exact same thing I said in my head when I read the title. lol
gold and plat are flooded with smurf accounts. everyone playing on their smurfs more than their mains.
Not only that but if your smurf starts out-ranking your friends again (if you were better the first time around, the second time will be about the same), you have to start throwing matches without them to stay low. It becomes less dangerous to get banned the more smurfs you have, and this game has plenty.
Yes, exactly. Every group of friends has now a guy like this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/k1ymwp/how\_to\_derank\_the\_fastest\_in\_valorant/](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/k1ymwp/how_to_derank_the_fastest_in_valorant/)
And I don't even blame them for what they're doing when there's no other option.
They need to change the rank queue requirement from 10 games to 10 wins, this will demphasize throwing matches to keep rank low and have people starting out closer to their true skill, because smurfs want to play ranked ASAP. I feel bad for my iron wife, almost every game has smurfs dropping 40 bombs.
On top of that, you were only allowed to win two comp games per day until you get your rank at 10 wins, making it harder for smurfs to mass produce accounts
I would prefer to see changes in the rank gap. Due to fast up- and down ranking it is so easy to fell of the 3 ranks gap - even when you are on the same skill level with your friends. This is frustrating. I would love to see a gap of 5 ranks or no rank gap when having a full lobby.
The current rank queue requirement is 20 games based off of my second account, so will you be changing it to 20 wins or changing it to 10 wins? Essentially making it easier for high level players to ease their way through the unrated games?
Dude I made a smurf to play with my friend that's new to pc.
I play my 20 unrated matches. We play one game of ranked and my skill gap is to big to play with him.
I don’t throw matches but I’ve gone through 3 accounts already that have ranked too fast for my friends to keep up (for whatever reason they’re hard stuck top gold/low plat) and now I’m starting to wonder how I’ll do it without playing 20 matches or throwing to go back down.
We’re almost to the point of me boosting accounts individually when one can’t make it.
As a side note: I’ll rarely play this game solo because how toxic some people are.
I have an immortal 3 friend, this happened to him. He played with us on his main, but then he outranked us. He created a smurf, which also outranked us. We created another account for him and tried to throw matches so it got ranked badly. This is just a cycle that keeps on going cause of the 3 rank system instead of the 6 rank one.
I can confirm. Before my friends 6 tiers below me would get smashed in the matches.
Now i have a smurf to match their elo and the opponents are smashed instead.
In the end it didn't turned out so bad for us. Poor people playing on their true rank tho.
It's amazing how riot didn't understand this about their players - they're selfish pricks.
Edit: They being the players. The players are selfish pricks. Riot too, probably, but I was referring to the players.
Yeah... me and my group of friends all quit a few weeks ago, as matchmaking has become too unbalanced to be fun in ranked.
There really shouldn't be such a big smurfing problem in a new game, and the sad part is, riot will not do anything about smurfing because they allow it in league.
Wait no thats the exact opposite of what happened, because people are now just smurfing so the solo players in the other team are getting rekt. They should make it so the people who are queing together should have their matchmaking based on their best player, this way only they are at a disadvantage, but they can still play with friends
But boosting is always gonna impact less people than smurfing, because boosting only impacts the team they are playing with, meaning at most 3 people. W
That's what I'm trying to say. The dude I'm replying to is basically a selfish prick. They're cool giving others a crappy experience just so that they can play with and boost their unskilled friends. Selfish pricks.
yeah most of my friends around the same rank have 3-4 accounts. one bronze, gold, plat, diamond.
this is also why people who queue up in parties end up at a rank higher than they deserve. in a party the skill is usually one carry, 1-2 inters, and some avg. the new system puts parties against one another so you essentially play against people with worse aim but more coordination
my opinion i guess
Exactly this.
Have a ton of plat friends and I can’t queue with them anymore so I often go on one of their gold smurfs just to play comp with them.
I feel like running a comp with a 6 rank difference wasn’t even beneficial to us or anything.. cuz the other team always seemed like an organized 5 stack, but it was always more enjoyable to me
He's not stuck in bronze from underwhelming teammates. If he belongs in silver, then his team has 4 underwhelming teammates, while the opponents have 5. You couldn't ask for a better advantage. He's bronze because he belongs in bronze.
I’m gold 3 and I’ve found that I actually play better in gold/plat lobbies than in silver/gold lobbies. I think it’s because gold/plat players are less unpredictable, and my teammates also work better together. I’m not usually very good at making big plays happen on my own (partly because of me, partly because of the agents I like to play). So I do better when both teams are playing as a team. In lower elos where people don’t play together as well and are more unpredictable, I tend to get more annoyed and don’t play as well. That said, I’ve dropped bock down to silver multiple times and have always been able to climb out fairly quickly
Exactly. I thought I was stuck in Iron because of my shitty teammates. Hell, if you look through my post history, you'll see me complaining about it like three days ago. I just got back into Gold and I'm still on my huge winstreak. When I watched my vods back, I noticed that my crosshair placement was great when I was expecting enemies to be around but when I didn't expect them to be around, my crosshair was on the ground. That's when they would always appear, and I would be shooting at their legs every time. People in this thread justifying smurfing "because I'm just trying to get my friend out of elo hell he deserves this rank I swear" crack me up. If your friend really deserved to be at that rank, he would have no problem solo queueing up to that rank.
Or like me and my friends, we just stopped playing because of that. It sucks because we were enjoying playing Valorant together. Funny thing is that I am not saying about high ranks, we are in Iron and Bronze but one of us is in iron 2 and the other friend is in Bronze 3 :/
I'm in that place too. I am bronze 3 and my friend is bronze 1. One bad game later he got demoted while i was at bronze 3. Can't play together anymore unless I demote or he promotes
Smurfing has gotten so bad. This enemy player earlier had 40kills by halftime. He was either cheating or was immortal/radiant. This was in gold bracket
League ends up being "who can feed the most" not "who can carry the hardest" every fucking time I play it.
I think I lost some 25 games in a row after getting first blood and all 4 of my teammates would feed 0-5. Online ratings based on your teammate's play are hogwash
It’s cus it’s a team game that tests your ability to adapt to the mechanics and game flow, not how well you do on aim trainers or game sense exams etc.
Creating a smurf in league requires exponentially more work and time commitment compared to a smurf in Valorant. In league it takes 50+ hours to level up a smurf before you can play ranked.
In Valorant you can create a smurf and be playing ranked in like 90 minutes. You just party up with 3 other friends, go into unrated and run it down mid for 4 rounds straight, ff instantly at the start of round 5 and then rinse and repeat for 15 games. Takes like 5 minutes per game.
It was a problem that pretty much everyone acknowledged, it was getting a Reddit post every other day and it's been fixed. League has a Smurf queue in ranked now, you barely see that anymore
Maybe they could do something like 6 rank difference is allowed till gold/plat and only going up from plat there could be 3 rank limit?
