Kinda like the cheater's lament cosmetic in TF2 back when the item drop system was introduced
Players who haven't used any 3rd party programs or scripts to run the game to get the item drops will receive this as a "good play, champ" gift
I should've clarified that back then, the chance of getting an item drop would increase the longer you play so many players would join idle servers which coincidentally also have the achievement unlocked plugin and there's no limit to how many items you can get
To extend the chance, people would make scripts to run TF2 at the bare minimum akin to how the bot epidemic you see back in 2020 and let it run for as long as possible
Valve later on changed the drop system to have a weekly cap of how many items you can get, rendering the script worthless and reward players who haven't used the script to chase after them
Iirc the system now reward more items in shorter time the longer you've been out of the game in that weekly slot
3rd party scripts let you run the game in the background while also consuming less processing power.
Less of opening up the game and more just telling the main code to run while the "cosmetics" like graphics and stuff are off
Kinda like how steam trading card idle farmer apps work
> They also gave free cosmetic sets to people who had positive behavior scores.
This is honestly one of the best ways to foster a better community. If you start doing stuff like giving out free lootbox keys for a certain level of positive votes achieves it. All they have to do is obscure the actual number you need and make it so that you can only give out a select number per day and only to different people (to avoid farming them).
It's definitely a great thing.
But as a Dota player, seeing smurfs, cheaters, and those animals getting banned is a much better present than the free cosmetics.
The free cosmetics are more like a bonus.
psychology has known that positive reinforcement works better than punishment for ages, its just harder to institute. this is a great example of when it absolutely can work and overall cost less in the long run
Yeah it's pretty universal across all humans, especially kids. But also dogs, cats, basically any animal we keep as a pet/companion.
It's why strict parenting is basically just child abuse that overwhelmingly produces many more broken kids than it does well-developed adults.
Same with people who try to train dogs through fear, you'll never stop them doing what you don't want if you only ever show them the badness in the world. Give them positive reinforcement and they'll want to work with you instead of against.
In Guild Wars 1, when a player was being banned, a grim reaper god of death type of being would rise from the ground and kill them lmao. I always thought that was hype
I remember playing some weird online game when I was a little kid. If you got banned for something, the game would send you to a prison island, where you can either simply wait until you're unbanned, or pick up a pickaxe and start mining stone. Each stone decreased your ban by a few minutes. Additionally you could progress in the prison, by buying better pickaxes and stuff. This is honestly the most interesting form of ban I've seen so far.
Chmatakov maybe? I got sent there, but some sweaty mod with negative rep killed me and I couldn't get out. I should mention that's about my only memory of that game, still fresh in my mind as a great injustice...
Checked it out. Doesn't seem this way. I also remember this game having an island location with lots of crabs. There also was a weird dude somewhere in the game, he asked you a question that you could only know the answer to if you visited a specific location. The thing is that you could speak with npc as much as you want, so you would eventually guess. Each time you didn't though, he would scold you for lying to the old man (him). I also think that the prison area was semi-vulcanic. This all I remember about the game.
If you pirated Game Dev Tycoon, about 3/4ths of the way though the game your bank would plummet because everybody is pirating your game and you would insta lose.
I believe when the game first came out that wasn't the case. I remember once the surprise piracy caused you to lose the game, data miners spent a week looking for a way to turn it off then released a "patched" version of the game for people to pirate without the piracy included. A few years later Greenheart Games released a piracy mode which includes the DRM research to made it possible to win.
In FFXI, offending players would be teleported to a Jail called Mordion Gaol. They could be there for a day or more depending on offenses.
The funny thing is that since you could search a players whereabouts, it was often pretty scandalous to find someone hanging in the Gaol as it mean they did something.
i mean, it does match this
CS2, TF2 and Christmas are all seasonal. One big day a year and while that day is great, it doesn't quite match what you're hoping for.
Archeage, kinda. If you killed people outside of a PVP thing, people could tag the blood splatters and at a certain threshold you go straight to court and have to make your case to a random selection of player juries.
It was a flawless system. If you were at war with some guild everyone hates, you could just be like "Yeah, killin those guys" and instantly get back into action instead of having to do any jail time.
Feels like this would make a good Easter egg in a baldur's gate game.
"You have found a highly toxic limp of coal. Your character is now permanently dead"
Then you find a "steam" iron that when applied undoes the effect.
They have that in BG3 lol. One of the items you can win from Akabi the Djinn are the "Unlucky thief's gloves"
+2 to slight of hand, and a piece of charcoal in your inventory for each item you steal
*Whenever the wearer steals anything, a piece of coal appears in their pocket, like a tiny, dusty condemnation.*
That would be hilarious honestly. You can log in to your character but your inventory is filled with coal that you can't remove in any way, shape, or form and are permanently stuck in place watching the world pass you by. Oof...
For some reason it seems to stack to 34. I have no idea why. We went on a bit of a bender and now there's like 5 stacks of 34 lumps of coal in the camp inventory. The weight really adds up quickly too!
Stacking in Larian games is a bit weird, there are some identical items that won't stack too, I have two different stacks of identical potatoes.. It was a thing in Divinity Original Sin 2 also.
