The Smurfing Problem: The Solution

Skip the last paragraph for what I think the solution to my issue is. Read on for the backstory.

I am a Gold 1 player in Starcraft 2. I have been frustrated by players smurfing. Players from diamond and high Platinum lose 20 games in a row in order to bring their rank down so they can obliterate new players. It’s really frustrating. To the point that I deleted my account last week. A week later I realized that I really do love this game and want to keep playing and would if I would be paired against players that are in my own league, or at the very least, are within a couple tiers of me. I have no problem playing with players better than me. But when people are purposefully stooping down to Troll other players, it’s just not fun. I have several friends and family that were into the game but quit because of players coming down to lower leagues. I understand this issue is mainly an issue in leagues lower down, and many would argue that is an opportunity for players at this level to get better. I would argue that it doesn’t allow the player to focus on the things that matter at this level such as macro. For the sake of increasing the player base over time, I think that lower level players may stick around longer if they aren’t being paired with diamond players doing immortal kiting with a prism when the gold players are still learning how to drone up a base properly.

I have a simple solution to smurfs. Blizzard needs to put metrics in place that keep smurfs in check. These metrics would be kept secret by blizzard and used to decide if a player should be banned for an amount of time if they meet the metrics. For example, in ranked play, If a player quits out of the game within the first 2 minutes 2 times in a day, the player could be banned for that day until the following day. Another example, in the games they win, what is thier apm and epm. Does their epm match the league they are in? Several different metrics could be used together to pinpoint smurfs and ban them every time they start doing it. Complexity should be kept down in communication to the community, as it will just get too confusing for people if the metrics are common knowledge, also, it may give smurfs the ability to find ways around the metrics. There are definitely metrics recorded during every match that should be able to give the “Smurf AI” an ability to see that someone is smurfing.

Interested to hear what people think of this idea. Maybe have things to add? Or just think it’s a bad idea

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Hi Butler. I have passed by the league you’re in and, though I never went as far as deleting my account, I fully understand how you’re feeling. It’s really frustrating to get stomped by people whose level is so above yours that you feel like you never had a chance to play a fair game ; even more if they’re doing so in a trolling or taunting way. And that, while, we regular players, at our own little level, might do our best to slowly surpass ourselves.

I am also not surprised to hear you know more players negatively affected by that, as I am convinced it’s a problem in low to intermediate levels.

Yet there are some things you could do by yourself to mitigate that, would the devs never attempt to correct the problem :

  • Learn to recognize smurfs right away
  • Learn to react accordingly ingame (by playing tactics more than mechanics).

I have created a thread for players confronted to smurfs, which can help regarding those two aspects, and which might interest you.

I also happen to have recently completed a report about the proportion of smurfs in your league, scroll towards part II or the very last posts if you’re interested. :mag:

Those concept are interesting, but :

  • APM and EPM depend not only of level, but also very much of players’ styles, races and compositions. High APM can be a hint, but in any way not a good mean to confirm smurfing.

  • Leaving a game early, on the contrary, is the trademark of freelosing smurfs. But some players do rage, sometimes some have technical issues, and sometimes they could try to freelose because they are convinced the opponent is a smurf. So that criteria is good, but can only be retained if repeated (my own detection cutoff is 3 or more freeloses in recent history).

And that would be relatively easy to detect for devs of the caliber of SC2. But you can’t just ban players who bought the game. Some players have suggested alternatives that I personally find excellent :

But it’s not sure the devs will ever take action about that, however easy it’d be for them to implement such systems. Yet, the more people are talking about it, the more precisely the phenomenon is described, the more likely it is to finally catch their eye. I do regularly maintain the thread I’ve linked to you, take a look, share your opinion into it. The more the merrier. :wink:

This “Problem” exists on literally all levels of ladder. Unless you are the absolute best player in the world, there exists a better player than you who will win and ‘steal’ your mmr. Even at the top level, players’ form fluctuates to such a severe degree that mouth breathers on reddit make/upvote posts about which pro is ‘washed up’.

None of the metrics in the game data are actually sufficient to detect smurfs with near 100% accuracy, which is the level of certainty you would need to convince a reasonable person to reprimand an account. Things like APM can ONLY confirm that a player is too slow, and should never be used as evidence that a player is good. So many people spam between control groups while missing very basic macro cycles.

While it feels super scummy on the low end of the league spectrum, all levels get smurfed. GM players make ‘alt’ accounts and benchmark their climbs. Pro players have multiple barcode accounts in GM. People race switch on alternate accounts. People create fresh accounts. Yeah there are ***heads who troll low league, but there are ***heads who troll every league.

Ultimately the only thing you can do is just assume everyone you face is NOT a smurf, because even if they were there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Don’t use the scoreboard to try and confirm, open up the replay and note what you think they did well. Find your very first macro mistake and try to fix it. Move on. Losing is a part of this game, and the system literally tries to force you to lose 50% of the time. Good luck out there,

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile:

I guess I’m talking about guys that come down from diamond with amazing micro With stutter step marines and I’m just trying to figure out how to put my lurkers in the ground haha. Makes sense what you’re saying but, if players could be silo’d into leagues better, do you not think the game would be more enjoyable?

A system which deters smurfs would be nice I agree. I think the most reliable way to impliment this would be to do as Trias said. Increase que times for players who leave a game within the first couple minutes of a match. Though I suspect players will still suffer through this if they are very commited to the smurf. So the problem will likely never go away. But it can get slightly better.

