This seems like a reasonable approach but the smurfs have already ruined all the games prior to being banned. I wonder how difficult it is to prevent smurfing altogether? Doesn't seem like it'd be easy at all.
Both regions require you to register for the game using a residential ID due to strict internet laws in those regions. China’s are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you’d see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
As for the West, the only companies from my experience that genuinely ask for personal details beyond a username, email address and password are those that host shoddy Korean MMO’s and have notoriously bad internet security. Valve have tried to address smurfing in the past by requiring accounts to register phone numbers before they can play Ranked, but this can easily be bypassed with cheap burner phones and other services.
China’s are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you’d see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
Got any resources to back this up? I have a hard time imagining a culture where cheating is the norm alongside one that ruins your life if caught cheating. One of these things can’t be true.
multiple accounts regularly logging in through a single IP
day/time login patterns
same champion pools
consistently stomps games
frequent higher than average KDA
frequent higher than average CS/min
higher than rank level winrate
higher than rank level MMR
These items taken individually don’t tell much. But when cross-referenced with other data, I’m pretty sure it becomes clear really fast when someone is smurfing.
In dota, there is a cost: you have to play 100 hours of unranked before you can play ranked. Honestly, because of this, while smurfing obviously still happens rarely, I don’t think I’ve seen any smurfs in my last 50 games of ranked, which is at least 30 hours of gameplay. I would assume you see more smurfs in unranked games, but since I’m not playing those, I don’t see them.
Basically someone with a high matchmaking rating creates a brand new Steam account and installs the game, pretending to be a new player. They then proceed to stomp on the actual new players and just be generally as toxic as possible. After all, if that account gets banned, they can always make a new one.
Does this effectively mean that making a new account for any other reason is effectively against the rules in these kinds of game, because you’d start at the bottom rank, or is there some way of telling between an experienced player just making an alt or new account, and one specifically doing it for facing low ranked players?
If you play on a separate account specifically to play in a different skill range, then that would be smurfing. But if you play through the calibration games on that account to your best ability, then it should place you roughly where your other account would be within a handful of games.
Smurfing is knowingly and deliberately playing at the incorrect skill-level/mmr/elo. Most times, people will create or buy a separate account that somehow has a lower mmr/elo attached to it, to do this. You can ‘play bad’ or ‘throw the game’ for 50 games in a row and your rating will tank a lot, so that’s a bummer to encounter as your new teammate randomly… Then this player can win a lot of games in a row playing as ‘themselves’ and completely stomp games all the way back to their ‘true’ mmr. Does that help explain it?
Smurfing is when a player has a secondary account so they can play against/with lower ranked players. Imagine a chess grand master putting on a disguise and going to a beginners chess tournament
On chess.com smurfing is actually not permitted, but chess grandmaster can play on special accounts to do fun challenges and all of the elo is refunded to the players that they beat.
Smurfing is when you play Ranked ladder on an alt-account in a much lower skill bracket with the intention to curb stomp lesser-skilled players.
It’s a very big issue in any competitive multiplayer game, especially direct competitors of DOTA 2 like League of Legends and SMITE. Valve may just be the first company to start actively banning smurfs.
For those who don’t want to read the article to know what this has to do with Smurfs:
Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence.
As always: if leaving or sucking ruins a game for everyone else, your game is badly designed.
Only MOBAs have this level of toxicity. All MOBAs have this problem. Maybe lashing strangers together for forty-five minutes, in a zero-sum contest where half of them will lose, with so much inter-dependence and complexity that nobody feels responsible, is not great for the human psyche.
You can’t even kick someone. Losing them for any reason ruins the game. You have to tough it out, for most of an hour, after waiting however long just to start the game, and the inevitable loss will still count against you. No kidding people get wound-up.
I’d add the caveat “badly designed for solo matchmaking.” Dota with friends–especially a five stack you get along with and play well with–is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you’re not in the total shit tier ranks it’s usually pretty fun.
I absolutely agree. I think the time investment is the biggest reason. I can easily shrug off a loss if it only took 5 minutes. It’s much harder to swallow when you feel like you just wasted the last hour of your life. Honestly I don’t know how to fix it though - the farming and leveling is kind of baked into the formula. You can speed up the process like Heroes of the Storm did but it’s going to feel like a “lite” version of the original.
If you could leave, you’d never be trapped in a long game. You would enjoy every long game. The ones that suck wouldn’t last.
Root problem: the game requires a fixed number of human players, from start to finish. If bots worked then you could just take the L and quit. Or safely eject someone who’s being a total cock. Or possibly even split the game in two, so both the “fuck this” and “fuck you” groups see everyone else replaced with bots.