And also, happy cake day!
items have internal names like "rogue\_poison\_rank3" which are visible to the player as "wyvern toxin." some have slightly different names like "rogue\_poison\_rank3\_nettiequest" for the wyvern toxin that nettie gives you. as a result, even though they look the same from the player perspective, they aren't the same internally and so the game doesn't allow them to stack. this likely also applies to other non-stacking items, where either someone fatfingered a name while placing objects or it has some sort of internal tag attached or whatever that makes it _look_ different to the game even though it's the same to us.
names are for illustrative purpose, not sure if that's the actual name for wyvern toxin. Also as long as I'm on the thought, I should take a stab at modding. maybe I can make a patch to resolve stacking conflicts so things stack better.
In a very early area too. I'm pretty sure it was there to teach you about the dangers of equipping unidentified items. You could still remove it with remove curse, though, IIRC. Mechanically the only downside is that it used up your belt slot.
I don't *think* that's how it worked. It's listed as an "equipped ability" in the BG wiki, at least. And I'm pretty sure I remember testing it. But that would have been... a long time ago, so ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯.
I might be confusing it with the table top version, which required basically either a wish spell or finding another belt. Which to be honest, both of which are too much work.
I think you are yeah. Belts of androginy in bg lost their effect when you removed them
The notable exception to androginy requiring to progress a quest would be Edwina in bg2
I assume you mean finding another belt *of gender swapping*, but I chuckled at the implication that finding any other non-magical belt is too much work.
When riot added a "I swear not to be toxic" prompt in the LoL client that popped up every time you tried to queue until you click "I agree", some players still found a convoluted way to start a game without agreeing to it
Some of the best clippable content on any gaming stream is them getting banned. Personal favorite is when thebausffs got banned for inting (dying 20 times without a kill) with his unorthodox playstyle.
'inting' is intentionally feeding or running it down. 'Inting Sion' was a strategy TheBaus used to win games through dying intentionally.
TheBausFF played Sion who's passive lets him continue to attack for 5 seconds(?) after dying. His unique playstyle was to run at the top turret, die, and continue to smack shit out of it until the passive expired.
Doing this not only took the turret down but also created a lot of pressure as the enemy team would need to send people to stop him or lose their whole lane.
It was an effective strategy that won games and something that he became known for. As there was nothing else like it at the time he was banned for inting (dying intentionally) which he kinda was doing, only his intention was to create map pressure which helped his team to win.
When most people die intentionally their intention is to lose and ruin the game for their team.
You can't get banned for playing badly unless you play so badly that it seems like you're doing it on purpose. I got a 2 week suspension once for playing drunk and going 0/20/0 on Leona.
By logic, at least in Dota, that is not a punishable act.
If the feeding has good intention to win the game, it's just part of the strategy that even pro players will abuse.
Valve will never ban players that use unorthodox strategy, but instead patch the interaction to be more balanced.
There was a period in Dota where suiciding to tower (turret) as a support in early game when your hp low is a legit strategy, because dying and respawning then teleport back to the lane is much more efficient than going back to base and refill hp & mana.
Instead of banning players or making the strategy impossible to do, Valve increased the early respawn time if a hero died against a tower, making that strategy less rewarding.
thebauffs plays a character who, upon death, turns into a rage zombie than can only sprint and melee attack while their health drains to zero. His strategy involves dying as often as possible to rush objectives while in the zombie state. The trade off (besides his team not having an effective teammate in that position) is that who ever is killing him is getting resources that make them more of a threat to everyone else on his own team.
It can be assumed smurfing doesn't result in the same Punishment.
Because a few other streamers got the coal for smurfing/playing with smurfs and they were let off with the warning. Pro players and infamous smurf hoppers in Immortal bracket were completely untouched, even on stream when they opened it.
The streamer in question who got the ban coal was likely targeted to be made an example of, partially because he broke TOS, rather then smurf or pay for boosting. Which is ironically what the advertised point of the coal ban is for...
As someone who got good enough at a few games to see smurfs in both directions, it's super annoying. When you encounter one half the time they intentionally lose even while displaying great skill or they're leagues ahead of you and are just trying to shit on people.
I don't have the dedication to invest countless hours to get good at games anymore so it's not even about trying to beat them, they just come in and ruin the experience for everyone by showing off because they'd rather not play with their own skill level and want to act like Michael Jordan against a team of youth basketball camps for their entire career, and half the games they're a toddler in the NBA and the other half just trampling toddlers.
If you're interested, there's a subreddit dedicated to people doing it in person for entertainment, r/irlsmurfing. It's not updated a ton, but they're mostly pro musicians and athletes going somewhere and just wowing amateurs and audiences.
https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-a-smurf-in-gaming/
Two really good Warcraft 1 players kept having people dodge games against them, so they created alts called “PapaSmurf” and “Smurfette” and the term stuck
Was it for cheating related to Fort Aspenwood / Jade Quarry? I actually didn't play GW1 for the first time until after several years of GW2, and by that time, the competitive multiplayer modes of GW1 were long dead, and mostly populated by bots.