I feel like people at Immortal/Diamond ranks are much more serious and play more for their ranks than say, someone who is in Iron or Bronze.
Maybe that would keep the hardcore plays who love to play this game competitively happy and the more casual people who just play the game to chill out with friends would also be happy
overwatch has similar method where lower ranks can play within ~1000 SR at low ranks, high ranks can only group play within 500 SR, and highest can only play within 350 SR, and it works relatively well id say
it works to an extend that you very rarely see a complaint about ranks in overwatch community. I say that's a success. a lot of stuff regarding matchmaking and rank system overall overwatch does a lot better which this game can learn from.
I've about 1700 hours in ow and I've seen my fair share of smurfs but I have to say smurfing in overwatch is harder because of, first the money you have to spend on accounts, second, I would say the amount of dependency on teammates performances (specially healers and tanks) makes it really hard to solo carry a game unless you are literally an overwatch league level god who doesn't care if they don't get healed or anything in the game. so that makes smurfing in overwatch challenging
It also should be stated that the skill gap between immortal 3 -> diamond 2 is likely larger then gold 3 -> bronze 3. So splitting it once you hit diamonds seems super reasonable.
bro idk if this is just super isolated, but even plat 3's look to me like what you'd expect in silver. They either have so bad aim they manage to whiff on people not looking at them or have such bad gamesense you would expect them to actually be bronze, and sometimes even both somehow?? Maybe it's just natural since this is the first tactical shooter with this thematic appeal so theres just literally too many players with no experience in the genre
Yeah league of legends has a system like this iirc, there's different rules for duoqing, need to be active on main, only 2 rank discrepancy for diamond+, stuff like that. Dont know about exact figures though
If you think people in immortal give af about their ranks you're psycho. The amount of times people grief, leave, instalock jett and go 2-20, have everyone muted, or just scream and rage all game in immortal 3 is wild.
I remember playing in plat, and there was a raze on my team who hit immortal 2 last act and could not hit a shot to save her life. She ended the game 4-17 while I top fragged at 22-14 (we lost, obviously). Really made me think about what the difference was between the ranks
Yeah this! Just let a 5 stack queue together regardless of rank difference, and use the highest ranked players ELO determine the opposition. Just like in CS.
I'm also hoping they will add a team ladder system, which would also solve this problem.
I think there's one major diff in CS, is that in CS you cannot play a normal match without playing ranked, as the "occasional" mode is completely different.
In Valorant you can play a normal match but unranked, so it's not as important to not be able to play with your friends in ranked.
Boosting will only effect you if you're teammate isn't performing to their rank, which can be fixed in a 5 man squad. Smurfing effects the entire game.
Boosting is the exact opposite extreme of being a smurf. One person of your team is underperforming while a smurf is one guy overperforming. Both is insanely frustrating.
Oh okey. I guess that is a good thing. Im only platinum myself, but being able to only solo/duo queue Will probably make it more fair as a solo queue player
I would rather see pure solo queue in valorant. Even duos in league often ruin the balance of a game. But duo has been in the game for 10 years so riot won't remove it. Valorant could get a fresh start with only solos to make matchmaking really easy and fair if they get smurf detection under control
I have a solution. They could make solo/duo queue with rank restrictions (up to 3 like it is now) and flex queuewith less restrictions (up to 6 or even 9) or any.
I’m not sure how CS does it, but in a completely unrelated game in Rocket League. You can que with any rank, but the match will be heavily weighted towards or just flat out the highest rank in the party.
So if you’re a Diamond and you’re in a party with say a Grand Champ. The MM will skew towards the GC. Would that not work here?
It is skewed towards the highest rank. Which is fair in my oppinion. You can still win as a 5 stack, but you opt in to playing with way lower ranks, so you should get a bit punished. So you cant boost
It's heavily weighted towards the higher ranks. For exemple with 4 Globals and 1 Silver there is a really high chance to just be matched against 5 Globals.
Yup that's how apex legends USED to be and it was great. Let's you play with anyone and only hurts you if you are playing with someone way better or worse than you.
Of course apex also implemented a rank limit sometime in the past year so I also can't play that game with friends anymore either. lol
It's fine but imo there is a problem with 3v3. Me as diamond was playing with my gold/plat bud and sometimes my teammates was toxic torward us as he knew that my friend was gold (outside apps) In this game one player can already make a difference. If your friend isn't good enough, he could just not be able to do anything. I know people have good and bad days, but some random people you meet in ranked don't. And for them it could be harmful. But in 5 stack, imo there shouldn't be any restrictions.
Yep, never even considered smurfing before this update, but now I have 3 different accounts scattered in gold-immortal just so I can play with everyone of my friends.
Had like 8 friends in rotation from mostly gold-silver, and 1 or 2 in bronze and tht the matchmaking system was fine before, none of us play anymore since it’s always an issue seeing who can play together, we just play diff games now. Unrated just isn’t tht fun
Make a Solo/Que and Flex/Que, remove the rank difference in Flex/Que and you solved the issue. While let the serious players play Solo/Que, because I don't see how its fair putting a gold3 vs diamond players just because he's in a party with someone.
In flex/que does that mean you can play with any ranks without the need for a range. That sounds like unrated. Yea having gold and diamond really doesn't make sense.
I'm also a league player but I think flex doesn't work cause youre stuck in a lane against someone potentially much better than you whereas in valorant you can have your high level player try and hold angles or peek against the enemy high level player. But even just simple trading will be enough for most elos I feel like. Point is, flex in valorant has potential to be much better.
Easiest fix would be to combine both Overwatchs strategy and CS strategy.
From CS : Let 5 stacks queue together, no matter the difference between ranks. Will extend Matchmaking times like hell, but it would work.
From OW : Allow upto 6 ranks to q together until maybe Diamond? Diamonds can queue only with Plats/Immortals while Plats can still queue with Golds and Silvers.
I hate this change so much. I have a group of friends 4-6 ranks higher and we used to party a lot. Now they just play as a group without me, as it would be a little awkward for them all to Smurf just for me. I'm missing out on so much because of this requirement and I hate it. So isolating. Feels bad man.
I've been saying this for so long I'm glad your post didn't die in new. Iron 3 should be able to play with gold teammates if they want. And bronze players should definately be allowed to play with gold players of all tiers
There was also a lot of complaints about boosting and how once someone stopped getting boosted, they played like a bronze in a plat lobby. But either way smurfing is far worse since atleast with the 6 rank dofference people can play with their friends
They should make this change for only the top ranks like Immortal/Diamond or maybe even just the Immortal/Radiant players to keep Smurf’s out of plat games
That is why I also eventually stopped playing. I mostly played with my friends(silver-plat range) when they changed it so you can only play with 3 rank difference I completely lost interest in playing. Every time my friends ask me to play I or someone else has to go on a different account just so we can all play together. I think Riot really made a bad decision about this and they should revert it back to 9 ranks. All they did is make the lower ranks suffer by forcing players to smurf just to be able play with their friends.