Bots don’t have to be good with every character. Bots don’t even have to play by the same rules as humans. They just need to be balanced. Which you’d figure these developers are really really good at, after fifteen years of pouring new characters into these games.
Individual scoring would be almost as powerful. A high-level player with a low-level team should ideally be scored on their skill - not a binary win / lose condition. Especially if half the players are guaranteed to lose. Long matches provide oodles of time to evaluate. And if bots work at all, the game can quietly run simulations from snapshots of the ongoing match - checking if players did better or worse than a player-like script would, and by how much.
Compare sports. You have a regulation basketball game. On one side is the 2023 Miami Heat, minus Jimmy Butler. On the other side you have the AZ Compass Prep Dragons, plus Jimmy Butler. The Dragons’ chances of winning are approximately diddly over fuck. But a talent scout watching those high-schoolers get smoked 132-15 can still recognize which of them are doing especially well under the circumstances. And Erik Spoelstra can still give Tyler Herro side-eye for ever missing a free throw. Despite a blowout loss, every individual can be judged for how they played, both in terms of independent actions and productive teamwork. (This new kid at Arizona, Jimmy somethingorther, is really good.)
Yet in a video game - where every moment can be scrutinized frame-by-frame, and statistical analysis is so easy you’d think this was baseball - there is only total victory and utter defeat, and only for whole teams. Everything from Smash Bros to Overwatch has little trophies to hand out for leading performance in a bunch of arbitrary details. So why doesn’t a loss caused by one feeding troll count as 90% of a win for the players who almost eked it out in spite of them?
More importantly: why doesn’t the game make it feel like they were doing good, when they were doing great?
Hit the nail on the head, I'd say. Some future competitive game that endeavors to weigh in an evaluation of personal contribution over just the binary win/loss condition and that implements ways to automatically mitigate the negatives enumerated for long duration matches is going to start off in a really good place.
Handling those issues honestly seems like Step 1 in tackling the kind of negativity that is notorious for cropping up in these sorts of games. If everyone's having a better time and doesn't feel punished for things outside of their control, it seems reasonable to assume that the baseline behavior will be a lot more chill.
If the smurf detection/etc is good, then that’s the first way to alleviate those toxic behavior. It’s a really bad feedback cycle when smurfs are involved. My main game is rocket league, you can have smurf that win the game single-handedly and then start to play 1v3 or 2v4 because he decides that he wants to lose these games to keep playing at lower rank, or something you did the smurf don’t like, and you might be some MMR away for your next promotion and it doesn’t matter. The MMR matchmaking this little shit to your matches because he decides to smurf instead of playing at his normal level.
I don’t know much about dota or moba games, but the idea is the same, smurf will pump more negativity into the game.
I don’t play DOTA2 but that’s some seriously great live service management. Smurfing in Overwatch2 drove me nuts (I’ve even given up playing the game). Constant leavers, toxic behavior, and no repercussions.
Tracking smurf accounts back to their main (likely by reviewing IPs as one account logs out and another logs in) is a powerful way to stamp out this behavior and deter people from smurfing in F2P games where having multiple accounts doesn’t cost a cent.
Smurfing prevented me from playing LoL and Dota2, impossible to get into a game when you can’t get off the ground, the opposition is made up of smurfs and half or more of your team as well, and you get shit on for trying to learn how to play.
DotA Allstars was the worst and was the thing that made me initially not get into MOBAs. I always used to nickname that game Defense of the Assholes because of how toxic the player base was. My teens were otherwise spent playing Footman Frenzy, BattleTanks, WW2/WW1 Battle for Europe, Run Kitty Run and other maps.
Best memory was sixteen years ago being labelled a feeder, kicked from an -apem game on Bnet mid-match, added to a global banlist, and told by the game host to hang myself when I asked him what his fucking problem was.
What was the cardinal sin I committed which led to such a heavy-handed and toxic response, you may ask? I bought Mekanism while playing Dragon Knight. Apparently without any tutorials and in a casual pub match on Blizzard’s own servers, I should have known that players needed to buy Buriza and not a healing/buffing item.
I think it’s a problem with competitive gaming. Your average player in any competitive game is a meta slave that’s incapable of any kind of critical thinking.
My fifteen-year-old brain’s thought process at the time was that DK had very high innate armor and health regeneration, and Meka would not only bolster that, but allow me to heal/buff allies, push waves harder since it affects minions, and just snowball the game.
I think it’s just because most players tend to be good at micro, but not so much macro.
Having a set “build” takes the macro thought of your item choice out of the equation so they can focus on their micro. The thing is though, you can easily make up for subpar micro with good macro. Picking the best items for a given situation, even if they aren’t necessarily “meta” is incredibly important and something most players just don’t feel like mastering.