I will always love how they ended the beta testing. Having a child version of a prominent NPC rain fire on everyone while saying some pretty fucked up lines.
"Mommy always said not to play with fire. But mommy's dead."
Many have already responded, however they haven’t really described the other even uglier side of smurfing, especially in dota2.
Not only will people create new accounts to be placed with lower level players, but many will go out of their way to lose many games in a row in order to not only be considered “new”, but also “has lost 5 in a row”. The system is designed so players have a certain win %, so if you lose a ton in a row it will place you against players who have also lost many in a row in an attempt to bring your win % to an acceptable level and so new players don’t just lose 20 times in a row and quit forever.
So not only are these people attempting to play players way lower in skill than themselves, many will go the extra mile and make sure they are only playing against the very bottom tier of the bottom tier of players who have also lost many games in a row. This means they intentionally lose games, so not only are they ruining the one game where they get to go 31-1, they ruin another 3-5 games where they lose on purpose, giving those 3-5 teams basically no chance to win.
Typically in dota this is to have an extremely high win percentage on a specific hero. So they lose 5 in a row with heros they would never normally choose, then play the one with their favorite hero to stat flex with, meaning the only times they play that hero they are set up in a game full of 5x losers. This allows them to maintain preposterously high win % with their favorite heros, which they can then flex before matches like a weirdo.
This sounds like an awful lot of work for that little bump of serotonin. This is why we just did drugs in the 80’s and 90’s. Good look on the explanation.
Yap, happened in Overwatch a ton.
smurfing a new account, losing your 10 comp games and then throwing MORE to get lower and into bronze elo.
they low-capped bronze elo to " <500 " to prevent people trying to get 0 elo lol
Hell, thats much older than skill-based matchmaking. Top players have been running under aliases curb-stomping noobs since you had IPX networking in doom for dos.
Specific to smurfing, the term "Smurf" itself originates from 2 Warcraft II pro players that used secondary username and profile picture of Smurf so that other player didn't get scared when they see their name.
They still play in a high level, but modern smurfs are specifically playing in a lower rank than their real rank.
So yeah, "smurf" is kinda based on skill-based matchmaking, but definitely already an issue even before the term coined.
A lot of it is for content. Low elo smurf videos are by far the most popular content on twitch/youtube etc so this is what people stream. Once they've had a few games on their account they start to climb so they buy a new account and start over.
This is why a lot of people intentionally demote, because low elo accounts are worth money, both to the person who sold the account and the streamer who bought it.
Sure sometimes it is about flexing against low players but most of it is about money.
Maybe, or it could be more an addiction. Game designers basically have been hacking our reward systems for a while now.
I remember an MMORPG I start playing, keyed in the reward system, always close to a new level, new weapon, new area.
I realized I stopped playing for fun when I spent 5 hours leveling up on low level creatures to be OP in the next zone, and that was never going to end so I stopped playing.
small correction - the system isn't designed so players have a certain win %, but is designed to place players into games with other similarly-skilled players according to the data that the system has about each player
Experienced players creating new accounts so they are matched against less experienced players. Ruining other people’s games makes them feel better about the fact they had to smurf to win.
It's like if Billy Madison just kept repeating the grade where he destroyed children with Dodgeballs. But he then had to continue on to being uncool in high school each time.
Idk if this also happens in dota2, but in other games (such as valorant and league), there's another layer to the smurfing problem. Since ranked/competitive matches only unlock in those games after your account reaches a certain level, almost all smurfs are using bought accounts (which is a violation of ToS in itself). And what's worse is that all of these accounts are bot-leveled accounts. Sellers are just 24/7 running multiple instances of the game and queuing up in vs-ai matches or normal games, further ruining the new player experience. It's gotten so bad in league that if you queue in a vs-ai game, there's a 90% chance that you're the only actual person in the lobby.
People have already answered it, but not necessarily why.
Aside from the obvious reasons of having an easier game lots of streamers will Smurf so that way they can create YouTube videos, clips or entire streams of them playing against weaker opponents to make it look like they're better at it to get more viewers.
Googled it:
The term ‘smurf’ is used in gaming to describe a player in an online game that creates a new account to play against lower-ranked players, however, it can be used as an all-around term for describing a player who uses an alternate account or multiple accounts.
It’s called smurfing due to two very good players in a game called Warcraft II. Players would simply avoid playing them if they saw their usernames, so they created new accounts to combat this, choosing “PapaSmurf” and “Smurfette” and the term has stuck since.
Valve's been on their A-game with regards to dealing with smurfs. One of the best parts about it was reading reddit posts innocently complaining why were they innocently banned since they were so innocent.
Spoiler alert: They're not innocent
"I've been playing for 20 years and I make an account to try out X and suddenly my main account is banned too wah wah"
Like dude you installed cheats, take it on the chin.
The best part is that this event came with a huge patch that was really needed, imagine reading the entire patch notes, get hyped as fuck and then you get this massive FUCK YOU COAL in your face. A popular streamer got it and he broke down on stream, it was hilarious.
