Hi, I’m a new user and I was going to upload an attachment so show a perfect example of ELO rigging 2x 2.7k+ + 2 smurf accounts on 1k and 1.3k.
… Ok? There is no punishment for smurfing or teaming up with people lower than your elo.
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You don’t get money by playing Age of Empires 2. I don’t see the point in banning smurfing or taking action against it, it’s not like you’re smurfing at a tournament where there is actually a stake.
It ruins the game for many people, and said people get frustrated and stop playing, and the game slowly dies. I used to play TG almost every day, now i play maybe once or so a week because of this, the games are not balanced at all and it’s frustrating. Personally i’d rather just resign but my mate insists on playing and we get wrecked every time, such fun!
Whenever we don’t play vs smurfs we win very easily, but our TG elo is lower because of all the loses vs smurfs. Again, not fair for the people who are actually at their real elo. It’s a MESS! That’s why the devs should take care of it.
(also i know i’m playing vs smurfs because i always have my 2nd monitor with aoe2net open, so i check it out while the game is loading xD)
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I talked about this and other issues here.
They closed the thread but the problem - as I witness in this thread - keeps only increasing.
Smurfs and early quitters.
Honest players being eloe’d to 0ish ranks as a result of hidden smurfs profiles.
Multiplayer accounts of a same player with 20 or more smurf accounts.
Subject leave in team-games to qualified majority vote.
etc.
What is currently being done by devs to address this?
I want to thank the people who voice the problem. Those who know of game rigging but don’t talk about it are part of the problem. Maybe decreased online $$ stream revenue or less ego-satisfaction out of steamrolling players under 20 minutes is the problem?
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In the era of internet, online streaming and hidden sources of revenue, you never know. People can say one thing and do the very opposite, you can only trust someone if he has only one identity, consistent behaviour and its integrity.
Now, if there is 1 player with 20 accounts pretending it’s 20 different players and sufficient IT knowlege to trick the game controls, hacking and exploiting system… thinking all players are respectful and honest becomes self-denial of reality.
Ok, so they can get money by Age of Empires 2. However, you never know how, so it might as well be impossible but you have an assumption.
As far as I know:
Streaming - works on LOW ELO too, sucks to stream while smurfing, sucks to stream while LOW ELO on HIGH ELO due to losing most of your games.
Other hidden sources - such as what?
But you don’t get money by playing Age of Empires 2. So why does it matter for you? You don’t lose anything.
Hey, if someone is desperate enough to buy 20 copies of Age of Empires 2 I hope every scheme works out of him, that man has commitment.
Early quitters, I’m with you there. Some idiots whose wall was just broken and the next thing you know they resign. I report them and I hope you do the same.
But smurfs, I don’t really see any benefit to it and I’m not playing for money, at least early quitters ruin the experience but if someone beats me because he’s better than me, good for him.
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I am still curious on how this supposedly works.
Like, what is your Elo atm, and what Elo do you guess would be your “true rating”?
And whats the true rating of the Smurfs you allegedly run into constantly?
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I disagree, this is just making a blind eye and pretending the problem does not exist.
Ranking system was precisely made to avoid extreme unequal differences, yet at the moment elo is just a number. But without any further controls, this is pure naive approach. You can have a person with a +2000elo profile and at the same time he as a profile of +1000, +500, +200 elo. If you are beaten by a player account with +300 elo, yet that player account plays very similar to gameplays of +1500 elo ranks or eay outside of his elo league bracket, you know the player is a smurf on purpose.
Now it’s no use to say smurfs are a minority or a very rare case. Seeing in 700-900 elos people being steamrolled in less than 30 min by people in imp age and massive armies is NOT something that can be accomplished by casual players or noobs, but by professional ao2 videogamers with extensive experience. “Being beaten” by someone whose elo reflects his game performance is totally fine, but “being beaten” by a profile whose game performance is 4x, 5x times aboce his elo… that is not normal and that has to be looked upon.
There are aoe2 players with several accounts who use it deliberately for smurfing, ruining the experience of newer players who use ranking system as a way to play a game with likewise-skilled people, who only see that the rank system is exploited by abusive, narcissist and scumbag cheaters who play ao2 in elo ranks way below their real rank to just steam-roll new or casual players. That they do this to quench their immature egos, or have fun steam-rolling casual or new players is one thing; that the game devs allow such behaviours is another.
In other video game platforms, smurfing players and smurf accounts get penalities, even banning player alltogether from the platform, yet in ao2, smurfing is an accepted practise to which “nothing can be done about”. That is wrong, sorry.
If you want to lose against someone better, make sure you lose to somone who is not smurfing. That is, if you are not a smurf yourself.
Either way, a game community has the right to defend against smurfs. The logic next step in the community is blacklisting smurfs, this way newer players can refuse to play against dishonest players who only play ao2 to ruin other players fun experience. This too is valid for early quitters.
The unranked system, is even more subject to abuse because I’ve seen tons of games where only low elos are accepted, and the same smurfs on ranked appear on unranked with lower profiles steam-rolling others, so the “go play unranked if ranked is too difficult” reason doesn’t hold.
