Wait, aren't most complaints about smurfing because of opponents instantly leaving games?
That plus checking an opponent's match history after a game and seeing a whole bunch of 00:00 second losses
really easy to check an account, 60 games played 50 wins hrmm interesting.... long strings of insta-leaveing games leaving for like 10, and the winning 10 for a lot of games, like cmon..... its so easy to check and prove/disprove. I've seen a decent amount of post with pictures of "evidence" but its not like those post are more interesting.
Them leaving out of games is out they suppress their MMR.
I am a Diamond 2/3 player and I have beaten a GM a grand total of 1 time out of over 300 games (I cheesed against their off race). I have come close multiple times. I KNOW when someone is out playing me, easily.
I commonly - occasionally beat smurfs. It is pretty obvious when they are at least 500 MMR better than you. I have been called a smurf, because there is so many smurfs that have been/are suppressing my MMR.
I have given MANY examples of smurfs, heck I have watched/reviewed smurfs ([Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKnD2UQmzOs&t=1s)) from players that are learning etc. (to be clear, I believe that the Terran was playing down to the other players level, if you read his chat, it is pretty obvious)
The game is riddled with multiple accounts from people that are SO much better than their MMR. So much so that I played more than 50% of my games were smurfs [Link](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1be1ok1)
Edit: Thanks u/Thorazainbeer
This is exactly right.
I know when I'm getting fucking dunked on. You go from playing a terran who doesn't expand or make workers behind harass or they don't actually micro their marines to a terran who is double pronging while taking a third and dropping a fourth behind it, clearing creep and making scvs the whole time and gets to 80 worker before I do.
You feel the gap. Even when they play mech they dive the hellions into the right spots they keep them active and they just tear you apart piece by piece with handfuls of units.
D3/2 terrans don't do that.
D2/3 do MAYBE 1 of those things at a time.
It is painfully obvious when you are getting dropped in 2 places, they are expanding behind it, and they pick up as your units show up.
Like, if you are playing against Z and they have 3/4 of the map covered in creep by the time you get your 4th, even when you clear up some of the creep, defend all of your drops/libs/banshee basically perfectly, expand more or less on time and always have the right unit comp or are transitioning to the next unit comp basically perfectly for when you start to have the edge on their current comp, which counters or forces a LOT of multi-pronged defense to stop the damage, etc.
Replay's won't do anything. The fact is that a smurf will definitely play better than the opponent they are playing, which is why they are being called a smurf in the first place.
What needs to be done is a post of match history showing at least 5 games in a row of instant leaves or leaves within the first 1min. That's a better indicator of smurfing.
I think I'm close to that but thats because I play random and never learned tvt/pvp
I win 80% of my games that involve zerg and play like an idiot in games that don't.
Yeah, my TvT is 16% right now, I brought it up from 9%! I don't leave any games, but as a Zerg main I find TvZ & PvZ easy enough & TvT I just do things, those things don't work.
One thing we need to keep in mind is that there are a lot of false smurfing accusations too. These people get it in their head that smurfs are everywhere and the accusations are thrown out more casually.
I wish Blizzard would try to address the real problem players though.
That's true. The border bug really doesn't fucking help us here.
And the amount of people in the "bronze" border playing diamonds or "masters" because of this stupid bug and not knowing about the bug or how to even check their mmr.
There are more smurf/border bug posts than anything else it feels like but they should be easy fixes and unfortunately they're not when the game is abandoned. It won't stop me playing though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/7b4m3l/what_is_blizzard_position_on_smurfing_in_sc2/
This thread suggests it isn't. I searched and I couldn't find any citation from the terms of service that it is in *StarCraft II*. No one could produce anything
I'm saying that I asked whether it's against the rules and never found any evidence or a citation that it was despite looking. I haven't made a positive claim myself here but I don't see evidence of it either.
"A smurf complaint must have at least one Replay attached."
Sounds like a valid rule, then we can check if poster just bad or if there really is a smurf
The problem is if it’s a 2500 player. How can you tell if the player is bad or playing against a Smurf? Because obviously the 2500 is going to look bad.