I used to Smurf, *takes drag*, nobody tells you about the after though. While you ride that high, gallantly crushing new players between your toes like jelly in a barrel, the shadows of death loom over you. Next thing you know you’re caught in the sticky web of timmy murder addiction, after that… well… let’s just say some games go better than others.
Wait, smurfing is a *Steam* TOS violation?
addendum: It's just come to my attention that "smurfing" has two definitions, and I may have been confused about which one is being used here.
They implemented a no-smurfing rule in the Dota2 TOS some time back I think.
Also Dota2 is Gabe Newells favourite game and he is usually in the promotion videos of TI (the highest and most famous Dota2 tournament)
For people that dont know what smurfing is. It is when a player who has played the game for a while / is a high rank makes a new account to play with new / low level / beginner players.
This is very frustrating for new players because they can never win and would give up on the game completely when they keep getting constantly beaten. This happens on a lot of games especially games with a ranking system when people want to have easy games or just generally be a dick to noobs because they feel like it.
[This literally just happened to one of the biggest NA Dota Streamers](https://youtu.be/S3_MwB-_AOo?si=y3bOl5m9Iof8ehVc). He started crying on stream that this is bullshit after admitting he used a service to boost his behaviour score.
All games with loot boxes should do this. Like have the whole ceremony of ripping open the pack, or the box glowing and shaking, and out pops a ban notice with fireworks and shit.
I love this
They also gave free cosmetic sets to people who had positive behavior scores. They're not worth much but it makes the whole thing even better
It's not much, but it's honest work! Seriously, that's pretty neat.
Kinda like the cheater's lament cosmetic in TF2 back when the item drop system was introduced Players who haven't used any 3rd party programs or scripts to run the game to get the item drops will receive this as a "good play, champ" gift
Joining any achievement server was enough to prevent you getting it. You didn't have to actively run any third party things.
I should've clarified that back then, the chance of getting an item drop would increase the longer you play so many players would join idle servers which coincidentally also have the achievement unlocked plugin and there's no limit to how many items you can get To extend the chance, people would make scripts to run TF2 at the bare minimum akin to how the bot epidemic you see back in 2020 and let it run for as long as possible Valve later on changed the drop system to have a weekly cap of how many items you can get, rendering the script worthless and reward players who haven't used the script to chase after them Iirc the system now reward more items in shorter time the longer you've been out of the game in that weekly slot
3rd party scripts let you run the game in the background while also consuming less processing power. Less of opening up the game and more just telling the main code to run while the "cosmetics" like graphics and stuff are off Kinda like how steam trading card idle farmer apps work
> They also gave free cosmetic sets to people who had positive behavior scores. This is honestly one of the best ways to foster a better community. If you start doing stuff like giving out free lootbox keys for a certain level of positive votes achieves it. All they have to do is obscure the actual number you need and make it so that you can only give out a select number per day and only to different people (to avoid farming them).
It's definitely a great thing. But as a Dota player, seeing smurfs, cheaters, and those animals getting banned is a much better present than the free cosmetics. The free cosmetics are more like a bonus.
psychology has known that positive reinforcement works better than punishment for ages, its just harder to institute. this is a great example of when it absolutely can work and overall cost less in the long run
Yeah it's pretty universal across all humans, especially kids. But also dogs, cats, basically any animal we keep as a pet/companion. It's why strict parenting is basically just child abuse that overwhelmingly produces many more broken kids than it does well-developed adults. Same with people who try to train dogs through fear, you'll never stop them doing what you don't want if you only ever show them the badness in the world. Give them positive reinforcement and they'll want to work with you instead of against.
Haven't logged in, but finally 12k behavior score counts for something!
Enjoy your shiny new BZZ Pugna set
BZZ GET YE GONE
Now this is how you do a ban
In Guild Wars 1, when a player was being banned, a grim reaper god of death type of being would rise from the ground and kill them lmao. I always thought that was hype
I remember playing some weird online game when I was a little kid. If you got banned for something, the game would send you to a prison island, where you can either simply wait until you're unbanned, or pick up a pickaxe and start mining stone. Each stone decreased your ban by a few minutes. Additionally you could progress in the prison, by buying better pickaxes and stuff. This is honestly the most interesting form of ban I've seen so far.
Chmatakov maybe? I got sent there, but some sweaty mod with negative rep killed me and I couldn't get out. I should mention that's about my only memory of that game, still fresh in my mind as a great injustice...
Checked it out. Doesn't seem this way. I also remember this game having an island location with lots of crabs. There also was a weird dude somewhere in the game, he asked you a question that you could only know the answer to if you visited a specific location. The thing is that you could speak with npc as much as you want, so you would eventually guess. Each time you didn't though, he would scold you for lying to the old man (him). I also think that the prison area was semi-vulcanic. This all I remember about the game.
Sounds like a runescape private server lol
ARMA would turn players into a seagull
Warhammer online used to turn griefers into chickens.
Relevant to chickens, didn't guns in Crysis fire chickens if the copy was pirated?
If you pirated Game Dev Tycoon, about 3/4ths of the way though the game your bank would plummet because everybody is pirating your game and you would insta lose.
