The Smurfing Problem: The Solution

[Trias-2243]

@Butler-11195

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.

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.

@Butler-11195

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.

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 :

@Truth-21716

This is incredible easy for Blizzard to solve.

Rules:

1. If a player quits a game their queue time for the next game becomes 5 minutes.
2. If they quit again their queue time doubles each time.

@SunRise-6441

My idea that was posted on the old forum in regards with delaying the time that you can requeue a match.

5:00 Minute delays coincides with the duration of the match.
25:00 Minute game, doesn’t affect you.
4:30 Minute cannon rush, please wait 30 seconds.
InstaInsta-leave, please wait 5 minutes.

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.