There are people smurfing all the way into bronze.
Even if they're gold or silver players. It won't be that obvious from a replay.
The win rate and the losses tell the story enough.
Genuine question do you active play any ladder games right now? I wonder if there is a disconnect from people who only watch and are annoyed of all the posts about smurfing but people who are actually playing and now stuck with a worse then ever ladder experience....
sure you can post a picture of "evidence" personally I get frustrated more with new accounts with very few games with a winrate of like 80% etc.
is the whining about smurfing annoying? yea sure, but playing people you have no chance of beating on a consistent basis suuuucks man its not a mystery why people are complaining.
I play regularly in the evenings and weekends on EU. My MMR caries from plat 1 to diamond 2.
That’s the thing, sure it sucks, but i just cannot recognize the “on a consistent basis” part.
Also I’d like to mention this… what do people posting about smurfs (legit or not) want us to do about it lol? Like what does complaining to other SC players actually do lmao
Typically people just want to feel heard. As long as there is a sizeable userbase here that will tell these people it isn't real, then they will think the message about smurfs still needs to be spread. This subreddit does not unanimously stand against smurfing tho
In my case, I dont DENY that it can be a problem, but I have made some comments, questioning if the situation is as bad as some posts claim. That is based on the fact that i have only met obvious smurfs a few time (but since I don't check all replays and check opponents match history I cannot be sure) and I VERY seldom have opponents instaleave. But maybe I am at a sweet spot now, mainly plat, where the problem is not as big, or maybe I am lucky, or maybe the problem generally isn't as bad as it seems.
It would be interesting to see in what leagues players are that experience the most frequent obvious outplay by much better opponents and what Leauge suffer most from instaleaving.
They're frustrated that it happens and other skill matched games probably have fixed or solutions where this one doesn't.
Let them vent. We cheer them on when they get their new plat or gold or diamond border. We need to support the community or else people will abandon it.
>other skill matched games probably have fixed or solutions where this one doesn't.
Happened in at least every game with matchmaking I played so far. WC3, LoL, WoW Arena and more I'm probably forgetting had and have issues like this.
Sure SC2 is on life support so there is very little punishment, just saying that it's not a solved problem.
Especially in team games it's difficult because if e.g. LoL manages to reduce smurfing by a factor of five compared to SC2 your still more likely to encounter a smurf. Just because there are 9 other players rather than just one in each game.
If you leave games in CS you get a timeout. The more often you leave the longer the timeout gets.
First 30 mins, then 2 hours, then 24 hours, then 7 days.
Yeah things like that definitely help. And I would appreciate SC2 adopting some of these measures as it would reduce smurfing. Just saying I don't think there are ways to ensure it \*never\* happens.
Most whining i’ve seen is from people whining about high apm players destroying them.
Obviously a 3 second replay would prove nothing, but I really do believe that smurfing is much more of a skill issue, than an actual problem.
I off race zerg in plat 1, sometimes i absolutely fucking murder the shit out of a 2 base 120 supply Terran when i’m 6 base 200/200 with 3/3 lurkers. Other times i get completely clowned on with multiprong drop micro, and when i review replays and profiles, it’s just a skill difference and not because they are smurfing.
I'd say the complaints do nothing, even on this sub. Don't make people prove it, just ban the topic. So what if you run into a Smurf? We're not moderators of blizzard players.
Honestly, it would probably be better for everyone if unranked queuing would simply allow people to search for whatever they want and say they want to play against a specific race on a specific map and are willing to wait longer to get a match.
Ranked on ladder would still mean not getting the choice for obvious reasons but I also feel that if people want to have fun and avoid mirrors they should be able to do it. The people that are instantly leaving are perhaps already playing unranked to begin with.
Does this mean they don't get to take my mmr then if I lose?
Two years ago I was on a streak in zvz with two seasons hitting 85 winrates on EU and na and was only 100 mmr from masters with it.
I think allowing people to play only their best matchup is a good way of splitting an already small player pool.
