The TG ladder is one big mess. Smurfing is just one solution. Smurfing is just one of them.
The TG ladder is broken because of issues of the past. These issues are kinda fixed, but the devs still didnt clean up the mess. As result TG rating became meaningless. Their “kinda fix” turned out to be a bad fix. Many playerrs use smurf account to lower the TG rating of a team so they can play against weaker players and boost a main account. This give people a bad experience.
Then you also have the inflation on the ladder what happend due to all issues in the past. As result new players start at 1000, but some have to grind their way up to much higher, which is much harder as solo on the TG ladder compared to playing on the 1v1 ladder. The outcome of a game is not only based on your own skill, but also on others.
As result you will see many players of 1600 elo with a win rate around 70%. They are probably no smurfs. They are players who still havent reached their true elo yet. Their elo still have to go up before they reach that level. But since the TG rating is already streched to 5K (while 1v1 only goes to 2.6k) it can really take a lot of games.
The solution to all of this is pretty easy. All of the following needs to be done:
- Reset the TG ladder. It will take some time again to resettle. But after a while it will settle.
- Change the Elo calculation for team games. There are many suggestions posted in this thread. It goes into all of this in much more detail.
It is ashame the devs are still ignoring this issue. The fix doesnt seems that hard. In the past they put it into the patch notes under “Ongoing Investigation”, but in the latest patch notes it isnt even mentioned anymore. It isnt mentioned in the road map as well. So i really start to lose all hope. It looks like the devs dont think it is an issue, while threads like this pops up pretty regularly.