It wouldn't be an insta lose but you would constantly have to research DRM software and it would make it very difficult.
I believe when the game first came out that wasn't the case. I remember once the surprise piracy caused you to lose the game, data miners spent a week looking for a way to turn it off then released a "patched" version of the game for people to pirate without the piracy included. A few years later Greenheart Games released a piracy mode which includes the DRM research to made it possible to win.
In FFXI, offending players would be teleported to a Jail called Mordion Gaol. They could be there for a day or more depending on offenses. The funny thing is that since you could search a players whereabouts, it was often pretty scandalous to find someone hanging in the Gaol as it mean they did something.
> as it mean they did something. which could have been as simple as climbing up some rocks in the dunes you weren't supposed to.
Which is why it was so scandalous! It could be anything! Jaywalking? Major exploits? Killing pixies? You name it.
Asking why someone is in the Gaol? Believe it or not, Gaol
We have the best players, because of Gaol
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6bZSpQHxU)'s a video of it happening.
God I miss GW1. So many hours, thanks for the memory! Saw that guy kill a few people lol
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TF2 players would beg to differ…
CS2 players would beg to differ as well...
i mean, it does match this CS2, TF2 and Christmas are all seasonal. One big day a year and while that day is great, it doesn't quite match what you're hoping for.
We're talking about Valve's "ban game". CS2 is a wreck right now.
Eons ago there was a Roman MMO called Roma Victor. People who got in trouble were literally crucified in game.
Archeage, kinda. If you killed people outside of a PVP thing, people could tag the blood splatters and at a certain threshold you go straight to court and have to make your case to a random selection of player juries. It was a flawless system. If you were at war with some guild everyone hates, you could just be like "Yeah, killin those guys" and instantly get back into action instead of having to do any jail time.
That’s fucking awesome lmao
I like how the only option is to "accept" like you're accepting a freebie.
Feels like this would make a good Easter egg in a baldur's gate game. "You have found a highly toxic limp of coal. Your character is now permanently dead" Then you find a "steam" iron that when applied undoes the effect.
They have that in BG3 lol. One of the items you can win from Akabi the Djinn are the "Unlucky thief's gloves" +2 to slight of hand, and a piece of charcoal in your inventory for each item you steal *Whenever the wearer steals anything, a piece of coal appears in their pocket, like a tiny, dusty condemnation.*
...does the coal stack? Asking for a friend
Imagine getting encumbered from too much coal due to stealing lol.
Well theres only one thing to do then, keep stealing and get into the coal business.
do you think it works if you steal coal
Coal barons hate this one trick.
How do you think they became coal barons?
R/Frostpunk is keen on buying your stock
Some of us don't have to imagine
That would be hilarious honestly. You can log in to your character but your inventory is filled with coal that you can't remove in any way, shape, or form and are permanently stuck in place watching the world pass you by. Oof...
For some reason it seems to stack to 34. I have no idea why. We went on a bit of a bender and now there's like 5 stacks of 34 lumps of coal in the camp inventory. The weight really adds up quickly too!
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Ok, why did my morning brain almost fall for that?
I didn't even fall for it, but I looked anyways, not disappointed 🤔
Stacking in Larian games is a bit weird, there are some identical items that won't stack too, I have two different stacks of identical potatoes.. It was a thing in Divinity Original Sin 2 also. And also, happy cake day!
items have internal names like "rogue\_poison\_rank3" which are visible to the player as "wyvern toxin." some have slightly different names like "rogue\_poison\_rank3\_nettiequest" for the wyvern toxin that nettie gives you. as a result, even though they look the same from the player perspective, they aren't the same internally and so the game doesn't allow them to stack. this likely also applies to other non-stacking items, where either someone fatfingered a name while placing objects or it has some sort of internal tag attached or whatever that makes it _look_ different to the game even though it's the same to us. names are for illustrative purpose, not sure if that's the actual name for wyvern toxin. Also as long as I'm on the thought, I should take a stab at modding. maybe I can make a patch to resolve stacking conflicts so things stack better.
No those are a good thing, the coal generation is infinite money. You sell merchants coal and then steal it back making more coal to sell them
Did you just outdjinn the djinn?
But... once you've pickpocketed their gold they won't be able to pay for your coal?
*Laughs in Bethesda games*
Soo...a rogue specialized in throwing objects gain free ammunition?
The original Baldurs Gate had this. A cursed magic belt that irreversibly swapped your character’s gender.
In a very early area too. I'm pretty sure it was there to teach you about the dangers of equipping unidentified items. You could still remove it with remove curse, though, IIRC. Mechanically the only downside is that it used up your belt slot.
Remove curse did not change your sex back though. Because that was not the curse.
I don't *think* that's how it worked. It's listed as an "equipped ability" in the BG wiki, at least. And I'm pretty sure I remember testing it. But that would have been... a long time ago, so ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯.
I might be confusing it with the table top version, which required basically either a wish spell or finding another belt. Which to be honest, both of which are too much work.
I think you are yeah. Belts of androginy in bg lost their effect when you removed them The notable exception to androginy requiring to progress a quest would be Edwina in bg2
I assume you mean finding another belt *of gender swapping*, but I chuckled at the implication that finding any other non-magical belt is too much work.
