Even cannon rushes hardly ever are decided in 3 mins unless the person getting rushed just doesnāt want to deal with it at all and leaves the second they see a forge.
The only cheese I can think of that can actually end the game this quick is 12 pool in PvZ if the toss doesnāt wall. But even then if the toss try to hold it at all it will likely last longer than 3 mins. But even if you arent for the 3 min then make it 2 or 1. Something, literally anything would be better than nothing.
3 minutes isnāt a good cutoff for a freelose. Iāve been screening for those since quite some time now, and though when I can I just look at what happened build and army-wise, Iāve never seen a regular game where the opponent had realized he had a reason to surrender under a minute. Each time the game is lost with a duration of 0:xx, itās a freelose. Earliest motivated quit from raging players were upon scouting, which can happen around 1:30 (which is my cutoff for the API searches).
Iād set a freelose definition for a game lost < 1:00. A guy who leaves in 10s doesnāt do it because heās being cheesed. 
As for adding 5 minutes queue time for each consecutive freelose, script wise that would be quite simple. Itād be a bit longer to set in place a system to detect games lost < 1ā, but I donāt see it taking that long for a Skyrim modder to do, nor having a noticeable performance impact. Just make the script run once (for the player) at the end of each match and weāre good to go (plus as Nordy said, thereās already a similar script for XP). For SC2 devs, that would probably be childās play.
There are people who leave upon scouting a counter build, so the leave timing of such games is their scouting oneā¦ or rather the moment where the opponents first hits. Canāt happen under 1ā30 from what Iāve seen. 3 minutes would be the timing for a player who actually tries to defend. 
Thanks Nordy. Iām glad the topic receives some attention as thereās work behind it, but itās even better to feel supported. 
I think your confusing the statement āits much much easier to tell someoneās actual skill level the higher you areā with the statement āyou will be able to accurately tell someoneās skill level if you are a masterās playerā
To sum up :
ā Youāre saying that the higher level you are, the better you are at knowing what skills belong to what league (but not necessarily at noticing when being matched against).
ā Nordy and I do state that the lower level you are, the more keenly you will feel if youāre playing an user above your level (but not necessarily at knowing from which league they are from).
It seems to me that those propositions arenāt mutually exclusive. 
Alright, back to the main course :
SMURFS REPORT W33-35
SILVER LEAGUE
Using a randomized procedure (similar than for the gold league) :
How to read : cf. first post (part II)
Method used : cf. dedicated post.
Quickie :
Over 105 users at silver MMR :
Some thoughts about this :
FUN FACTS
Now for the funny part :
Once upon a time, was a lad known as Ā« Ok Ā».
Ok was a high league player, but stagnated. So, one extremely gloomy day, he decided to stop playing in diamond 1, and to freelose 1000 MMR+ in order to feel like the man again. And it worked wonders, he finally could get the 20-30 games winstreaks he had always dreamed of. By continuously slaying unsuspicious lower leagues, he felt he had regained his virility. He felt like a Flash among the men.
But good things arenāt meant to last. One Saturday in the evening, he was matched against another lower league player, that we will call Pony. Ok didnāt noticed, but the pony seemed shaken by his manly apparel, as if he had seen a ghost.
Full of confidence, Ok deployed a splendid exemplary of skill : with his 235 APM, he hit every macro timing magnificently. He even killed the opponentās scout who was trying to harass his CC building SCV. Such a foolish attempt !
But upon preparing to lay waste on the ponyās mineral line, Ok noticed the wall was made with three supplies. Suddenly, he didnāt feel ok anymore. An alert immediately sounded : his base was being assaulted by a small squad of marines, and they werenāt friendly. Listening only to his 200+ APM fingers, he got back, and tried to temporize an SCV pull. But while doing so, the second Ponyās SCV had (barely) had the time to land a bunker. He had just lost the game to a vulgar pony. And Ok wasnāt ok with that at all : he did ragequit, and by that had his first real lose in a while.
What was the difference between the pony and the 20 previous players ? Skill ? Nah, otherwise the pony wouldnāt belong to an intermediate league. It was information, as contrary to the others, the pony had learned to recognize smurfs right away.
Moral of the story : would the devs let the ladder be ruined by smurfs, we regular players would still have a chance to deal with them by ourselves. Know your enemy, goes the saying. Even more so in a strategy game.
PS : first post updated. See you in about three weeks for Bronze league ! 
And here we go for Bronze :
SMURFS REPORT W36-38
BRONZE LEAGUE
Still with the randomized procedure :
How to read : cf. first post (part II)
Method used : cf. dedicated post.
Quickie :
Among 105 users at bronze MMR :
Some (important) thoughts about this :
Corrected by leagueās population, there would be :
This is the estimate I will retain from this report. 
FUN-FACTS
FINAL THOUGHTS
Thatās it folks, I said I wanted to survey the 4 metal leagues, and after many weeks, the objective is complete. I must say that task required for me to get knowledge and tools I didnāt have a first, and that coupled to the hints I had to define, and the hidden nature of my targets, I sometimes felt like some kind of secret service analyst (lol). Anyway, it was an intellectually stimulating challenge.
Lastly, the previous report didnāt raise any reaction. However, with it the thread did attract lots of views (more than 320), and that even while being in the abyss of a three weeks inactivity. Thatās remarkable, and I can only hope some of the eyes apparently so interested were those of the devs. If you guys ever read this : donāt assume F2P wonāt bring to SC2 what it did to LoL. Donāt let smurfs ruin the game from beginners to intermediate levels, or you will lose the former.