Just learning to prioritise BKB instead of the same item build you use every game when you are up against a strong int team will improve your game 20%.
League of Legends has a very unique account selling problem that Riot have proven outright fucking incompetent in addressing.
You need to hit level 30 on your account to start playing Ranked, which can take about 112 hours of cumulative play time to achieve. This has created a black market for fresh League accounts that have been pushed to Level 30 and are ready to be played in Ranked.
Unranked League accounts that are level 30 fetch about $1 - $10 on illicit websites because there are whole industries of Chinese gold farming firms and bots infiltrating the game. If you want an account that’s in Iron 3 or Iron 4 (the two lowest divisions in Ranked), it can fetch a few hundred dollars at bare minimum, at least if DongHuaP is to be believed. Iron accounts are so expensive because of how hard they are to actually get into Iron in the first place without tripping Riot’s automated reporting systems and getting banned, but also they’re lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do ‘Iron to Grandmaster’ series.
I’m somebody who peaked at Archon rank in DOTA 2 (LoL equivalent would be Platinum) and used to play StarCraft II at Master level (second highest league in the game, Grandmaster is top-200 in the region), so I’m not exactly incompetent at RTS or MOBA games. But in League my account is borked and I’m in literal elo hell. I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.
But yeah ELO hell is real… I tried to combat that by only playing with at least 1 premade (duo). If I bring someone in, that makes one less spot for inter/AFKer/troll in my team, right? Yes. But matchmaking also sends you to harder matches because “you are at advantage of playing with a premade”.
Each past season since S07, I reach gold then quit. This season I fell from Gold 4 10LP straight to Silver 4 25LP. 15 loses streak. The hardest I’ve ever fallen. Soul crushing. And I usually end up top 3 players of the match. I make mistakes, but they don’t cost us the loss.
Even in bottom silver, I saw matchmaking sending Platinums in my enemy team (based on porofessor.gg pre-match info). I thought it wasn’t possible to play with 2 divisions difference. Get your shits together and fix matchmaking, Riot.
It actually amazes me how much friendlier and more capable of critical thinking people on Lemmy are.
My comment on r/leagueoflegends would have probably been removed by a moderator for breaking some kind of arbitrary hidden rule, or heavily downvoted with people telling me I’m full of shit and elo hell is a myth.
Matchmaking is borked in League and if Riot don’t get off their lazy asses and fix it, game’s gonna die.
True. Just mentioning ELO hell in r/leagueoflegends you get downvoted to hell and spammed “you just need to git gud/you just need to carry your games/you just need to take a break” 🙃
Not to mention… I’m Plat in Wild Rift, which is the dumbed down bastardized mobile version of the game.
Funny thing is Wild Rift recommends different builds. Senna with Grasp of the Undying is considered troll tier in League but is a top build in WR, despite having practically identical movesets…
She literally has the same abilities and the same infinite AD and range scaling on her soul mechanic. This would make Grasp great for her in the main game from how many opportunities she has to buff her health.
There is this notion going that league of legends ranking system is good which is strange. Full of smurfs ranking up, full of bad players deranking after buying boosted accounts, and few actually players that want to win and are trying really hard, but at the end of the day, if you are not the type of player that can extremely carry, result of your game is decided before you even start playing. And then they removed ability to see teammates nicknames, so I can’t dodge obvious trolls anymore, and have to play in the team with people that have for example 30 ranked games played with around 40% winrate.
The ranking system is complete dogshit in League, and people instantly dismiss you when you say elo hell is real, because if it was, all these coaching sites like SkillCapped, GameLeap, ProGuides, etc wouldn’t be able to sell you their own brands of snake oil.
Riot’s customer support is also dogshit. The amount of in-game reports, Zendesk tickets, and posts on Twitter/X that have been straight-up ignored are through the roof.
I was watching a league stream on twitch because I thought I might try to get back into it a little, but one of the ads in the twitch chat that was sponsoring the streamer was for a league Smurf account seller. I noped the fuck out of league and uninstalled instantly. I might give dota 2 another shot now, smurfs were really killing the experience of learning and playing the game.
It’s just refreshing seeing a company publicly state smurfs aren’t tolerated. It’s always this unspoken thing that smurfs are just always there because they’re not technically against any TOS. Finally a company has the balls to float out say smurfs ruin the game for others.
I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.
If this is the case, then how does this happen?
they’re lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do ‘Iron to Grandmaster’ series.
Presumably OP is about as skilled as, or a little more than, account farmers (who are bound to be pretty good to make any money…) and less skilled than professional YouTubers.
Up timing, but depending on data permissions upon download they may also have things like device fingerprints. Agreed on the service management though. Brilliant work.
dota2.com
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