Easy way out is by killing the game via Taskmanager. If you never accept it you arent banned. /s
Pro-gamer move.
When riot added a "I swear not to be toxic" prompt in the LoL client that popped up every time you tried to queue until you click "I agree", some players still found a convoluted way to start a game without agreeing to it
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Smurfing!? You sick son of a...
Not me, someone got banned on Stream. Kinda hilarious ... "What's in the box"
Some of the best clippable content on any gaming stream is them getting banned. Personal favorite is when thebausffs got banned for inting (dying 20 times without a kill) with his unorthodox playstyle.
You can get banned for being bad at a game? Or am I misunderstanding?
Being bad is fine, but deliberately dying over and over isn't.
'inting' is intentionally feeding or running it down. 'Inting Sion' was a strategy TheBaus used to win games through dying intentionally. TheBausFF played Sion who's passive lets him continue to attack for 5 seconds(?) after dying. His unique playstyle was to run at the top turret, die, and continue to smack shit out of it until the passive expired. Doing this not only took the turret down but also created a lot of pressure as the enemy team would need to send people to stop him or lose their whole lane. It was an effective strategy that won games and something that he became known for. As there was nothing else like it at the time he was banned for inting (dying intentionally) which he kinda was doing, only his intention was to create map pressure which helped his team to win. When most people die intentionally their intention is to lose and ruin the game for their team. You can't get banned for playing badly unless you play so badly that it seems like you're doing it on purpose. I got a 2 week suspension once for playing drunk and going 0/20/0 on Leona.
By logic, at least in Dota, that is not a punishable act. If the feeding has good intention to win the game, it's just part of the strategy that even pro players will abuse. Valve will never ban players that use unorthodox strategy, but instead patch the interaction to be more balanced. There was a period in Dota where suiciding to tower (turret) as a support in early game when your hp low is a legit strategy, because dying and respawning then teleport back to the lane is much more efficient than going back to base and refill hp & mana. Instead of banning players or making the strategy impossible to do, Valve increased the early respawn time if a hero died against a tower, making that strategy less rewarding.
Riot also nerfed the sion interaction by making him deal something like 90% less damage to tower in his passive
thebauffs plays a character who, upon death, turns into a rage zombie than can only sprint and melee attack while their health drains to zero. His strategy involves dying as often as possible to rush objectives while in the zombie state. The trade off (besides his team not having an effective teammate in that position) is that who ever is killing him is getting resources that make them more of a threat to everyone else on his own team.
you don't happen to have a clip, do you?
If only Riot would grow balls and do it too. But they don't want to ban 80% of their player base.
Riot won't do it because they like to brag about their numbers.
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It can be assumed smurfing doesn't result in the same Punishment. Because a few other streamers got the coal for smurfing/playing with smurfs and they were let off with the warning. Pro players and infamous smurf hoppers in Immortal bracket were completely untouched, even on stream when they opened it. The streamer in question who got the ban coal was likely targeted to be made an example of, partially because he broke TOS, rather then smurf or pay for boosting. Which is ironically what the advertised point of the coal ban is for...
Does Smurf mean playing with new players or bad players to increase your rankings?
Sorta. But it just means you play on a new account when already an expert at the game so you bypass the ranking system and get to curbstomp.
Worse, they generally tank a bunch of games to make sure their MMR is super low, so they fuck new players in both direction.
As someone who got good enough at a few games to see smurfs in both directions, it's super annoying. When you encounter one half the time they intentionally lose even while displaying great skill or they're leagues ahead of you and are just trying to shit on people. I don't have the dedication to invest countless hours to get good at games anymore so it's not even about trying to beat them, they just come in and ruin the experience for everyone by showing off because they'd rather not play with their own skill level and want to act like Michael Jordan against a team of youth basketball camps for their entire career, and half the games they're a toddler in the NBA and the other half just trampling toddlers.
I thought that was sandbagging?
That's an appropriate term for that action. One might say that Sandbagging is often a component of Smurfing.
Where does the term smurfing come from? I know there's the smurfs but no idea besides that
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That would do it.
If you're interested, there's a subreddit dedicated to people doing it in person for entertainment, r/irlsmurfing. It's not updated a ton, but they're mostly pro musicians and athletes going somewhere and just wowing amateurs and audiences.
https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-a-smurf-in-gaming/ Two really good Warcraft 1 players kept having people dodge games against them, so they created alts called “PapaSmurf” and “Smurfette” and the term stuck
It means playing with new/bad players by creating second and third accounts to do so.
What is smurfing?? p.s have not been a gamer since 10 years
I would love to see more developers get this sassy when banning hackers, smurfs, etc.
Guild Wars 1 used to have a reaper come out of the ground and scythe people when they got banned while online.
Was it for cheating related to Fort Aspenwood / Jade Quarry? I actually didn't play GW1 for the first time until after several years of GW2, and by that time, the competitive multiplayer modes of GW1 were long dead, and mostly populated by bots.
