Bam! you are dead It was a headshot from a distance, the same gun you’re using. Dan, they’re pretty good.perhaps that too good. Could they be Smurfs?
These are considerations players make in the heat of competitive FPS like CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, and Valorant. If a teammate or opponent seems superior based on rank, it may actually be a higher ranked player using a different account (a “Smurfs” account).The ethics of smurfing (opens in new tab) It’s complicated, but most people agree that playing against the Smurfs is terrible.
One commenter’s conclusion to a post on the Valorant subreddit claimed that Riot was “downplaying the game’s obvious problem: smurfing” in order to increase total player count and sell more skins. This comment is personally 3,400 word response (opens in new tab) It doesn’t happen every day.
Gist? EvrMoar says the Riot devs aren’t the “back man” trying to manipulate Valorant’s player count. His team treats smurfing as a serious problem, but he wants fans to know that internal research shows that “smurfs aren’t as common as players think.”
“Every decision we make for ranking has to do with, at the design stage, ‘Can this reduce smurfing?’ or ‘How can we change this to reduce smurfing?’ There were always questions,” he said.
EvrMoar says claims that more smurf accounts increase Riot’s success are false.
“Some of the strongest data we have across the gaming industry is why matchmakers need to have ‘skill-based matchmaking’ and how fair matches are. Because people will play the game more and quit less based on .There will be more unfair matches and more players will quit the game,” said EvrMoar. “Why do you want to keep players away?”
It’s not necessarily cut and dry. A player who maintains a separate account has long suspected that he will buy twice as much cosmetics. After all, we haven’t seen anyone peeking into his Valorant corner with a standard skinless gun in the swamp, and Evr Moar said he’s cut off from his Valorant monetization side and completely While acknowledging that he isn’t sure about , he also rejects this idea.
“The idea of wanting a Smurf [because] “They spend more money” is not true. In general, there are always exceptions, but alternate accounts/smurfs aren’t really monetized,” he said.
It’s one thing to know that Riot (and all other competitive game developers) are aware of the problem, but it actually feels like there’s a solution That’s another matter.
What does Valorant do to combat smurfing?
Riot says Valorant has a reliable (but imperfect) system for dealing with Smurfs. Back in October 2021, EvrMoar wrote (opens in new tab) Valorant’s automated system is “very good at detecting smurfs” and will fix your MMR as soon as you dial it in.
So why are some players still felt Smurf infested like Valorant? Perhaps it’s because Riot deliberately doesn’t do what’s visible like other games do, instead opting for automatic solutions that are invisible to the player. For example, both PUBG and Rainbow Six Siege require him to have two-factor authentication to play ranked.
“I think a lot of it is also that we don’t want to be completely transparent about how we approach smurfing. I don’t want them to know, how can they circumvent our system,” said EvrMoar.
what a brave do conduct:
- Automatically detect when a player may be smurfing
- Quickly adjust MMR after a few matches
what a brave is not conduct:
- Two-factor authentication required to play Ranked Battles
- A phone number is required to play Ranked Battles
Riot has looked at two-factor authentication and SMS authentication to combat smurfing, but EvrMoar says these tactics don’t address the problem itself, but instead “make people play games because they can’t solve the problem.” It claims to create a “secondary solution that blocks you from playing”. the problem is direct. ”
To illustrate the point, EvrMoar described a hypothetical situation in which implementing SMS/two-factor authentication could cut the number of smurf accounts in half, but at the same time You can play Valorant and block legitimate players who don’t have an account several times. Phone (even if it’s only his 3% of players, less than 1% of players are Smurfs, that’s a lot).
EvrMoar said these mitigations would not be a problem if players dedicated to creating Smurf accounts could simply create a new email address or sign up with a different phone number to get around the problem. I think it may not be worth it. However, he hasn’t completely closed the door to his duality.
Whether or not these invisible solutions “solve” smurfing entirely, it’s nice to see Riot being more publicly active on the issue than other developers. last month, Patch 5.01 (opens in new tab) We have started testing the “New Smurf Detector” in North America. The patch notes weren’t more specific, but EvrMoar said the results “look very promising.”