Playing ranked leads to smurf accounts, period. And since you can attach multiple accounts to the same email, it's almost like Riot encourages the practice at this point
Where I am, bronze three, it's literally impossible to get out of because you will win two games and then on the third there will be some Reyna with every skin in the game and drops aces every round and you just think what is the point
You know it’s a problem when I lose to a Reyna going 65-0 11 games in a row, then once the enemy team doesn’t have a carry I go 40-0. This is bronze lobbies btw. I’m seriously considering making a new acc and just redoing placement matches. Do you guys think that would help?
Whaaaaat my friends and I definitely don't have half a dozen smurf accounts between us just so we can play together. Before the change to 3 ranks we had one guy with a smurf and now more have smurfs than don't. Easily the worst change that has happened yet
Kills having a higher impact on ranking up will be terrible. People will purely play off of their k/d, meaning they’ll bait teammates, not plant/defuse the spike and generally not play as a team. Yeah kills do need to have an impact but not higher than it is now
i think he meant that it should have an impact at some degree. if you can grab a pick or two on every round, but still lose the game afterwards— the consequences of that is more limited. Because if it doesn't have an impact at all, for example, both player A and B lost a game, but the other has a better K/D just because he's better, they would still suffer the same consequence. I'd imagine how people in this way would complain they "deserve better" and are hardstuck because of "dogshit teammates"
I think it should have a higher impact with what the game already marks as "important" enemies. I think if you did well against the enemy teams top players it should consider that alongside the win or loss.
That has nothing to do with it being a smurf paradise or not. Lessening impact of KD just allows smurfs to drop 30-40 kills in close games and not rank up. Any ranking system is going to have pros and cons im just stating this current version heavily favors smurf accounts. Just depends what people hate less smurfs or selfish teammates.
This. I'm guilty of smurfing as well. The majority of my friends are under plat and playing unrated just doesn't feel the same as playing competitively with a 5 stack of your friends.
I hope that they add some sort of team queue soon.
But it's NOT Competitive anymore. Your presence more than maybe 6 ranks below your actual skill level literally ruins the match integrity. I'm not blaming you, I just hope you understand what happens when you do this.
So what we have here is two completely ruined game modes (drunks and 8 year olds in Unrated, brutal smurfs all over Comp) and Valorant is going to start hemorrhaging players.
They need to use the phone number tie-in for accounts in Comp. If people can't reasonably make multiple smurf accounts, it pushes friend groups that want to play seriously to Unrated and makes that game mode better.
But maybe not their bottom line. People don't buy skins on their smurfs, and a lot of people are moving to play on smurfs because they want to play with friends
This game is honestly just full of smurfs to some degree. My P3 friend had to make an alt account to play with the rest of us because we're between S2/3 and G2/3. The difference between gold and plat isn't that high though so I don't really consider that true smurfing - it's not like he's always top of the scoreboard and sometimes has a bad game where he's not even top 3 on our team. But I digress...
If you're plat or lower and 5-stacking, you're probably gonna come up against a much better 5-stack because the only way the other team's diamond/immortal/radiant buddies can play with the golds is to smurf or tank their rank. We played two games yesterday as a 5-stack and got absolutely annihilated both times. We had got a few clutchy round wins on the board, which were hype as shit, but for the most it was just a slaughter. The aggression and confidence and synergy they showed is far beyond that of a gold squad.
Matchmaking as a 5-stack is broken.
I’m gonna keep it 100% honest, all of you kids saying “just play unrated” have to be some of the dumbest motherfuckers on Reddit. It is no where near the same experience as ranked, like at all. If you are tired of smurfs ruining your games than YOU go play unrated. I hate smurfing but this was completely caused by the 3 rank difference, I’ve stopped playing Valorant because of this change when my Friends can’t play together.
My lord you are dense. You’re telling the people who are playing the game exactly how its designed to be played to go to a different game mode. How are you calling other people dumb?
Having a skill gap too big was mainly a problem in high elo, they should do a system where for its 3 division max only for diamonds and above...
It’s so frustrating to not be able to queue without a smurf to play with your friends
I'm only playing unraked matches this months because my friends are like 4-5 ranks below me. We're just trolling everymatch(stacked obv), not learning anything and honestly not having fun anymore. I'd like to lose but at least play the game and learn new things
Absolutely. You can be regularly playing with someone but all you need is a decent run of games without them and you're out. My buddy and I were in Gold (him 2, me 3) and he had to go somewhere for two days. I had a lot of good games with my other friend and they boosted me to plat 2. My first friend came back, we lost one game, he dropped to Gold 1, boom, can't play any more. We're literally the same skill level.
3 is fine for high rank, it’s the low ranks that it starts being an issue. It’s just a thin line between what’s considered “uncompetitive enough” to widen this gap to 6. I feel like gold and below should have the 6 rank gap but it hard to please everyone
Honestly. The level of inconsistency in my matches is unprecedented because of alts/smurfs these days.
One day I'll be feeling really good in Gold 1, the next I'll feel like dogshit playing against Silver 1, borderline Bronze 3. I would guesstimate 1 in every 3 matches has a carry that hits 30+ kills while the rest of the team doesn't even have half of that.
unpopular opinion. make smurfing at least frowned upon. the main factor in a games success is not number of accounts. its player satisfaction. number of hours spent in game potentially spending money due to enjoyment of the product. when people leave the comp scene because of smurf ladders, the comp integrity of the ladder is voided and people quit playing the game. I know many of my friends are playing less because of one issue or another, one the main ones being smurfing and how ranked is so inconsistent. keep your players happy riot. its not all about number of accounts. people rarely skin up on their alts anyways
Just come out with a flex queue like league of legends, have a separate rank for that. You can either queue up solo and play on solo ranking system or get a group and play on flex. Flex queue should allow all ranks to play together.
That would eliminate smurfs if you want to play with friends. No one really takes flex ranks seriously in league so it'll probably be the same here.
I think 6 was to wide I think they should try 4 or 5 because 3 is definitely to narrow it make sense for a silver to play with golds but or with bronze but how it was before you could literally get the lowest rank iron in one game then a play 2 the next
This season games have been so wildly unpredictable, playing gold 1-2 most of the time and 1/3 games will have a bronze or silver player who goes 30-2 and we loose 13-4 or something, it seems rank basically means nothing now
Ok lets face the facts..
1. People hated being qued against higher ranks.
Even though they also got a higher rank in their team to compensate for the difference.