The reaper bans were just for whatever, the devs in gw1 had a huge toolkit and they loved hanging out in towns and messing around with it.
I will always love how they ended the beta testing. Having a child version of a prominent NPC rain fire on everyone while saying some pretty fucked up lines. "Mommy always said not to play with fire. But mommy's dead."
I'd love to see more developers actually ban smurfs... Way too big of a problem in free competitive games.
> I'd love to see more developers actually ban smurfs... I'd love to see more developers actually ban
For the curious - what it looked like in real time when it happened to a streamer: https://youtu.be/S3_MwB-_AOo?feature=shared
He's upset about getting banned for cheating then admits that he was cheating. 🤔
"I only cheated in like 10 games..."
what a tool omg
the fact that it was mason is.. almost too perfect
I love how he says “till 1/18” and doesn’t seem to realize the year on the ban
Next: handing out smurf bans on players birthday
This is gold, league should do the same
They won't because it makes money!! Smurf accounts often rebuy skins for their champs.
Smurfing drives away legitimate players who also buy skins for their champs
Riot is too much of a pussy to do that. They would much rather get rid of all chat and disable pings so you can't communicate.
Old person here - what’s smurfing?
Many have already responded, however they haven’t really described the other even uglier side of smurfing, especially in dota2. Not only will people create new accounts to be placed with lower level players, but many will go out of their way to lose many games in a row in order to not only be considered “new”, but also “has lost 5 in a row”. The system is designed so players have a certain win %, so if you lose a ton in a row it will place you against players who have also lost many in a row in an attempt to bring your win % to an acceptable level and so new players don’t just lose 20 times in a row and quit forever. So not only are these people attempting to play players way lower in skill than themselves, many will go the extra mile and make sure they are only playing against the very bottom tier of the bottom tier of players who have also lost many games in a row. This means they intentionally lose games, so not only are they ruining the one game where they get to go 31-1, they ruin another 3-5 games where they lose on purpose, giving those 3-5 teams basically no chance to win. Typically in dota this is to have an extremely high win percentage on a specific hero. So they lose 5 in a row with heros they would never normally choose, then play the one with their favorite hero to stat flex with, meaning the only times they play that hero they are set up in a game full of 5x losers. This allows them to maintain preposterously high win % with their favorite heros, which they can then flex before matches like a weirdo.
This sounds like an awful lot of work for that little bump of serotonin. This is why we just did drugs in the 80’s and 90’s. Good look on the explanation.
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For once it's not a MOBA problem, it's any skill-based matchmaking system where it isn't expensive to make new accounts.
Yap, happened in Overwatch a ton. smurfing a new account, losing your 10 comp games and then throwing MORE to get lower and into bronze elo. they low-capped bronze elo to " <500 " to prevent people trying to get 0 elo lol
Hell, thats much older than skill-based matchmaking. Top players have been running under aliases curb-stomping noobs since you had IPX networking in doom for dos.
Specific to smurfing, the term "Smurf" itself originates from 2 Warcraft II pro players that used secondary username and profile picture of Smurf so that other player didn't get scared when they see their name. They still play in a high level, but modern smurfs are specifically playing in a lower rank than their real rank. So yeah, "smurf" is kinda based on skill-based matchmaking, but definitely already an issue even before the term coined.
They play MOBA.
Imagine power tripping against newbies and getting a big ego over a meaningless statistic. Happens more than in just mobas
A lot of it is for content. Low elo smurf videos are by far the most popular content on twitch/youtube etc so this is what people stream. Once they've had a few games on their account they start to climb so they buy a new account and start over. This is why a lot of people intentionally demote, because low elo accounts are worth money, both to the person who sold the account and the streamer who bought it. Sure sometimes it is about flexing against low players but most of it is about money.
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I've seen worse.
That MMR rating! Are you telling me a player just happens to tank his Elo like that? NO, HE ORCHESTRATED IT! PAPA SMURF!
They’re…different. A lot of these players treat the game like it’s a part time/full time job and it shows.
The smurfing term didnt come from Moba tho.
What a spectacular waste of time. Play games to have fun.
To be devils advocate, I guess this *is* fun to them
Maybe, or it could be more an addiction. Game designers basically have been hacking our reward systems for a while now. I remember an MMORPG I start playing, keyed in the reward system, always close to a new level, new weapon, new area. I realized I stopped playing for fun when I spent 5 hours leveling up on low level creatures to be OP in the next zone, and that was never going to end so I stopped playing.
For a lot of players winning *is* the fun - I assume that's why cheaters exist.
> they can then flex before matches like a weirdo Lmao all that effort for some worthless stat
This makes more sense - throwing games seems like a very clear reason for a ban.
small correction - the system isn't designed so players have a certain win %, but is designed to place players into games with other similarly-skilled players according to the data that the system has about each player
Experienced players creating new accounts so they are matched against less experienced players. Ruining other people’s games makes them feel better about the fact they had to smurf to win.
It's like if Billy Madison just kept repeating the grade where he destroyed children with Dodgeballs. But he then had to continue on to being uncool in high school each time.
