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 donât pull unitâs 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 donât 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 heâs 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. Thatâs 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 habitsâ 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 hasnât been repeated, but it also had never been done before. Which isnât 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 didnât screen the ladder once again, itâs 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 didnât 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 â 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 didnât 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.
This should be illegal, it totally destroys the ELO system and I wish blizzard delete their main account. Are Blizzard accepting this? Itâs kind of an identity fraud. I could in theory be meeting GMs at silver rank. Means I have to play at EWC level in every single game in order to reach a decent rank.
What happens when I start beating someone decent at a lower rank after loosing to 2-3 smurfs?
That is ridiculous. There is a unranked option. The higher ranked players should be waiting untill their faced at the same level.
After loosing, I get less point after winning.
Delete the Smurfs, or delete MMR.
If Smurfs exists, their accounts should be banned. Make the game paid again. This makes me unmotivated.
Twink thinks Smurf accounts are part of things like campaign mode - Kerrigan. Anything beyond Kerrigan queen interactions in game are going to be randoms because of the presence of advanced players like : Jaedong, Flash, Bisu, Stork
Smurfing is bad for games & this is generally pretty universally accepted. League and Dota for example are very aggressive at dealing with smurfs. They will give you a âpresentâ and when you open it it is a lump of coal with the message that youâve been banned for smurfing.
Blizzard took the opposite route because unranked allows you to smurf on your main account, off race allows you to smurf on your main account, and then they added endless free accounts which also allow smurfing.
Grandmaster is comprised of maybe 30 people each with 5-9 accounts. Itâs not a true âtop 200â anymore. To get into GM you have to be in the top 30. It gets worse, because of cross-region smurfing, so now you have to be in the top 30-50 worldwide to even get into GM.
Proof for this is very easy to demonstrate. Guys like Snake with 6100 peak mmr, who used to be in the top 10 on NA, are now generally rank 100-200. How does rank 10 get remapped to rank 150? Because the top 10 for each region have 1-6 accounts each. To estimate, we will use the median value of 3. There are 3 regions and so thatâs 90 GM accounts right there.
But, thatâs how the game is played in SC2. If you canât beat them then join them. I have 3 public accounts in GM right now and generally have at least 5.
Identifying smurfs is actually really easy. Smurfs will have the same play schedule BUT they will never match one another. If you compare their match history, there should be no games between the two accounts. Additionally, if they try to hide by simulating a match between two accounts, by queuing them at the same time, you can catch that by comparing the build orders and in game metrics like average APM to their normal games. The games will be short, and one player will have low APM (because they canât control two computers). So, to catch smurfs, you find accounts with similar play schedules, make a list of all games theyâve played vs one another, delete any matches that have a short duration or unusual APM/etc metrics, and if this number is 0 then they are the same player on smurf accounts. You could do this algorithmically by scrapping data off of a site like sc2pulse.
This account, for example, has zero games played vs berrycrunch: https://sc2pulse.nephest.com/sc2/?type=character&id=2097126&m=1#player-stats-matches