Now, of course it could be interesting to survey the diamond and masters leagues, possibly to redo platinum. I could also do a best-of about the hints you could get to spot a smurf on the loading screen. And Iāve got something about the different motivations behind smurfing that might interest the devs.
But some views on a thread, without comments, without likes, and with the blue ones remaining ever silent on the matter, arenāt enough to renew my motivation. So unless thereās some change, I can let my work as is. I will still wander around to exchange as any other community member though. And, since Iām now trust level 3, will use the opportunity to transform the first post into something really neat. 
See you around, folks !
Concerning Leaver botter on EU where a smurfer ruins my RT games by leaver/afk botting
They did delete and lock all the posts in that thread except the first two, so either because of the replays or something else happened after I went to bed
I didnāt get any suspension, but it shames me I canāt even discuss leaver botting. The account name of the person was removed from the thread. Massively grieving other players should be punished, not ignored and censored when itās reported. You disappoint me, Blizzard
Told you there should be nothing linking to the individual himself ; otherwise he could be targeted by the most angry readers. I might add that there are a lot of users around here who donāt see with a keen eye when their doings are denouncedā¦ and so if the smallest rule is broken in the process, they will report it so that the author gets silenced.
Now, you canāt denounce that individual ; but we can still discuss the case without breaking any rules. And that by debating over the phenomenon in general ; and anonymizing any source material.
I took a look at it, and I must say this userās procedure was quite unusual. However, after careful inspection, Iām not sure there is botting involved, and Iāll explain you why below :
First, the profile :
https://i.postimg.cc/bYQR8bYq/2020-10-04-AFK-smurf-Profile.jpg
Ingame :
https://i.postimg.cc/Bnhgk0SD/2020-10-04-AFK-smurf-ingame.jpg
From the whole analysis, we can deduce that :
So my conclusion is that heās there at the beginning of some games for sure, but not all, while the gamesā ends look somewhat automated. So I canāt rule out an external program, particularly for the end.
As for the why, well itās made to lower his MMR so he can play lesser users (and as you could see decreased in leagues progressively, becoming gold, and then bronze later, which suggest he left league and then got placed again).
And the reason why he does AFK 5ā instead of leaving right away, IMO could be that this way the other users could not take control over his units, and that making sure that his resources wouldnāt be shared with them. So some sort of method to ensure the game is a defeat, and that his MMR indeed lowers.
And I who thought I had seen it all regarding smurfingā¦ 
So after your, I must say thorough investigation concluded there is no botting involved? Just some smurf leaving games after 5 minutes? Well damn. The guy must never sleep then
I mean, I went to bed and he still at it for at least 21 hours, as far as the match history is able to go back
I think heās there at some moments at least. I am not sure he hasnāt a sort of timer to close the game (which doesnāt necessarily requires a bot, but could be eased by an external program).
As for not sleeping, he could just alt-tab from SC2 to windows at at the start of each game, as suggest the slight camera moves. So he could be watching Twitch, reading at his emails, literally anything and then just closing SC2 process around 5 minutes. 
Hmm. Thatās disturbing. Looking back at what I saw, he left most games at nearly the same time as well, at about 5 minerals each time. This is smurfing, and he sometimes does some inputs by himselfā¦ but that could be him just watching at how things are going from time to time, and doesnāt rules out some parts being automated.
To make sure, I took a look at the post-game debriefing you first linked (the one of 11:50 Old Estate), which is a different one from my Fortitude one, and the amount of resources mined was 1747ā¦ for 1747 in Fortitude, and 1742 in my 26:52 Old estate.
So this is too close to be done manually for 21H long. There might be automated parts to this 4v4 smurfing after allā¦ 
I realized the thread had become quite long, and that this probably discouraged the read. Thus the objective was to make the first post easier to navigate, to allow users to read only the parts they are interested in.
Is data for NA only?
i have a question myself, what level smurfs the most? diamond master platinum ect?
I started the surveys as purely observational ones, by just reporting those I faced as a player. And so it started at EUās 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 didnāt 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 didnāt survey diamond and masters leagues either. 
Thanks for your appreciation, Dallarian. 
Thatās 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% canāt tell.
So there are smurfs from nearly all leagues, but this suggests a majority of those smurfing in bronze are diamond players. Thatās interesting because thatās 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.
it would make sense considering diamond players think they are āā"āgoodā""" and also are way bigger in population than master league.
I donāt understand the point of smurfing in this gameā¦ the whole reason itās fun is pushing boundaries, and trying to increase your skill. Itās 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 2ā> Platinum 2, is that smurf?
I guess it falls into:
often abnormally high winrates as well.
Being Ā« good Ā» 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 gameās domains prefer to say theyāre Ā« decent Ā» rather than good.
I think itās partly because of that because there are so many smurfs from diamond, because they donāt 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 theyāre unsure/unwilling to invest themselves into, some of they turn towards smurfing instead.
Itās 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 thatās indeed why most of us do play SC2, as itās one of the most difficult/competitive games of the e-sports scene, and so it wouldnāt 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 balanceā¦ 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 canāt 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.
Iāve found quantities of reasons behind that behavior ; most of them being rather bad. Iāve noted them all somewhere, in case if the devs would wish to understand the motivations better.
Itās either a walk in the park type described above (the ones who canāt 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. Youāve successfully hunted your first smurf, Dallarian ! ^^