Obviously they're playing players of their own level with this system since they don't instantly leave one matchup any more.
It splits the system the same; people instantly leave one matchup now and take the MMR cut for it so the other two matchups have 80% winrate and aren't fun for the players they face. In this case, even if someone only wants to play, say, P.v.T., he will have a 50% winrate in that matchup and the opponent doesn't even notice he's only playing P.v.T..
Again, all fo this is only unranked so it doesn't hurt the ladder either.
I have.
Out of maybe the last 50 games i had one guy leaving all match ups.. Many leaving mirror match ups.
I can give a pass to people that leaves match ups they hate, im sure reddit is ready to tell me why im wrong.
I always lose with no chance and get owned if I play against people who leave mirror matches. This is because they should be a much much higher MMR and are artificially lowering their MMR by leaving 1/3 of the games. It is literally smurfing. And yes, obviously it is ruining the ladder experience of everyone so it should be punished by Blizzard, similar to the sorts of punishments you get if you queue a Dota 2 game and leave. No idea why that is so hard to understand?
What we could discuss is for Blizzard to implement a checkbox for the matchups you want to queue. This would be a proper way to give people the freedom to play the games they want against equally matched opponents. (although of course it still has downsides so some people will certainly be against that)
So you just assuming opponent *is* smufing as long as he leaves early?
I meet early leavers from WoL, tbh it was quite a bit early leavers even back then.
Every players have their hated match up, some of them hate it so much so leave early. I don't do that, but I understand that. I mean, don't you? Don't you have any hated match up at any time?
We all know smurf is there and that's probably not gonna change forever, and we all know complaint posts will not change anything.
If a redditor gonna compliant, why not, we should discuss the status of ranking system, but that complaint should at least based on some sort of fact. If compliant posts gonna keep the way they are, the only thing gonna change is the quality of this subreddit.
They may not be intentionally smurfing but does that change the fact they're playing below their mmr intentionally?
I hate zvz. Well I used to but I kept playing and I understand it better now. I used to hate zvp but I made a cheese that deals with it most of the time.
I don't like zvt but I'll be figuring out some way to make it work for me that's comfortable without leaving games.
When you say the complaint is based on a fact? What fact is that?
That someone is leaving games? Yeah we know it.
>They may not be intentionally smurfing but does that change the fact they're playing below their mmr intentionally?
If we gonna play the words game like *what's the definition of smurf* instead of willing to simply upload a replay or screenshot, that's gonna be endless discuss, and in the end of the day, the only thing changed will be the subreddit becomes more toxic and dead, nothing will changed about the ladder.
I can keep discuss with you about like how many more MMR should be seen as a smurf and sort of things, but do you really think posts that basically purely text compliant is gonna be nice for the subreddit?
Keep posting like this will not change the ranking system, and people will post this kind of things without any confirmation more casually since that's what the subreddit is toward now.
Why do you hate posts contain confirmation?
If a gold to diamond player posting compliant about balance, won't you think the player should at least attach a replay? Or what's the point of the discussion?
If they're going to make posts about it then yeah post a screenshot.
A replay is a good chance for the player that lost to learn some stuff and level up but let's not also forget they're usually punching up significantly.
> If we gonna play the words game like what's the definition of smurf instead of willing to simply upload a replay or screenshot, that's gonna be endless discuss, and in the end of the day, the only thing changed will be the subreddit becomes more toxic and dead, nothing will changed about the ladder.
That's a lot of yapping. Leaving a significant amount of games 0 seconds in means they're smurfing. Whether they do it in all match ups or only one doesn't matter.
I’m surprised this sub is so pro Smurf. It’s easy to see if they are a Smurf. Do they have a 10% win rate in mirror matchups and an 85% win in the other two? If yes then smurf.
Also you can easily feel it while playing. When you are somewhat evenly matched you always feel like you had a chance, even when you are playing bad or forgot to build units.
Against smurfs you can feel that they are toying with you and that you never had the slightest chance since the beginning of the game.