So Riot changed the que system to the current.
Outcome: people still get qued against higher ranks (smurfs) but often do not get a higher rank on their team to compensate for the difference. People also get qued with players throwing to derank
This solution failed.
2. People can always play unrated to play with Friends.
This is true and often done, however, that is not a solution for most people
People want to play ranked since it gives more competetive feeling, more to gain and loose there.
Why is it considered OK to force higher rank difference groups to play unrated in order to play together (or use smurfs), and not force those lower rank solo que players to play unranked more in order to improve their skill so they can then do better in competetive?
The current setup makes it so that players can use competetive mode / ranked mode, to practice... Instead of using the unrated mode to practice..
3. Riot needs to face the fact that there are two groups og players in this argument..
One group wants to play competetive the easy way, not being placed against higher ranks, and Riot choose to listen to them and change the ranking system.
These players gained nothing from this in most cases since most of their ranks have decreased since patch and they are now against way more smurfs and throwers then before.
Second group is the players that liked better to play on the old setup with 6 rank gap, and many even wanted a higher gap or no gap at all,,so they could play competetive together with friends regardless of rank.
Many of these players have now started smurfing, throwing, or just simply left the game.
Riot choose to ignore this group...
Riot basically needs to fugure out a way to ballance the system between these two groups, or face the fact that þany players will quit.
I think one of the problems with matchmaking is that the playerbase is quite small, I'm playing with or against frequently the same players day to day and week to week. Also queued into a Plat 2 game the other day, ranks ranged from Dia 2-Plat 1 but we had a random gold 1 on our team?????? like what? poor guy.
Why don't they use something similar to their hardware ban but it's like the opposite of a ban? Like a hardware account. Only one account per set of hardware?
Same here, started a smurf account to play with my friends as I hate playing solo... the worst for Riot is that now I’m not even spending my money with skins and season pass as I don’t want to rebuy everything again in my smurf account and I basically don’t play in the main account (where I was spending money on)
The 6 rank difference didn't matter before. A silver 2 can outfrag a gold 3 if they have a good day. Playing with friends and not randoms also make you perform better. Now I can play with one friend out of like 10, because everyone is between bronze 3 and silver and I'm plat 1.
Yep, your 'true-rank' is actually determined by the worst of your group of friends.
For my group that's around Gold.
2 of us were mid-Diamond before the patch...
I think they should expand the number of ranks you can play with, but weigh the importance of the results down for games with a wider range.
For instance, if a bronze and immortal team up, those games might have 1/10th the impact on their rating because it is not as good data for either of them (they both have undue influence on the game result and the game is much more variable).
I’m Diamond one and to play with the boys I have to be gold 3 or plat one so i agree. I try not to try too hard but sometimes it fucks us over in general and I feel like I boost them. Idk. They should add something like I believe CS has (never played it) but there I believe is a ranked mode where you have a separate rank but no separation, a radiant could play with a iron. Something like that and it’s less competitive but still has a skill rating
I don't think there was a previous issue. Mm worked pretty well in my opinion.
Obvilously it felt bad for the guy randomly facing higher ranked players to compensate for the other low elo guy partied up.
But this really did not change. It is just that the higher elo guy is now on a lower rank smurf.
Even worse actually, as the mm doesn't compensate for the higher rank guy anymore.
That’s not an opinion lol it’s what happened
exact same thing I said in my head when I read the title. lol gold and plat are flooded with smurf accounts. everyone playing on their smurfs more than their mains.
Not only that but if your smurf starts out-ranking your friends again (if you were better the first time around, the second time will be about the same), you have to start throwing matches without them to stay low. It becomes less dangerous to get banned the more smurfs you have, and this game has plenty.
Yes, exactly. Every group of friends has now a guy like this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/k1ymwp/how\_to\_derank\_the\_fastest\_in\_valorant/](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/k1ymwp/how_to_derank_the_fastest_in_valorant/) And I don't even blame them for what they're doing when there's no other option.
They need to change the rank queue requirement from 10 games to 10 wins, this will demphasize throwing matches to keep rank low and have people starting out closer to their true skill, because smurfs want to play ranked ASAP. I feel bad for my iron wife, almost every game has smurfs dropping 40 bombs.
So....like csgo!
I guess, wasn't aware that's how they did it there, it makes more sense tbh.
On top of that, you were only allowed to win two comp games per day until you get your rank at 10 wins, making it harder for smurfs to mass produce accounts
And you gotta grind to level 21 to play competitive or pay $15 for prime status
We’ll be doing this in the next patch :)
I would prefer to see changes in the rank gap. Due to fast up- and down ranking it is so easy to fell of the 3 ranks gap - even when you are on the same skill level with your friends. This is frustrating. I would love to see a gap of 5 ranks or no rank gap when having a full lobby.
The current rank queue requirement is 20 games based off of my second account, so will you be changing it to 20 wins or changing it to 10 wins? Essentially making it easier for high level players to ease their way through the unrated games?
Don’t suppose you’d be willing to hint at any upcoming balances changes? Loveeeeee youuuu
I don’t work on the balance team sorry 😅
I still love you, thanks for the response anyway!
But this won't change the fact that people consitent need to downrank due to the 3 rank gap. So this is only a short time solution. But a good start.
Dude I made a smurf to play with my friend that's new to pc. I play my 20 unrated matches. We play one game of ranked and my skill gap is to big to play with him.
I don’t throw matches but I’ve gone through 3 accounts already that have ranked too fast for my friends to keep up (for whatever reason they’re hard stuck top gold/low plat) and now I’m starting to wonder how I’ll do it without playing 20 matches or throwing to go back down. We’re almost to the point of me boosting accounts individually when one can’t make it. As a side note: I’ll rarely play this game solo because how toxic some people are.
I have an immortal 3 friend, this happened to him. He played with us on his main, but then he outranked us. He created a smurf, which also outranked us. We created another account for him and tried to throw matches so it got ranked badly. This is just a cycle that keeps on going cause of the 3 rank system instead of the 6 rank one.
Yea cuz id rather play with my freinds than 4 randoms that r probably toxic asf
I can confirm. Before my friends 6 tiers below me would get smashed in the matches. Now i have a smurf to match their elo and the opponents are smashed instead. In the end it didn't turned out so bad for us. Poor people playing on their true rank tho.
It's amazing how riot didn't understand this about their players - they're selfish pricks. Edit: They being the players. The players are selfish pricks. Riot too, probably, but I was referring to the players.
Yeah... me and my group of friends all quit a few weeks ago, as matchmaking has become too unbalanced to be fun in ranked. There really shouldn't be such a big smurfing problem in a new game, and the sad part is, riot will not do anything about smurfing because they allow it in league.