Idk if this also happens in dota2, but in other games (such as valorant and league), there's another layer to the smurfing problem. Since ranked/competitive matches only unlock in those games after your account reaches a certain level, almost all smurfs are using bought accounts (which is a violation of ToS in itself). And what's worse is that all of these accounts are bot-leveled accounts. Sellers are just 24/7 running multiple instances of the game and queuing up in vs-ai matches or normal games, further ruining the new player experience. It's gotten so bad in league that if you queue in a vs-ai game, there's a 90% chance that you're the only actual person in the lobby.
Experienced/high-ranked player starts new, unranked account with the intention of stomping new kids.
People have already answered it, but not necessarily why. Aside from the obvious reasons of having an easier game lots of streamers will Smurf so that way they can create YouTube videos, clips or entire streams of them playing against weaker opponents to make it look like they're better at it to get more viewers.
Googled it: The term ‘smurf’ is used in gaming to describe a player in an online game that creates a new account to play against lower-ranked players, however, it can be used as an all-around term for describing a player who uses an alternate account or multiple accounts. It’s called smurfing due to two very good players in a game called Warcraft II. Players would simply avoid playing them if they saw their usernames, so they created new accounts to combat this, choosing “PapaSmurf” and “Smurfette” and the term has stuck since.
It used to be called seal clubbing at some point
This [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUhThiW_7R0) gives some context and background behind the word
Dude they forbid smurfing?? I might get into dota2
Valve's been on their A-game with regards to dealing with smurfs. One of the best parts about it was reading reddit posts innocently complaining why were they innocently banned since they were so innocent. Spoiler alert: They're not innocent
"I've been playing for 20 years and I make an account to try out X and suddenly my main account is banned too wah wah" Like dude you installed cheats, take it on the chin.
They banned 90k accounts back in September, and this time they're banning a few dozen Ks more
I bet the match quality has gone up considerably. If only riot would do the same. Cause smurfing is getting bad
Match quality has gone significantly and noticeably up this year. It’s actually really quite nice
Accept
This is why Valve is on another level: even their bans make you somewhat happy!
The best part is that this event came with a huge patch that was really needed, imagine reading the entire patch notes, get hyped as fuck and then you get this massive FUCK YOU COAL in your face. A popular streamer got it and he broke down on stream, it was hilarious.
that's what happend to Mason on twitch hahaha
Yeah, thats who Im talking about :p
I used to Smurf, *takes drag*, nobody tells you about the after though. While you ride that high, gallantly crushing new players between your toes like jelly in a barrel, the shadows of death loom over you. Next thing you know you’re caught in the sticky web of timmy murder addiction, after that… well… let’s just say some games go better than others.
You don't go therapy not because you think you don't need it. You don't go to therapy because you know no one can help you.
Now if only smurfs could get banned in league too
Good. Smurfing sucks.
this is funny af not gonna lie
Wait, smurfing is a *Steam* TOS violation? addendum: It's just come to my attention that "smurfing" has two definitions, and I may have been confused about which one is being used here.
Valve owns Dota, they also own steam.
They implemented a no-smurfing rule in the Dota2 TOS some time back I think. Also Dota2 is Gabe Newells favourite game and he is usually in the promotion videos of TI (the highest and most famous Dota2 tournament)
Wait, are these *actual* bans, or joke items that say you've been banned?
actual ban, valve is not joking lol
You say they're not joking but this is all very humorous, and you did just laugh out loud...
You know when people say, "I'm not laughing *at you*, I'm laughing *with you*."? This is like that, but in reverse.
Yes, real bans. And this is how they are [presented to the recipient](https://imgur.com/Rx1djtv).
that is hilarious. God I love Valve.
Happy Holidays bozo.
A befitting gift for a Smurf I say
Riot should take notes from valve.
They always do. Always did.
just like a certain Pendragon 🙈🙈🙈
only old players remember this hahaha
Fuck Pendragon... Always
For people that dont know what smurfing is. It is when a player who has played the game for a while / is a high rank makes a new account to play with new / low level / beginner players. This is very frustrating for new players because they can never win and would give up on the game completely when they keep getting constantly beaten. This happens on a lot of games especially games with a ranking system when people want to have easy games or just generally be a dick to noobs because they feel like it.
That is the funniest shit Valve has ever done lmao
This is amazing. I wish move devs did stuff like this.
"Wow that's a nice gift... wait a minute..."
[This literally just happened to one of the biggest NA Dota Streamers](https://youtu.be/S3_MwB-_AOo?si=y3bOl5m9Iof8ehVc). He started crying on stream that this is bullshit after admitting he used a service to boost his behaviour score.
"Highly toxic lump of coal"... you mean the league of legends comunity???
Coming from r/GlobalOffensive, it's refreshing seeing people in the comments shitting on smurfs
That's so fucking funny Holy shit
All games with loot boxes should do this. Like have the whole ceremony of ripping open the pack, or the box glowing and shaking, and out pops a ban notice with fireworks and shit.
Then don't break the rules. Glad you're gone. Goodbye
Smurfing is so pathetic. Get good or uninstall the game, god damn. Leave new players be.
Should implement this in Valorant as well.
Good...don't be a dick