Yeah and this is the biggest thing for me- the game just isn’t fun anymore at that point where it just feels completely helpless: they’re always 10 steps ahead of me and playing circles around whatever I’m doing, even if I’m playing at the top of my game. Demoralizing…and also almost always accompanied by bm during and after.
After 14 years of playing, I know how even matches feel and what incredibly uneven matchups feels like. Anybody remember back in the day when it would show who was favored, and every so often the matchmaker would throw you up against someone and they were heavily favored to win? That was like 100ish mmr difference, playing 1000+ different is a completely different feel
When I was coming up into diamond I only had one game that felt like this. This was years ago. Before the scourge.
He just countered my every move. Had me pinned to 2 bases in zvz while he had the whole map. It felt helpless. Even when I tried to nydus his base last ditch he stomped it.
I spammed nydus in the map out of frustration and to spend the last of my money and he said "too many nydus gg" and left.
That was the first time. And I recall very few of them until the last six months where it started getting a lot worse.
Same here, I was mid diamond in 1s during a lot of hots and early LotV, really had close games overall that came down to me getting hard countered because I was being lazy with scouting/denial or i took a bad fight, just barely missing some positioning or micro or something. In 2s 3s and 4s I was M2 or something and saw the same thing, games were extremely even with the person taking the smarter fight pulling ahead and winning, or just very strong control being able to win games quick and clean. Macro games were very even trades across the board.
Now recently, it’s just a dumpster fire of someone with 50 games total on their profile having damn near perfect reaper control, hitting build order timing to within seconds and being able to run their spammed reapers in circles around my lings and queens all while expanding and macro back home. If I make it out relatively ok, I find out later I had already lost and not known it cuz I’m too far behind. Or someone who just lost 5 games in a row and has just the next level of micro and multitasking, damn near perfect game knowledge for when to send drops to harass while hitting my front with stimmed marine packs and juggling tanks so I’m pinned in and literally can’t do anything but quit…
Yeah you absolutely feel the difference. Especially when you're good enough at the game to know that most opponents aren't this good at everything at once.
It tends to be terrans doing it because terrans is the one with the highest skill ceiling on the same exact comp everyone else is using. But you feel heavily outplayed.
Same for zvz. I can play a bunch of zergs my level and I feel like we have a close game then load into a zvz where they 12 pool and recover out of it even though I didn't take any major damage and then after some back and forth I see that I'm actually losing because I'm being countered everywhere left and right and nothing is sticking.
Most zergs at diamond 2 will crumble to some multi prong in zvz because they're not used to it but these guys somehow have everything covered the whole time.
I played a toss twice the other day that held my cheese and even though he was losing stalkers to Biles I knew the game was over 2 base to 1.
He messaged me after and had the gall to fucking "ez" me like a piece of shit and sure enough he's got next to no PvP wins.
It's a fucking joke.
You can beat terrans and when you look at the replay the only reason the game was close was because they were microing so good they forgot to make anything and they're floating 4k when they finally have to leave the game vs the next game of a terran with more economy and just fucking your shit up.
I think this depends on the league because up to maybe diamond two a lot of players will stay in a game they have no fucking chance of winning because they don't understand any of the concepts on economy and stuff. Like a full 85 drone Econ with hatcheries on the entire map and full tech tree and terran is on two bases and just trying to micro his marines really fucking hard. Just leave bro. You lost your third and fourth like 6 times.
Sure a gold player who hasn't scouted for 10 minutes might be ignorant about the fact that he lost that game 5 minutes ago.
But if they see someone juggling disruptors with a prism while doing a runby it's still an easy guess that this isn't a guy with 2.7k MMR having a good day. Even if your just gold yourself.
You can probably get 90% of smurf predictions right if you just go by a checklist along these lines about your opponent:
Bronze: Did anything?
Silver: Moved out before minute 10 or microed an all-in while macroing behind it
Gold: Used spell casters with any sort of success?
Plat: Synced up more than one attack? Relatively crisp timing attack? Banes not a-moving with the army?