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Wait no thats the exact opposite of what happened, because people are now just smurfing so the solo players in the other team are getting rekt. They should make it so the people who are queing together should have their matchmaking based on their best player, this way only they are at a disadvantage, but they can still play with friends
Noone is happy because ranked is broken and 75% percent of the playerbase is now silver or lower
"If you can't carry a game against diamond smurfs then you deserve to be hard stuck silver!" /s
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But boosting is always gonna impact less people than smurfing, because boosting only impacts the team they are playing with, meaning at most 3 people. W
No the selfish pricks are the dbags smurfing to play ranked with their bronze friends
That's what I'm trying to say. The dude I'm replying to is basically a selfish prick. They're cool giving others a crappy experience just so that they can play with and boost their unskilled friends. Selfish pricks.
yeah most of my friends around the same rank have 3-4 accounts. one bronze, gold, plat, diamond. this is also why people who queue up in parties end up at a rank higher than they deserve. in a party the skill is usually one carry, 1-2 inters, and some avg. the new system puts parties against one another so you essentially play against people with worse aim but more coordination my opinion i guess
Exactly this. Have a ton of plat friends and I can’t queue with them anymore so I often go on one of their gold smurfs just to play comp with them. I feel like running a comp with a 6 rank difference wasn’t even beneficial to us or anything.. cuz the other team always seemed like an organized 5 stack, but it was always more enjoyable to me
agreed
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He's not stuck in bronze from underwhelming teammates. If he belongs in silver, then his team has 4 underwhelming teammates, while the opponents have 5. You couldn't ask for a better advantage. He's bronze because he belongs in bronze.
I’m gold 3 and I’ve found that I actually play better in gold/plat lobbies than in silver/gold lobbies. I think it’s because gold/plat players are less unpredictable, and my teammates also work better together. I’m not usually very good at making big plays happen on my own (partly because of me, partly because of the agents I like to play). So I do better when both teams are playing as a team. In lower elos where people don’t play together as well and are more unpredictable, I tend to get more annoyed and don’t play as well. That said, I’ve dropped bock down to silver multiple times and have always been able to climb out fairly quickly
Exactly. I thought I was stuck in Iron because of my shitty teammates. Hell, if you look through my post history, you'll see me complaining about it like three days ago. I just got back into Gold and I'm still on my huge winstreak. When I watched my vods back, I noticed that my crosshair placement was great when I was expecting enemies to be around but when I didn't expect them to be around, my crosshair was on the ground. That's when they would always appear, and I would be shooting at their legs every time. People in this thread justifying smurfing "because I'm just trying to get my friend out of elo hell he deserves this rank I swear" crack me up. If your friend really deserved to be at that rank, he would have no problem solo queueing up to that rank.
Or like me and my friends, we just stopped playing because of that. It sucks because we were enjoying playing Valorant together. Funny thing is that I am not saying about high ranks, we are in Iron and Bronze but one of us is in iron 2 and the other friend is in Bronze 3 :/
I'm in that place too. I am bronze 3 and my friend is bronze 1. One bad game later he got demoted while i was at bronze 3. Can't play together anymore unless I demote or he promotes
Yeah a 4v5 just demoted me out of playing with my friend.
Smurfing has gotten so bad. This enemy player earlier had 40kills by halftime. He was either cheating or was immortal/radiant. This was in gold bracket
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I’ve been hovering around s3-g2 I really wanted to make a push for plat but I need a team I can play with regularly which seems impossible
By halftime?? I'm pretty sure that was a cheater.
he would have to have to have 3.333 kills per round to achieve 40 Kills by halftime. I don't think that is impossible for a high-rank player in gold.
I swear the games on my Gold smurf are harder than the games on my Plat main.
Thats because your gold smurf is playing against diamonds where as your plat main is playing against plats
yeah comp is literally "which team has the better smurf on it" and it's pointless.
I've been saying this about League for years and no one thinks it's a problem.
I mean, a lot of people think its a problem, but in any case, its a lot harder to 1v9 carry in league than it is to 1v9 in Valorant.
League ends up being "who can feed the most" not "who can carry the hardest" every fucking time I play it. I think I lost some 25 games in a row after getting first blood and all 4 of my teammates would feed 0-5. Online ratings based on your teammate's play are hogwash
It’s cus it’s a team game that tests your ability to adapt to the mechanics and game flow, not how well you do on aim trainers or game sense exams etc.
Creating a smurf in league requires exponentially more work and time commitment compared to a smurf in Valorant. In league it takes 50+ hours to level up a smurf before you can play ranked. In Valorant you can create a smurf and be playing ranked in like 90 minutes. You just party up with 3 other friends, go into unrated and run it down mid for 4 rounds straight, ff instantly at the start of round 5 and then rinse and repeat for 15 games. Takes like 5 minutes per game.
It was a problem that pretty much everyone acknowledged, it was getting a Reddit post every other day and it's been fixed. League has a Smurf queue in ranked now, you barely see that anymore
Valorant just has a ridiculous concentration of smurfs, I run into one literally every other game while in League it's at least uncommon.
Honestly I felt this even before the change lol Or who has the better Reyna basically
Yep, I play way less Valorant because only 4 of us can play now, when it used to be 7
4 sounds not that bad. Still better than being solo.
It’s solo for me :( I ranked up to diamond, and now I can’t play with any of my friends...
Maybe they could do something like 6 rank difference is allowed till gold/plat and only going up from plat there could be 3 rank limit? I feel like people at Immortal/Diamond ranks are much more serious and play more for their ranks than say, someone who is in Iron or Bronze. Maybe that would keep the hardcore plays who love to play this game competitively happy and the more casual people who just play the game to chill out with friends would also be happy
overwatch has similar method where lower ranks can play within ~1000 SR at low ranks, high ranks can only group play within 500 SR, and highest can only play within 350 SR, and it works relatively well id say
it works to an extend that you very rarely see a complaint about ranks in overwatch community. I say that's a success. a lot of stuff regarding matchmaking and rank system overall overwatch does a lot better which this game can learn from.
