clearly, out of my 10 TG games, there are around 2 to 3 games you can clearly see a smurf account here.
usually those smurfs are the opponents because they are usually doing this for their duo team.
I know smurfs are everywhere in different games. but for a games costing you so much time to play one match, I think this is really needed to be prevented.
What do you think?
actually how toxic of these players are?
if you want an unbalance win game, go playing unranked and enjoy rapping other TCs.
This is totally destroying other players time.
The smurfs of pros are usually close to their own ratings
This is probably a 1600 player having a smurf
what they are doing is to averagely pull down their own elo to match weaker opponents.
10 wins 0 losses looks like a legitimate (though young) alt account. Unless these people are making new accounts every week… Did you say you see people with this kind of win/loss record in 30% of your games?
Smurfs I’ve heard about before are characterised by long losing & winning streaks, and many games where they resign without really playing.
yes, around 20% to 30% I would say.
few will be on my team, but mostly they are the opponents.
sometimes you can just feel it when you are so outplayed during the game.
I’m ~1700 in 1v1 and lately started playing 3v3 with some real life friends who are ~1100 in 1v1.
I did only 8 Teamgames before and now I’m sitting at 14/0 or 15/0 after some games with my friends, but ranked just seems to be the best way to play with them. We still get matched up with the same caliber of players, so I think we will have to play like 10 more games until it gets challenging for me (we had some games where one of them was dieing though).
I can understand that it doesn’t feel great for the opponent, but that’s just what can happen if you play ranked. I never have the intention to get matched up against weaker players, but it’s who the system asigns us against. So what should we do?
The positive way of thinking would be to see it as a challenge and learn from it. But especially if it gets to lategame I can understand that it’s pretty bad to get that “we never had a chance” feeling.
I think the biggest problem is the teamgame rating system being absolutely terrible. So rating in teamgames is not a good indicator for skill anyway. I also saw some 1700 tg players who seemed pretty decent, while others just did not fight back at all.
Another “problem” is that skill gaps in AoE2 are huge. I think it’s overall a good thing, because it means the game is very complex and interesting, lots of things to learn etc… But it also means a good player can completely dominate a game and will be unstoppable if noone is at least close to his skill level. The biggest thing with this is that it applies on multiple levels. The 1100 1v1 players can easily dominate in a game of 800 players. I can make them look like a noob and a pro gamer can do that to me (and probably there are even more layers to that).
So I think the hardest the to fix here is that most of those “smurfs” are probably not people intentionally smurfing, but rather people who just join the que, but are not rated according to their skill level (and the system in teamgames right now can’t do that reliably, even after hundreds of games, because the devs screwed it up big time).
Smurfing can be completely removed by not allowing family share on steam, smurfs wont pay for another copy of the game.
Thats why I hate the fact that premade partys and randoms are playing each other… just no point of doing this. The random team should at least have all the rank of the highest rated premade teammate to compensate for the improved strats and communication of the premades
How expensive is the game ? only $20. I will definitely pay for it and enjoy it for a week.
The real problem is not new account, it is the high elo player carry low elo players with discord.
A player with 2.5k+ elo can surely beat 4 people with 1.5k elo.
i guess it depends;
this account is also a “smurf”, because i got game pass, but also a steam version of the game.
But there is a difference between a person who intentionally losses a lot of games to get into an “easy” elo, or a person who just started a new account.
Some player for example got a smurf for days when there are under the influence of drugs(weed/alcohol) or when they are tiered, and they know they will perform worse.
i understand your point, but since your haven’t played TG a lot, you dont actually know how terrible this situation is.
As above a user also mentioned, people doing this just because they team with other guys in discord so as to making a lower matching opponents, to win the game.
To me this is really disgusting.
If MS enable family share just want to increase the player pool for their stat, come on, this is absolutely no need, and you are allowing people to ruin the game.
I also agree you that AOE2 has a huge difference of the skill gap.
for me, I am currently at around 1500 in solo.
I can handle 1v 2 1300 players in a TG normally.
so a 200 elo difference can make this huge change, can you see the problem of smurf?
averagely pull down their elo (the whole team) down to 100, can really make their win rate much more higher.
That’s why you can see those smurf, with all 1v1, TG games below 50 to 100 matches, and get above 70% win rate for all of his games.
As long as pros can have their smurf accounts, then also others will make smurf accounts. Last time i checked the 1v1 ladder, MBL had even 2 accounts in the top 10.
It seems like there are nog rules for smurfing. I have reported some smurfs in the past, but these accounts didnt got banned. So the devs think smurfs arent an issue.
I do think they will be become an issue. Or even worse: They are an issue. Not only in team games, but also in 1v1. But it looks like the devs dont really care about smurfs at all…
I hope they will add some kind of policy about smurfs. I hate it if i have to play against a smurf.
yes, absolutely, I faced smurf in solo too.
and everytime I saw this, it’s really making me feel so bad as not because of losing a game.
It’s because I lost a game in an unfair way, wasting my time at all.
Feels like more and more smurfs are appearing these days. As long as devs don’t care about them, i would suggest to always shortly check the opponents’ profile at the start. At every single game and just resign if they have very few games with a crazy win rate.
Im only playing team games. Right now pretty unplayable for me.
Im not a good player(about 2100 TG Elo) but im playing almost everyday 2-3 games.
Have`nt won a game in a week. Always against people with very few games absolutely crushing us…
They even admit it and tell me that its just common among high elo players to smurf right now.
I dont care about my elo but its just not fun anymore loosing every game without a single chance.
Today my friends quit the game because of that.
Sad times
The most practical way to eliminate smurf account is to tie each account to real world info: passport, ID card, drive license etc. MBL can’t possibly have a dupe of himself right?
But then privacy issue and lots of people might as well just quit AOE2DE entirely because who trust Microsoft handling sensitive user information anyways?
Smurf exist because one person can create multiple accounts. No smurf means one account per player for life. Do you guys want that happen?
Hahahaha i dont think you understand what the word practical means… That is definitely not practical…
This sound dubious… You’re saying most high elo players are making new accounts just to get wins in, even if this was true, they are in the extreme minority. So statistically speaking you’ll face lower elos since there simply aren’t enough high elos rolling around to smurf.
What is more than likely happening is because the TG MM system is abysmal everyone is just getting matched with everyone else, instead of players of equal skill. Bad players with tons of games aren’t losing elo so they slowly creep up. Good players aren’t earning elo fast enough so they sit at lower elos.
On top of this (as explained by one of the first posts) a slightly higher elo can absolutely demolish a lower one due to the skill curve of aoe.
But if it makes everyone feel better yeah they’re smurfs. It’s the same as those guys that call their opponents cheaters simply because the opponent won and they don’t know how.
2100 is quite above average.
TG rating isnt fully based on skill but much more based on number of games because some issues in the rating calculation.
Getting some players at 2100 with much less games that are much strenger is the result of these issues.
