Today for the first time i faced 3 confirmed smurfs back to back with conq mains. I am a low plat.
What this will do is effectively carve out a wall at the gold level, and everyone below gold will be little kids playing on dads PC or 1rst time RTS tryers.
Once these people hit the gold level they will quit the game thinking everyone must be incredibly good if they cant even get into gold without getting abused.
Yes, abused. Smurfs dont merely win games, they hope-tease. They know what they’re doing to these noobs.
The ones who remain play in the gold bracket hoping to get a fair match, but they are few and far between nowadays. The new player numbers are inflated massively by family shared accounts
I dont face this issue personally, i think higher opponent is opportunity to improve. A smurf account would get to their relevant elo really fast (in less than 10 games).
in my experience, smurfs do not actually play in a normal way against noobs. You could theoretically try to study them but when you really know the game you can just play in unusual ways against an unskilled opponent.
Trust me i played against grubby once and i did learn a lot from that game. But these smurfs that come in and play unusually i dont learn from them at all.
Yeah. Unless they are somehow losing a bunch of games deliberately, its just not really practical to have a smurf account. Certainly to keep a Gold/Plat level ELO. At that point its unclear what the fun of it is.
I’ve played 35ish games so far this season at the Gold III/Plat I level, not a huge amount but some and encountered zero smurfs. There was one guy who I felt might be a smurf at the time - but he’s now Diamond II with 80 games played, so I’d guess not. He was probably just Plat III and on the way up.
Disable steam family sharing and the amount of smurfs will drop dramatically. Aoe3 had this until the free trial launched and then family sharing was disabled and those on the trial can’t play ranked so the only way to smurf on aoe3 is to buy the game again on a new account. With family sharing it is very easy to just repeatedly make new accounts and demolish everyone on your way back up to conqueror.
Wait if they lose a bunch of games deliberately then you’d be winning lol.
I think people are making this a bigger issue than it is. Why people are such sore losers. Learn that losing is fine and that some are better some are worse.
Im against disabling steam family sharing. That’s mean paying more for more account. No.
This. People should just see it as an opportunity to learn from a much more skilled player. As long as the opponent wasn’t shit talking it’s totally fine.
From a competitive thinking yes, but if you only can play a few matches every day and they all are unfair, it’s no longer fun.
Not everyone wants to get to conqueror, and not everyone is a guy in his 20’s or 30’s with minnor responsabilities. I play with my sister’s husband, he’s 44 and he is in platinum whereas I am in conqueror II.
I was platinum months ago, but I proposed to myself get to conq and after a lot of improving I did, but for example, for this guy, is literally imposible to get to conqueror due to a simple thing: he can’t play enough to do it.
He only wants to get some fair matches when he can play.
Not talking about smurf people, but matchmaking seems to be broken because you can perfectly get paired against 3 conqueror III, being your team for example conqueror I, platinum I and diamond I.
Talking about unfair matches, 3-4 people premade vs no premade, a big rank gap between teams, etc…
Team games are a different beast tough. I’d assume that the playerbase simply isn’t large enough (maybe on peak hours) for team games to be consistently very fair. In the end devs have to make a decision that either goes for a more fair matchup or reduced queue time. I can’t remember the site for team game statistics but iirc 3v3 and 4v4 were the least popular modes, which is only logical as it includes highest numbers of players required.