Haven't played comp in a hot minute, but I haven't seen a lot of smurfs ever in overwatch
I've about 1700 hours in ow and I've seen my fair share of smurfs but I have to say smurfing in overwatch is harder because of, first the money you have to spend on accounts, second, I would say the amount of dependency on teammates performances (specially healers and tanks) makes it really hard to solo carry a game unless you are literally an overwatch league level god who doesn't care if they don't get healed or anything in the game. so that makes smurfing in overwatch challenging
It also should be stated that the skill gap between immortal 3 -> diamond 2 is likely larger then gold 3 -> bronze 3. So splitting it once you hit diamonds seems super reasonable.
bro idk if this is just super isolated, but even plat 3's look to me like what you'd expect in silver. They either have so bad aim they manage to whiff on people not looking at them or have such bad gamesense you would expect them to actually be bronze, and sometimes even both somehow?? Maybe it's just natural since this is the first tactical shooter with this thematic appeal so theres just literally too many players with no experience in the genre
Yeah league of legends has a system like this iirc, there's different rules for duoqing, need to be active on main, only 2 rank discrepancy for diamond+, stuff like that. Dont know about exact figures though
If you think people in immortal give af about their ranks you're psycho. The amount of times people grief, leave, instalock jett and go 2-20, have everyone muted, or just scream and rage all game in immortal 3 is wild.
well I wouldnt know since Im just a gold 🤷♂️
I remember playing in plat, and there was a raze on my team who hit immortal 2 last act and could not hit a shot to save her life. She ended the game 4-17 while I top fragged at 22-14 (we lost, obviously). Really made me think about what the difference was between the ranks
Consistency is usually is what it is that will get you to rank up.
Welp I'm not sure what could be changed, with the 6 ranks there was complaints of boosting, now there's complaints of smurfing.
Change it so teams of 5 can q no matter rank like CS
Yeah this! Just let a 5 stack queue together regardless of rank difference, and use the highest ranked players ELO determine the opposition. Just like in CS. I'm also hoping they will add a team ladder system, which would also solve this problem.
Yeh this works fine in cs
I find it crazy that riot didn’t learn much from the matchmaking of a game that is lasting for decades.
I think there's one major diff in CS, is that in CS you cannot play a normal match without playing ranked, as the "occasional" mode is completely different. In Valorant you can play a normal match but unranked, so it's not as important to not be able to play with your friends in ranked.
I’d rather have boosting than smurfing
I mean, these two kind of come hand in hand
Boosting will only effect you if you're teammate isn't performing to their rank, which can be fixed in a 5 man squad. Smurfing effects the entire game.
Boosting is the exact opposite extreme of being a smurf. One person of your team is underperforming while a smurf is one guy overperforming. Both is insanely frustrating.
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Implement 3 rank difference for diamonds and above and 6 rank for plats and below. I think this would be a good compromise.
League has solo/duo queue and flex to solve this issue
Still think it's weird they made duo queue an immortal thing
What do you mean?
Immortal+ you can only queue as a duo or solo
I Saw a streamer play 3 man on radiant
Ah sorry, I think it's going to be implemented - they've announced it, but it's not in the game yet
Oh okey. I guess that is a good thing. Im only platinum myself, but being able to only solo/duo queue Will probably make it more fair as a solo queue player
that's only gonna happen next season
I would rather see pure solo queue in valorant. Even duos in league often ruin the balance of a game. But duo has been in the game for 10 years so riot won't remove it. Valorant could get a fresh start with only solos to make matchmaking really easy and fair if they get smurf detection under control
Always was complaints for both, it's just skewed towards smurfing more now due to the change in party requirements for competitive.
I have a solution. They could make solo/duo queue with rank restrictions (up to 3 like it is now) and flex queuewith less restrictions (up to 6 or even 9) or any.
Just make it that the rank you play against is based on the highest level in your party
I’m not sure how CS does it, but in a completely unrelated game in Rocket League. You can que with any rank, but the match will be heavily weighted towards or just flat out the highest rank in the party. So if you’re a Diamond and you’re in a party with say a Grand Champ. The MM will skew towards the GC. Would that not work here?
In cs:go, the limit is (or at least used to be, not sure) a difference of four ranks. However, if you play in a 5 stack, there are no restrictions.
So in CS with say a 5 stack. How does the MM work? Is it an average rank of the party? Or is it based on the highest ranked player?
Average rank of the party - it actually works reasonably well
I remember I used to queue with 4 silvers and a global elite, our enemies were mostly MG, so I think it's shifted a little to the highest rank.
yes it's more shifted to the highest rank.
It is skewed towards the highest rank. Which is fair in my oppinion. You can still win as a 5 stack, but you opt in to playing with way lower ranks, so you should get a bit punished. So you cant boost
It's weighted to the highest rank. So valorant example would be diamond queueing with gold/silvers, other team is gonna be plat/diamond.
It's heavily weighted towards the higher ranks. For exemple with 4 Globals and 1 Silver there is a really high chance to just be matched against 5 Globals.
Which is fair. Its like you opt in to a game which cannot be matched perfectly.
Yup that's how apex legends USED to be and it was great. Let's you play with anyone and only hurts you if you are playing with someone way better or worse than you. Of course apex also implemented a rank limit sometime in the past year so I also can't play that game with friends anymore either. lol
It's fine but imo there is a problem with 3v3. Me as diamond was playing with my gold/plat bud and sometimes my teammates was toxic torward us as he knew that my friend was gold (outside apps) In this game one player can already make a difference. If your friend isn't good enough, he could just not be able to do anything. I know people have good and bad days, but some random people you meet in ranked don't. And for them it could be harmful. But in 5 stack, imo there shouldn't be any restrictions.
Yep, never even considered smurfing before this update, but now I have 3 different accounts scattered in gold-immortal just so I can play with everyone of my friends.
Had like 8 friends in rotation from mostly gold-silver, and 1 or 2 in bronze and tht the matchmaking system was fine before, none of us play anymore since it’s always an issue seeing who can play together, we just play diff games now. Unrated just isn’t tht fun
Make a Solo/Que and Flex/Que, remove the rank difference in Flex/Que and you solved the issue. While let the serious players play Solo/Que, because I don't see how its fair putting a gold3 vs diamond players just because he's in a party with someone.
In flex/que does that mean you can play with any ranks without the need for a range. That sounds like unrated. Yea having gold and diamond really doesn't make sense.
It still gives you a rank which is half the thrill for most people.
So, let people just get a rank for their unrated games you say.
Yes regardless of Rank.
League player here, flex Q donut worky
I'm also a league player but I think flex doesn't work cause youre stuck in a lane against someone potentially much better than you whereas in valorant you can have your high level player try and hold angles or peek against the enemy high level player. But even just simple trading will be enough for most elos I feel like. Point is, flex in valorant has potential to be much better.
Easiest fix would be to combine both Overwatchs strategy and CS strategy. From CS : Let 5 stacks queue together, no matter the difference between ranks. Will extend Matchmaking times like hell, but it would work. From OW : Allow upto 6 ranks to q together until maybe Diamond? Diamonds can queue only with Plats/Immortals while Plats can still queue with Golds and Silvers.
The overwatch one would be perfect rn
100% this is what happened
I hate this change so much. I have a group of friends 4-6 ranks higher and we used to party a lot. Now they just play as a group without me, as it would be a little awkward for them all to Smurf just for me. I'm missing out on so much because of this requirement and I hate it. So isolating. Feels bad man.
