Why Free to Play made me a smurf

[Trias-2243]

@Sax-11552

I play against so many free to play accounts now that are obviously smurfs that my MMR is below my actual skill level. I didn’t realize until recently that I have become a smurf myself. (…) my MMR is so much lower than it should be. And now I am the one accused of tanking my MMR to play against lower leagues lol.

Nah you didn’t become a smurf, because :

• The MMR decrease in intermediate leagues is global. All the other players of those leagues do face smurfs as well, and so little by little the average MMR does decrease. Smurfing is one of the reasons of that, but since the pressure is the same over the other regular players, it means the players you’ll meet with the same MMR faced the same difficulty level.
• Second, smurfing is a deliberate attitude. The initial definition was closer to alternate account, but common smurfs do either freelose (to avoid gaining MMR), or create new accounts repeatidly in order to do full ladder climbs. So if you do not lose deliberately, nor spam accounts, you’re not a smurf.

@OMGitsBIZE-1650

or the player base just dies and no one cares about this comment at all lol bc activision will throw it away for its lack of player base… that opinions like yours destroyed… your own playgroun

SC2 isn’t dead from a player base point of view. Yet there’s been reports of newcomers quitting because of smurfing. And there are some leagues where it is so intense, the smurfs have almost the same probability of playing each other than of trolling a regular player. Which leads to massive mutual freelose sequences, as they don’t want to face a challenge, and so they keep freelosing until the undesirable opponent is matched with someone else. Which, result of their own stupidity, can sometimes take a long time.

@PaInLeSs-1413

It is way overblown. You encounter smurfs here and there but it is not as prevalent as most people make it out to be, it just feels like a lot because it feels awful when it happens. I would say that unranked in my opinion is a much more extended method for smurfing.

@Ciaus-2558

I know people say smurfing is a thing all the way up to GM, but in diamond (low and high) I pretty much never meet an actual smurf. People who have been masters before? Sure. But smurfs? Very rarely.

Worth keeping in mind that just because someone was ranked higher in the past doesn’t mean they are smurfing.

Sounds like it’s much more common lower down the ladder though =/

It is a matter of quantity, which indeed varies with leagues.

• If you’re a gold player, you’re in for 1 smurfs over 4 players average (which means it can get much higher than that due to the randomness of the circumstances), while it’s closer to 1 over 5 in metal leagues, and a bit lower than that in some particular ones. Bronze 3 have an extremely high smurfing rate though ; but that’s an exception.
• It’s been reported to me that there’s a drop in smurfing frequency around diamond 2 or 1. And that’s logical : most smurfs are diamond leaguers, implying most of them can’t actually smurfs in diamond 1 since it’s above or equal to their real skill.

More about it in that thread, for people wanting the precise numbers.