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all this talk about smurfs makes me wonder: how many smurfs are there?
you guys make it sounds like this is a super common occurance. in my 200+ 1v1 games i dont think i have encountered a smurf, while i’ve been called a smurf by sore losers several times. i feel calling opponents smurfs is more of a coping mechanism than an actual issue in many cases
I understand it’s more of a problem in team games, but team elo is meaningless anyway so it’s even harder to distinguish smurfs from genuine accounts with few games
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It is not just “a problem”, it is the 50 elephants in the room problem in team games.
Also, smurfing is actually illegal behaviour in many team-game platforms, with reasons similar to those already pointed out here and in other smurfing threads.
Yes I also would love to know the actual number of people smurfing. I have checked games of people accusing someone of smurfing and haven’t found an actual smurf that way yet. It’s mostly just a case of different strategies and misplays. More importantly checking the accused smurfers other games they don’t ever seem to have a deliberate losing streak and/or series of games where they play obviously deliberately terribly.
I think it’s so awesome this game has so much depth to it that someone can be good at one of booming or rushing or raiding or micro or strategy but bad at the rest. But it can feel like that awesome micro means they’re a pro, since you don’t see the bad macro behind it.
One thing that really helped me get better was realising that just because things look terrible for me doesn’t mean the opponent is actually in a good spot, often times they had less vills when I used to quit.
I think anyone accusing someone seriously of smurfing needs to watch the game replay and a few others of that same player and look for patterns of lowering their elo. Not even just see what their max elo is. My max elo is ~100 higher than where I am 90% of the time and it’s not because I’m not trying.
But it’s definitely easier to just shout “smurf!” and move on.
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I agree!!
Smurfs used to be a small problem on HD days, now it’s the norm! I’m pretty sure that more than half the ranked players have a smurf account, at least for TG.
@TwerDefender it’s not that hard to spot a smurf. You can spot a smurf by their winrate, usually around 70% or more, and low number of games. (let’s be honest AoE isn’t a game that you just buy and are great at instantly) you can also use aoe2.net and check their steam profile. You’ll see something that says: “this user hasn’t filled any information yet” or something similar. They’ll also be steam account lvl 0, which means they never bought a game or had anything done in their steam account = smurf. The clever ones set their smurf account to Private so you can’t see any of this xD
smurfing in 1v1 isn’t that big of a problem, there are many smurf strats that only work in TG. TG elo was made meaningless because most of the players on the ladder are smurfing.
If you want to see how many smurfs there are, click AoE2.net ← and set the order by win streak or win rate.
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I have 79% winrate in team games on my only account. so this clearly isn’t a sure way of determining if someone is a smurf.
or maybe someone who doesnt care about vanity on the internet
the steam account lvl being 0, is a bad metric too:
if you buy games anywhere but steam the level doesnt increase. eg if you bought the game on amazon or in a store your level doesnt change
none of these are evidence of smurfing
Yes they are actually. But then what do you call this? AoE2.net or this AoE2.net or AoE2.net
If you think these are legit accounts you’re in denial. It took me 2 seconds to get these links, and i could get thousands more for you.
Sure there may be an account out there that was created a week ago, the person bought aoe2 and played 100 matches in one week and is the best player around, hence the incredible winrate and low number of games, but i think those are pretty rare lol
they look like smurfs (one of them officially being a vivi smurf)
i still strongly doubt your claim about
that’s why i would like some real data on this
(also all of this is why i mostly play 1v1)
Most of the smurfs use the “Family Share” feature but i don’t know of any way to see only these accounts, that would be the best way to know for sure.
Yeah i wanted to get into 1v1 instead of TG for this reason, but i don’t find it as fun as 2v2. Also 1v1 is too stressful for me : ( lol
Sorry, thats just not true.
Everyone who has a basic understanding of age of empires 2 (maybe watched a tournament once) and has played another RTS before can steamroll in 700-900. I myself did this, i won the first 10 games on my account, and 18 out of the first 20.
But even is you were right, that would be even more of a problem. Because there are maybe 100 pros in aoe2 (and thats generous), but thousends of 700-900 player. How is this supposed to work?
And thats not even getting into the big question of how the entire elo system would react to a big amount of smurfs. I asked you before (you chose to ignore it…):
The reason i asked is because with as many smurfs as you claim there are, we would see the results in the system. Because when a smurf wins versus you, he get 15 points from you. After some matches, he is getting close to his true elo again, defeating the purpose of smurfing.
Now, two things can happen.
Option a is to intentionaly lose some games to drop elo again. However, this not only is not allowed, its funnily enough also something people hardly ever complain. Its always “smurfs stomp me”, but never “its annoying how many free wins i get versus people who arnt even trying”.
Option b is to delete the account and create a new one. If this was whats happening, we would see a huge elo deflation: A smurf takes a few hundred points off of other players, then deletes the account, rinse and repeat. But we are seeing to opposite, elo is actually inflating.
So neither are there huge amounts of smurfs loosing games intentionally, nor are there huge amounts of smurfs beeing deleted and created again. Therefor, there cant be as many smurfs as you claim there are.
I agree that in teamgames smurfs can be somewhat problematic, but as shown above, there are not that many of them.
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I mean i hate smurfing but the whole 3k with 1500 thing vs like 4 1800 to 2k people dident come from nowhere and so i would say people argurly would swim more around 1600-1800 elo as a smurf.
(I would reckon but i could be wrong)As a contrast i think some people also intentionally and maliciously tank elo to stomp noobs and thats far worst but the ratio of how many people tank elo to how many truely grind up again is unknown to me