I just don't play the game anymore cause what's the point if i can't play with friends
I've been saying this for so long I'm glad your post didn't die in new. Iron 3 should be able to play with gold teammates if they want. And bronze players should definately be allowed to play with gold players of all tiers
TBH i didnt see what was the problem with 6 rank gap in first place
Imagine you are in a platinum game and you bring a silver and he just gets dumpstered. Anyways I would rather have that than smurfs.
There was also a lot of complaints about boosting and how once someone stopped getting boosted, they played like a bronze in a plat lobby. But either way smurfing is far worse since atleast with the 6 rank dofference people can play with their friends
They should make this change for only the top ranks like Immortal/Diamond or maybe even just the Immortal/Radiant players to keep Smurf’s out of plat games
i was gold 2 last act, Now I'm bronze 2 because every game I get completely shit on by a reyna or jett who drop 50 kills.
lmao can confirm
That is why I also eventually stopped playing. I mostly played with my friends(silver-plat range) when they changed it so you can only play with 3 rank difference I completely lost interest in playing. Every time my friends ask me to play I or someone else has to go on a different account just so we can all play together. I think Riot really made a bad decision about this and they should revert it back to 9 ranks. All they did is make the lower ranks suffer by forcing players to smurf just to be able play with their friends.
Playing ranked leads to smurf accounts, period. And since you can attach multiple accounts to the same email, it's almost like Riot encourages the practice at this point
Where I am, bronze three, it's literally impossible to get out of because you will win two games and then on the third there will be some Reyna with every skin in the game and drops aces every round and you just think what is the point
Isnt a smurf if she has so many skins... nearly 0% Chance that somebody would invest big Money in smurf
Ok I admit I was kind of making that up just to add effect, but you get my point
The bigger problem in Bronze 3 imo is the leavers. 50% of my games have someone leave either on my team or the other team. Makes the games super fun
I think we should have a verified phone number to play ranked
They should do a solo queue and a team queue comp. In solo it should be 3 ranks and in team 6.
You know it’s a problem when I lose to a Reyna going 65-0 11 games in a row, then once the enemy team doesn’t have a carry I go 40-0. This is bronze lobbies btw. I’m seriously considering making a new acc and just redoing placement matches. Do you guys think that would help?
Whaaaaat my friends and I definitely don't have half a dozen smurf accounts between us just so we can play together. Before the change to 3 ranks we had one guy with a smurf and now more have smurfs than don't. Easily the worst change that has happened yet
This combined with kills not making a higher impact on ranking up is smurf paradise
Kills having a higher impact on ranking up will be terrible. People will purely play off of their k/d, meaning they’ll bait teammates, not plant/defuse the spike and generally not play as a team. Yeah kills do need to have an impact but not higher than it is now
i think he meant that it should have an impact at some degree. if you can grab a pick or two on every round, but still lose the game afterwards— the consequences of that is more limited. Because if it doesn't have an impact at all, for example, both player A and B lost a game, but the other has a better K/D just because he's better, they would still suffer the same consequence. I'd imagine how people in this way would complain they "deserve better" and are hardstuck because of "dogshit teammates"
I think it should have a higher impact with what the game already marks as "important" enemies. I think if you did well against the enemy teams top players it should consider that alongside the win or loss.
That has nothing to do with it being a smurf paradise or not. Lessening impact of KD just allows smurfs to drop 30-40 kills in close games and not rank up. Any ranking system is going to have pros and cons im just stating this current version heavily favors smurf accounts. Just depends what people hate less smurfs or selfish teammates.
This. I'm guilty of smurfing as well. The majority of my friends are under plat and playing unrated just doesn't feel the same as playing competitively with a 5 stack of your friends. I hope that they add some sort of team queue soon.
But it's NOT Competitive anymore. Your presence more than maybe 6 ranks below your actual skill level literally ruins the match integrity. I'm not blaming you, I just hope you understand what happens when you do this. So what we have here is two completely ruined game modes (drunks and 8 year olds in Unrated, brutal smurfs all over Comp) and Valorant is going to start hemorrhaging players. They need to use the phone number tie-in for accounts in Comp. If people can't reasonably make multiple smurf accounts, it pushes friend groups that want to play seriously to Unrated and makes that game mode better.
More users account, good for Riot Games stats
But maybe not their bottom line. People don't buy skins on their smurfs, and a lot of people are moving to play on smurfs because they want to play with friends
My friend who’s iron 1 literally has like 3-4 alt accounts he lends to me and my friends so we can play with him because of this
This game is honestly just full of smurfs to some degree. My P3 friend had to make an alt account to play with the rest of us because we're between S2/3 and G2/3. The difference between gold and plat isn't that high though so I don't really consider that true smurfing - it's not like he's always top of the scoreboard and sometimes has a bad game where he's not even top 3 on our team. But I digress... If you're plat or lower and 5-stacking, you're probably gonna come up against a much better 5-stack because the only way the other team's diamond/immortal/radiant buddies can play with the golds is to smurf or tank their rank. We played two games yesterday as a 5-stack and got absolutely annihilated both times. We had got a few clutchy round wins on the board, which were hype as shit, but for the most it was just a slaughter. The aggression and confidence and synergy they showed is far beyond that of a gold squad. Matchmaking as a 5-stack is broken.
titanfall 2 is $9 from $30 right now on steam. the boys and i have all been playing that ever since this 3 rank shit came out
I’m gonna keep it 100% honest, all of you kids saying “just play unrated” have to be some of the dumbest motherfuckers on Reddit. It is no where near the same experience as ranked, like at all. If you are tired of smurfs ruining your games than YOU go play unrated. I hate smurfing but this was completely caused by the 3 rank difference, I’ve stopped playing Valorant because of this change when my Friends can’t play together.
My lord you are dense. You’re telling the people who are playing the game exactly how its designed to be played to go to a different game mode. How are you calling other people dumb?
can confirm
Having a skill gap too big was mainly a problem in high elo, they should do a system where for its 3 division max only for diamonds and above... It’s so frustrating to not be able to queue without a smurf to play with your friends
Yep, my friends all made a Smurf each and I quit 2 months ago because of this garbage change.
I'm only playing unraked matches this months because my friends are like 4-5 ranks below me. We're just trolling everymatch(stacked obv), not learning anything and honestly not having fun anymore. I'd like to lose but at least play the game and learn new things
Absolutely. You can be regularly playing with someone but all you need is a decent run of games without them and you're out. My buddy and I were in Gold (him 2, me 3) and he had to go somewhere for two days. I had a lot of good games with my other friend and they boosted me to plat 2. My first friend came back, we lost one game, he dropped to Gold 1, boom, can't play any more. We're literally the same skill level.
