Can Riot Fix Smurfing? 

The gun skin is actually a really cool idea. It's basically a champions skin every episode (a skin you can never buy again) but is based on how well you play so it gives players motivation to play more to get the better skin.

i really liked this video, it was almost like a video essay, but it wasnt a super long video, keep up the good work!

Riot already got a mechanic which would kill smurfing to a very high degree. Its implemented for Premiere. When u want to play Ranked, Link your account to a phone number. Done.

my day lightens up when menmaro uploads

The rank skin sounds pretty cool ngl, just having anything besides the same gun buddy would be nice. Great analysis on the topic👍👍

super underrated I play valorant almost every day and encounter 1 smurf every week, good to see someone ACTUALLY covering it

I have an idea Valorant ranking system punishes you for playing well. For example if you’re ascendant 2 for example and get a KD of 30-5 it will jump elo and match you with elo of immortal 3’s even if their rank shows plat (smurfs) they will be of immortal + elo. Best thing you can do at the moment is try not get a + KD and win the game if you can. Unfortunately you get severely punished with matching either cheaters or super smurfs from super high elos. This can be achieved by dropping less kills and getting 0-10 or 0-15 at the start for example. Then gradually playing well to your best all the while trying to maintain an even KD and not a positive one in important rounds or defence. If you don’t do this and keep blasting 30+ kills you will eventually be matched with smurfs. Cause the opposing team will report you and you could end up being matched with cheaters too! Unfortunately this is the only work around cause the system is extremely unfair with the behind the scenes calculations (elo) compared to your actual physical rank that you see. You maybe matching a gold in diamond but that (gold / silver in previous act badge) is not that elo it is much higher. Conclusion. Drop kills and try win in a minus KD or even KD ratio. Do not! Try and get positive KD or match MVP. I have noticed that when you get match MVP the very next game your team mates will be amazing (like super smurfs) for one game then thats it its a downswing after that with matching vs smurfs and cheaters alike. Similarly if you keep losing you will eventually match super low elo in comparison (the now gold 3 will feel like iron 1 and the platinum that played like a immortal 3 a few games ago will now feel like a bronze as these are now true golds and true plats). Hope this helps. Also this coincides with the fact that at mid to higher levels such as Gold, plat and diamond there are gonna be loads of boosters. So if you go into them hitting 30 bombs you will be placed much higher elo wise then you will go on a losing streak. Its basically a mess and this is an idea to overcome it for the time being because playing well can land you in serious trouble elo wise compared to your physical rank and land you multiple losses in a row through smurfing and elo calibration which coincides with the smurfing problem giving us the mess that we have above. By going even kd or slightly minus kd you make the booster do more of the work (on your team) thus frustrating them cause they want YOU to do it to get your elo up they will happily bottom frag and put away their ego as theyre boosting someone. I can’t stress it enough that the physical rank and elo behind the scenes are two separate things and you can never see your true rank especially with the current circumstances of smurfs and cheaters.

I haven't watched the video yet but I already know one solution. Ban them! Riot doesn't ban smurfs and even CONDOMES IT. Look at Riot Mortdog. He is a fantastic Rioter and a player, but he smurfs. He has multiple accounts where he has videos of him playing on different accounts. He is also the LEAD DEV of TFT.

I have friends that have quit the game because of smurfs and I'm sure there are many more out there that do. Riot should really care about this more than they do or they will just lose more and more players.

Can you come up with some other ideas to incentivize people to have more than one account ( and buy skins on them) other than to smurf? That seem to be the reason riot don't want to address the issue (there ARE multiple ways to address the issue), because their skin sales will go down.

They could just add a phone number requirement to ranked, same as it is for premiere, it woul probabably help with smurfing

they should just add 2fa or phone number registered q, that would dim in smurfing a lot

