Smurfing is a massive problem, and it wastes everyone’s time. It ruins the player experience in two distinct ways:
The “Instant Resign”: You wait in a long matchmaking queue only for the smurf to immediately forfeit the game, wasting your time just so they can tank their ELO.
The “Massacre”: When the smurf finally decides to play, it’s to completely crush a player far below their actual skill level. It’s an unbalanced, unfun, and pointless match.
The issue is so widespread that major figures like T90 are making entire videos about it.
The problem is, most proposed solutions are overly complex. They involve tracking in-game time before a loss counts or other complicated rules. Not only are these hard to implement, but they also risk punishing innocent players.
What about a player who has to suddenly leave a match because their baby is crying? Or a younger player whose parents tell them to pause and come to dinner? These players shouldn’t be penalized for having real-life constraints, but a smurf should.
The Real Problem & The Simple Solution
Smurfing only works for one reason: A player can artificially lower their ELO to get matched against weaker opponents.
So, here is the simple, two-click solution to make smurfing useless, and even punitive.
Matchmaking should be based on the player’s PEAK ELO from the last 30 days.
That’s it.
Why This Works:
It Makes Smurfing Useless: If a player wants to smurf, they have to intentionally lose 10-20 games. With this system, it wouldn’t matter. Their ELO might say 1000, but the matchmaker will still use their 30-day peak of 1600. They will still be matched against 1600-level players.
It Becomes Punitive: The smurf just wasted hours losing games for absolutely no benefit. They can’t get the easy wins they want.
It’s Fair: Your peak ELO over a month is a very accurate representation of your true skill level. Even with natural ELO inflation, this system works. If you have a bad streak or take a week off, your peak rating still reflects what you’re capable of. It’s the same simple, transparent rule for everyone, and it doesn’t punish players for real-life events.
people can just make a new account with family sharing.
probably not. instead of going up to 1600 they start throwing games earlier, to keep the peak at 1100 or so.
additionally it’s unfair to other 1600 elo players: you are getting matched with a 1000 elo player, so you basically get no elo for your win, but lose a ton if you lose.
btw I strongly doubt that there are 1600s who smurf down to 1000 elo. it’s super boring to play if you are this much better (you could easily 2v1 at this difference) and you can more easily just make a new account
Nope, you have still not addressed the ACTUAL problem.
It’s not smurfing. It’s map skill.
My win rate is 70-80% Arena/Islands, 40% Arabia, Nomad 20%.
No matter how much you implement punitive measures to prevent smurfing and map dodging, a player can still attain the smurfing status by just playing the map out anyway.
For a few months I banned Arabia to see how high I could climb and got 1500-1600 ELO, I unbanned Arabia and went back down to 1300 ELO.
So now I want you to imagine that I play a 1300 ELO player on Arena, when I can beat players 300-400 ELO above them on that map.
The solution is ELO per map type. Open / Closed / Water / Nomad.
Imagine you get to 2k ELO playing only Islands. It means that you can never play a different map without getting destroyed.
If you have ELO per map type, you can keep your Water map ELO, while still being able to try the different maps. The map picks and bans is also necessary for queue time.
each queue should also have its own elo of course. just like how currently empire wars/random map, 1v1/team games each have their own elo.
maybe make it so the starting elo is some average of your other elos (maybe limited to similar maps)
Just make short games (less than 5 minutes) not lose elo, that’s it, no further changes needed, smurfs would have to do this for like an hour to loose enough elo, this would not completely remove smurfs, but make it so they had to do a lot more work for less results
You can’t really legitimately lose in 5 minutes, if you resign before that it was a real life problem or a smurf, it doesn’t mean you’re better or worse than the other player, so elo shouldn’t be affected
Obviously if many people use it to troll, just do it so if you resign in less than 5 minutes a lot you get banned or a timer
this fixes the smurf issue, but then makes the map dodging issue worse.
tbf I might return to ranked if this were the case, because now I can play arabia only, and don’t need to deal with any of the stupid new civs. just dodge very time it’s something I don’t like
Obviously if many people use it to troll, just do it so if you resign in less than 5 minutes a lot you get banned or a timer
Elo shouldn’t be a penalization, it’s not victory points that should be rewarded or used as a deterant for wrongful behaviour, it’s a matchmaking tools
Map and civ dodgers shouldn’t affect elo, because it isn’t that they are bad at the game, it’s that they don’t want to play it “properly”, they should get actual punishments and not be declared “lower skill” than they are
Something that other games have is a hidden 2nd ranking that is how “fair” someone plays.
The more often you cheat, queue dodge, use insults, etc. the lower your fairness score goes and you get matched with other people that also got a low score.
When you directly ban a cheater then they just create a new account and come back. But if you slowly start matching them with other cheaters then they will only slowly realise that and then take a lot longer until they go make a new account.
This way fair playing players would be less likely to run into bad actors while bad actors have no easy way to get matched with fair players again unless they keep playing fair for a while.
That is glorious. I have joked for years about a smurf purgatory on a parallel ladder-jail where all they do is match each other, I didn’t know it was a thing. Which games do that?
Different offences would have different penalties. Cheating would bring you there the fastest. Saying bad things that would get you suspended now would instead reduce your fairness score.
Of course if you insult your enemy or team mates in every match you lose then you will be stuck with a bad fairness score.
There is a really easy way to counter the instant resigning… Just give instant resigning major que penaltys.
Instant resign ( first 10 min) is 3hour que penalty
After 5 resigns like this within a certain amount of ranked matches say within 50 matches, you force those players to play in a special ranked bracket, where there is no elo gain or losses. Where only these kind of players are based. Where they need to play 100 games. If players are obisouly throwing in those games, multiplayer ban of 30 days. 3 strikes… perm ban.
I know map skill plays a big role, but not that huge you are mentioning. Kinda don’t believe you. I ban all closed maps. If i would play them I would probably drop 100 elo on closed maps but that is it, that is not why i ban them. I don’t like closed maps because they tend to play for much longer. 100 elo difference should represent you having only 10% chance to win against that player (at least in chess its supposed to be that way).
Your win rate is good on the maps you mastered but that does not qualify you as a smurf because you have a normal play rate by game duration. Map dodgers have a disproportionately large chunk of their games be short and lost, see this. Non-smurf people who are good on one map will always give back their points on other maps, it’s not different from playing only one top civ. That’s not a contradiction with the need to stop obvious rating-droppers and map-dodgers.
Also, you say you have 70-80% on Arena/Islands and 20% on Nomad but you have 144 / 6 / 9 games on those maps so don’t worry too much about a win rate for a map you barely played.