That being said though this has been an issue across all leagues forever. Even when you had to pay for extra accounts. So I doubt blizz will do anything about it sadly. My best advice for you is just to completely forget about these games. Yes its frustrating that you lost mmr to a player who had no right matching against you in the first place. But at the end of the day the mmr is simply a number. You will advance through the leagues if you keep at it regardless of the smurfs. We have all been there and know it sucks. But you just gotta try to take those games with a grain of salt and move on to the next one. You will climb that ladder and get to where you want to be eventually through practice and patience regardless of the crappy smurfs. <3

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no. bad. this is a horrible idea.

apm and epm mean nothing and anyone who is good at the game will tell you that. what if a platinum leaguer has 300 epm but just has bad decision making?

It’s not about the fact here are smurfs or not, it’s about :

  • The way they’re smurfing : them just playing normally (ending up playing anonymously but at their real MMR, which is the original use of smurf accounts a high level) ; or if they deliberately stall their MMR’s progression in order to remain at a lower level.
  • And their proportion (specially of those deliberately staying there) compared to regular players. Most D1 M3 I’ve come across did not know what a smurf was, some even questioned if there were smurfs at all ; which strongly implies the smurfing in those leagues is infrequent enough to not always get noticed. Whereas, there might be as much as 20-25% of smurfs in the lower levels of gold. You can’t just ignore something when it’s about one game over four.

That is an oversight. Numerous, repeated freeloses are on the contrary quite specific of freelosing smurfs. They can’t spot all the smurfs types though ; but if you see that :

https://i.postimg.cc/CLhmCyvQ/Smurfs-a-freeloses.jpg

You can be 100% sure it’s a smurf.

Certainly. Less frustration at lower levels, less waiting time at higher levels, less MMR shifts having to be done on the league tiers by the devs.

Share your opinion on threads dealing about the subject, maybe one day it’ll catch the eye of a dev.

That is a good advice. One could add it might be useful to learn finding the hints about smurfing in order to adjust your play against those, but in the end, getting over frustration, finding your mistakes and trying to correct them will lead to to leagues where there are less of them. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Can confirm the number of smurfs you face drops off a cliff the moment you hit D1. I was D1 for a long time and recently hit M3. I think I probably run into a smurf like, maaaybe 1 out of 40 games. But quite honestly once you get this high you start regularly getting matched against people legitimately 300+ mmr above you so you just have to learn to fight these types of players.

But when I was D3-D2 it was deff still an issue. Less so than in the metal leagues but still noticeably there.

Personally the way I got over the smurfing thing was by taking every chance I got to fight people significantly better than me, either on ladder or in custom games. Allowed me to recognize that these types of players showed me glaring holes in my game that people of my own skill wouldn’t necessarily be able to take advantage of. Then I worked on plugging those holes. I took every smurf game as a chance to see where I need to improve the most. And the constant exposure to people of much higher skill desensitized me to a degree of losing to them.

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They will do absolutely nothing about smurfing. When a game goes free to play, it’s a sign of desperation. For a year, the game will be alive and more players will come in. Then when the hype dies out, you are left with nothing but a cesspool of smurfing and regular players knocking down new players out of existence. Last season, someone got away with trolling the entire archon ladder. This season, I checked if the accounts were still active and the match history said a game was played 2 minutes ago. In other words, nothing was done.

There is no solution for smurfing. Ladder design is completely ruined across the board. Your only hope is to push through the pain or leave the game (as many have done).

Extremely interesting experience on the subject, which indeed confirms my suspicions. After all, that’s logical : they higher you go, the less player there are above you, so the less frequently you’ll find someone able to troll you.

That’s a good mindset. It’s hard to acquire when you’re struggling, but that’s definitely a way to get the best out of the smurfing issue.

I would rather see it as a wise economical model change, as there are no games who are able to sell copies 10 years after being published. However, you could sell DLCs all along. And that’s the intent with that : to stop selling a game that wouldn’t sell anyway, but to sustain it all along with small DLC sales.

As for newcomers, it’s been nearly 3 years now (11-2017) and we’ve still got newcomers in my community. Coincidentally, I’m currently assessing the silver leagues, and, though at the moment it seems even worse than gold at the moment regarding smurfs, I also see a significant amount of regular players who picked up the game just a handful of months ago. :slight_smile:

Trolling, but in what way ? Was it some kind of hackers, or just smurfs ?

Currently the only thing we can do is indeed deal with it. As for if the devs will notice, or take action, nothing is less sure. But even the very wise can’t see the future. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m by no means a good player, but I have noticed that people like me who have been playing off and on over 10 years and only play a handful of ladder games a season tend to get mixed in with new players. The system cannot accurately determine where I need to be with just a few games.

No, indeed. Which is why, for players who haven’t played in a very long time, there’s a provisional MMR system, during which the variations of MMR are doubled, and your league doesn’t reflects your actual MMR.

Yet some people exploit this, by deliberately staying within that provisional state…

Here is another thought. What if blizzard implements a rule that in the first 5 minutes of the game, all bases need to be destroyed by team A in order for team b to be allowed to quit. (make it so the first nexus doesn’t take friendly fire)

Obviously doesn’t solve the issue, but would at least make it more annoying for guys freelosing.

Loss of time for regular players. You can lose a game well under 5 minutes. Allowing players to surrender is precisely made to avoid that need.

Just make the queue time become 5 minutes if a game is freelost (left < 1’30), and double that queue time for each consecutive freelose. That would be radical.

But for that, we would first need to catch the eye of the devs. It has been done regarding balance, it has been done regarding ingame QoL, but for the matchmaking, not yet. Nordy and CollegeWings are right, we know they actually read the forums, but the chances are low for them to act on a non balance topic. And that’s why, while still voicing your experience on the forums (low odds ≠ zero odds), you should first focus about how to deal with it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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