
I would like to know where they said that it is okay to throw matches on purpose to get lower MMR.

That does not make sense. Can you back the statements with something?