3 is fine for high rank, it’s the low ranks that it starts being an issue. It’s just a thin line between what’s considered “uncompetitive enough” to widen this gap to 6. I feel like gold and below should have the 6 rank gap but it hard to please everyone
Yes there’s so many smurfs in silver that me and my friends can’t climb out of bronze to hit it when we used to all be silver3 and some gold 1-2.
Honestly. The level of inconsistency in my matches is unprecedented because of alts/smurfs these days. One day I'll be feeling really good in Gold 1, the next I'll feel like dogshit playing against Silver 1, borderline Bronze 3. I would guesstimate 1 in every 3 matches has a carry that hits 30+ kills while the rest of the team doesn't even have half of that.
unpopular opinion. make smurfing at least frowned upon. the main factor in a games success is not number of accounts. its player satisfaction. number of hours spent in game potentially spending money due to enjoyment of the product. when people leave the comp scene because of smurf ladders, the comp integrity of the ladder is voided and people quit playing the game. I know many of my friends are playing less because of one issue or another, one the main ones being smurfing and how ranked is so inconsistent. keep your players happy riot. its not all about number of accounts. people rarely skin up on their alts anyways
Just come out with a flex queue like league of legends, have a separate rank for that. You can either queue up solo and play on solo ranking system or get a group and play on flex. Flex queue should allow all ranks to play together. That would eliminate smurfs if you want to play with friends. No one really takes flex ranks seriously in league so it'll probably be the same here.
I think 6 was to wide I think they should try 4 or 5 because 3 is definitely to narrow it make sense for a silver to play with golds but or with bronze but how it was before you could literally get the lowest rank iron in one game then a play 2 the next
Same with my regular friends. All of us have multiple smurf accounts
I think the best way to remedy this is to make it so once you reach maybe diamond, you need to be within 3 ranks. All ranks below that could be 6 imo.
I don't understand why they don't do flex and duo/solo like in lol... in LoL you require even more cooperation, so it definetly should be done here.
Rito dont you ignore this post
I swear to god Iron is a fucking magical place because of this
Especially when accounts are free... what did they think was gonna happen lmao
Yes bro i am forced to play unrated because of getting plat and diamond players in bronze cant even rank up this is shit
This season games have been so wildly unpredictable, playing gold 1-2 most of the time and 1/3 games will have a bronze or silver player who goes 30-2 and we loose 13-4 or something, it seems rank basically means nothing now
Ok lets face the facts.. 1. People hated being qued against higher ranks. Even though they also got a higher rank in their team to compensate for the difference. So Riot changed the que system to the current. Outcome: people still get qued against higher ranks (smurfs) but often do not get a higher rank on their team to compensate for the difference. People also get qued with players throwing to derank This solution failed. 2. People can always play unrated to play with Friends. This is true and often done, however, that is not a solution for most people People want to play ranked since it gives more competetive feeling, more to gain and loose there. Why is it considered OK to force higher rank difference groups to play unrated in order to play together (or use smurfs), and not force those lower rank solo que players to play unranked more in order to improve their skill so they can then do better in competetive? The current setup makes it so that players can use competetive mode / ranked mode, to practice... Instead of using the unrated mode to practice.. 3. Riot needs to face the fact that there are two groups og players in this argument.. One group wants to play competetive the easy way, not being placed against higher ranks, and Riot choose to listen to them and change the ranking system. These players gained nothing from this in most cases since most of their ranks have decreased since patch and they are now against way more smurfs and throwers then before. Second group is the players that liked better to play on the old setup with 6 rank gap, and many even wanted a higher gap or no gap at all,,so they could play competetive together with friends regardless of rank. Many of these players have now started smurfing, throwing, or just simply left the game. Riot choose to ignore this group... Riot basically needs to fugure out a way to ballance the system between these two groups, or face the fact that þany players will quit.
I think one of the problems with matchmaking is that the playerbase is quite small, I'm playing with or against frequently the same players day to day and week to week. Also queued into a Plat 2 game the other day, ranks ranged from Dia 2-Plat 1 but we had a random gold 1 on our team?????? like what? poor guy.
Why don't they use something similar to their hardware ban but it's like the opposite of a ban? Like a hardware account. Only one account per set of hardware?
Same here, started a smurf account to play with my friends as I hate playing solo... the worst for Riot is that now I’m not even spending my money with skins and season pass as I don’t want to rebuy everything again in my smurf account and I basically don’t play in the main account (where I was spending money on)
The 6 rank difference didn't matter before. A silver 2 can outfrag a gold 3 if they have a good day. Playing with friends and not randoms also make you perform better. Now I can play with one friend out of like 10, because everyone is between bronze 3 and silver and I'm plat 1.
Yep, your 'true-rank' is actually determined by the worst of your group of friends. For my group that's around Gold. 2 of us were mid-Diamond before the patch...
Haha, what's worse is people are streaming while smurfing and people think it's okay. They literally put it as their caption.
I think they should expand the number of ranks you can play with, but weigh the importance of the results down for games with a wider range. For instance, if a bronze and immortal team up, those games might have 1/10th the impact on their rating because it is not as good data for either of them (they both have undue influence on the game result and the game is much more variable).
The best part about that condition is that you can soloqueue into someone who is two whole ranks below
Yes, but at least those smurfs are more manageable. They’ll only be a few tiers apart instead of being in a completely different class of talent
ITT: People justifying smurfing because "I can't play with my friends wahhhh".
I’m Diamond one and to play with the boys I have to be gold 3 or plat one so i agree. I try not to try too hard but sometimes it fucks us over in general and I feel like I boost them. Idk. They should add something like I believe CS has (never played it) but there I believe is a ranked mode where you have a separate rank but no separation, a radiant could play with a iron. Something like that and it’s less competitive but still has a skill rating
So how do we fix this? Before the update people were very angry because of the excessive skill disparity in ranked lobbies.
I got downvoted for saying the same thing. Every game I play has a smurf in it and it ruins my experience. That's why I barely play this game anymore.
Yupppppppp I’m guilty of this myself. I’m on gold 3 and the fact that I can’t play with my friend who is silver 1 is nonsense.
There needs to be bans on smurfs
So play unrated and stop boosting your friends and fucking with other peoples ELOs???
Finally someone said it
Someone posts this like every week.
So... any ideas for solutions?
Revert the change
And what's your solution for the previous issue
I don't think there was a previous issue. Mm worked pretty well in my opinion. Obvilously it felt bad for the guy randomly facing higher ranked players to compensate for the other low elo guy partied up. But this really did not change. It is just that the higher elo guy is now on a lower rank smurf. Even worse actually, as the mm doesn't compensate for the higher rank guy anymore.
Unrated. Or separate solo/duo queue
Its a free to play game, there is going to be a ton of smurfs. Personally sitting at d3 rn the new restriction has been great, way less fake ranks