The entire matchmaking queue is inundated with cheaters. I lost 14 games in a row yesterday when I was 1 win off immortal 1. I didn't tilt queue. I tried my best every game but no matter how hard I tried I got nothing but 0 comm teammates, griefers, leavers and people who weren't very good and a whole lot of 0 comm closet cheaters who couldn't out perform the other 3 cheaters on the enemy team. It got so bad that people started rage hacking on both teams and one of my games my own teammate admitted to cheating and said go ahead and report me I wont get banned. I got on my d2 account today and lost every game to cheaters so I decided to get on my gold account and I played 2 games before coming across a blatant cheater and was forced to FF at round 5. I play exclusively on Georgia servers but one game I sat in a 5 minute queue and it put me in a Virginia server where I had 2 cheaters on my team and went against 3 on the other team and lost. Do not waste your time with this game. People are not smurfing in your rank. It is more likely that they are cheating. Smurfs will communicate and igl your team. A smurf isn't going to sit there on Reyna and lurk behind the enemy team somehow every round finding perfect timings and getting instant one taps every round with 5ks. If you enjoy competitive games do not waste your time with Valorant. The better you become at this game the more you will come to the realization that a majority of the player base above Ascendant 2 are cheating. That is when I noticed it the most. Edit: To make matters worse, Riot purposely doesn't allow for a replay system and they allow anyone to hide their name via streamer mode as well as disable friend requests and set their trackers to private. I've noticed a lot of the sus players I've been encountering have all 3 of those and you can also see when someone goes into their tracker settings and changes it from public to private (which is a sure indication that they recently began to cheat). There are several other patterns I've noticed which include the traditional: 1 loser virgin and 1 underage teenage girl getting boosted by a cheater so he can get some e pussy. (this is the most common). The other is usually 2 friends with one trying to impress the other by cheating and pretending that they're not. (basically the same as the virgin situation). The third is 3 closet cheaters that know they all cheat and do it to sell accounts, advertise their cheat/discord or to try and make a name for themselves by pretending to be good at the game even though they're just cheating.(These are the kids that have the 50-100 followers on twitter with the cringe anime profile picture and the LFT in their bio with a SS of their match history being all mvp victories in Imm3-Rad lobbies). Moral of the story. Don't waste your time on a game that was designed to be a cheaters wet dream. No replay system, Vanguard doesn't detect hardware cheats (Arduino Leonardo), HWID spoofer tutorials are in abundance so you can always make a new account if a Riot Employee decided to manually ban you which is about the same chance as winning the lottery, and AnyBrain AI based their research off of Valorant which showed that at any given point in time 30% of the player base is cheating on average if not closer to 42% and Riot decided not to implement their AI/Machine Learning System to detect and ban cheaters for some reason(AKA they lose money by banning cheaters). GLHF Stay safe and do your research.

6:00 they still way better than the badges we have over in overwatch ahahha

thing is that the machanic outplay is normaly 50/50 against non smurfs and smurfs just make that up to 90/10 but at the 50/50 it can still be lost

I have played like 3 matches in the last 2-3 weeks or so. I dont feel the need to.

bro I talked to some riot devs on their discord and they said that they dont care about smurfs since it doesnt go against their TOS is it unfair to smurf Yes, but until they update their tos smurfing is unbannable because its essentially not cheating in their eyes

Just played a game with a guy that was level 5 and flicked the living shit out of me. Great game👍

curry shaking in his boots right now

I mean like smurfing on lower elo players when they're toxic it's funny and satisfying to see them get sat down completely and get quiet

I dont think you realise just how expensive both a replay system and community servers would be. Riot may be rich but they still have to make money for val to be worth their time

smurfing is for people who are socially awkward losers

hell no, why? no benefits... if there is a benefit, hell damn not only valorant will do it... I mean most fps wont fix it...

can you coach me

Valorant feels very stale and the game is lacking arcade modes, it’s maybe a too competitive game. I play unrated cus I don’t wanna deal with people in ranked and I still get matched up with people every game that treats unrated like it’s the fucking pro league. I wanna get into rank but the fucking angry people and the Smurfs are everywhere. You make one mistake and they flame you, you stand in spawn for 1 sec too long after we load in they spam “rep (agent name) afk” bro I was sipping some water while we load in. Valorant feels too unfinished from what a fps should be

We all love valorant but valorant dev dont love us..give us community servers.or game will die in few years

Honestly, Riot has really made some progress concerning Smurfing. I tend to smurf a lot, not because I want to brag and have fun (there is none), but because I want to play with lower ranked friends and I want them to learn more about the game. But lately, I tend to go into what I call the ''Smurf Queue'', where basically you have 1, 2, maybe a lot more Smurfs in the game. I find it nice from Riot to try to ''find'' those smurfs as early as possible. Even with 0 or only 1 or 2 MVP I instantly skip ranks and go into smurf queue. Which kinda sucks for my friends, but is healthier for competitive integrity. I like your other ideas too (skins and replay), and even if I do smurf quite a lot, no one learns or have fun with an instalock Reyna dropping 40 kills, and I meet that a lot in my smurfing games, where I just want to ''teach'' my friend about aspects of the game, but I end up tryharding as hell because there is a 30k Reyna in the enemy team. And that is super annoying tbh.

first

Anyone here has a number on how rampant smurfs are? In their own rank and interpretation of what they consider a smurf vs "a pop off game". Just did some handtracking of my small sample and i encounter about 1 smurf every 12-15 games in silver 1 elo. Some quick maths shows that this won't stop me from reaching my supposed elo but psychologically this aint easy to cope lmao. Thats like once a week with a playing 2-3 times per day rate.

Or maybe just get better at the game and stop crying about smurfs as if its a big deal. Boohoo you lost your virtual fake meaningless ranked points who cares you aren't gonna die i'll never understand how people can complain about smurfs so much like are you gonna cry because you lost your rr that means literally nothing?

@riotgames chain 👇

I think smurf content creators need their mains temp banned, otherwise these people will never care