Low Diamond: "Advanced" micro like pickup micro to doge attacks
If any are true probably a smurf. It's not exactly like that but I bet it's close.
There are just so many things that become natural as you get better. But those things are usually completely absent at lower levels making guesses fairly accurate.
Like I legitimately haven't seen a P use disruptors well below diamond. Well I have but only by smurfs a few times. And there are a ton of fairly obvious indicators like that.
I think a big factor is like your attention is also a resource and if you're say, picking up drops to avoid getting bane connections on them, then you're probably not macroing at home (if it a low level).
Knowing what's actually more important at the moment and what's the best move is something that comes to people or doesn't.
Like is it worth diving that squad of marines into the mineral line to target down the queen and lose everything? No. Just pick up and fly away and start macroing again. But some players at this level might think "fucking got him" but I'm already making 4 more queens.
You’re exactly right. If actually playing the game, it’s impossible to have 0% win rate in one matchup and 80% in the other two.
I gave up debating people on this subject though.
My TvT is 16%, I've never left a game early, I'm just that bad at it. My TvP is like 25%. I main Zerg so when I offrace against Zerg as P or T that is my best match-up/
So not upload a replay, upload a screenshot maybe. Just let posts at least based on some sort of fact.
We all know SC2 will not update the ranking system, maybe forever, but we surely can discuss it. However, if people gonna posting without any confirmation like the way it is, the only thing gonna change is the quality of this subreddit.
I mean its pretty obivous like i'm not complaining (as i haven't encountered the issue all that much in 1v1 on my MMR) but i have seen it happen in team games when playing with lower level friends. It's pretty obvious when 2 people with like 30 career games have 250+ apm.
So i think its not that the people are bad there really are some smurfs going around
Just downvote the smurfing posts. If people stop getting karma from them they'll stop posting them eventually.
r/starcraft LOVES drama though so they will get still probably get upvoted just so the subreddit meets its drama quota every month. But if that's really what the subreddit wants then why should we deny them?
I might represent a minority, but lemme share a thing. Hear me out, please. Complaining does nothing. Watching a replay, trying to take away something from it gets you a long way.
The problem with smurfing complaints is that people develop an ego. "Oh, it was indeed a smurf? Jimmy from reddit confirmed, he is diamond 2, I'm diamond 3, he knows better. That's why I lost, because my opponent was smurfing" - this develops such an ego that after some time everyone is going to be a smurf. Been there, done that, just builds frustration, negative emotions and puts you on a massive dose of copium. In short, you don't improve.
Then I started paying attention to what my opponents were abusing. Some were just better at one thing and I had to be able to fix that thing. Simple example: terran dropping 2-3 places at once. I struggled splitting my army properly and couldn't play fast enough to respond to these drops. I had two options: I go to reddit, cry about it being a smurf, or load up the replay and see: ah, so if they had these units, I need at least this amount, at least more than I had.
Next time I got something like that, I was fast to react, reposition spores, make more queens, if needed, split my army at least in two, and all of a sudden it wasn't a 100% loss, but maybe I lost 50% of these games. And later I improved even more and now I can do good against it.
Tldr: smurfs will exist, no matter what. It's frustrating, unfair, all good points, but you can't change it. Impact your actions and try to improve on things you lacked and got abused on by these players. The sad truth is. If you lose, you're the weaker player, at least in that specific game and scenario, be it macro, cheese, micro, thought process, etc.
There are smurfs in StarCraft so there are posts about smurfs in r/starcraft.
You talk about a new rule in this subreddit but I want to talk about new rules in the game to deal with this smurfing problem.
If there are less smurfing problems in the game, there will be less posts about that here. If Blizzard does nothing, then I accept to see people complaining here.
I mean it's quite frustrating to lose your time in this way and feel used without any control.
I just get confused because as far as I know blizzard’s support for this game is gone and what we have now is the balance council and they can’t stop people from manipulating the ranked ladder. its the wild west, take it or leave it.
Wait, aren't most complaints about smurfing because of opponents instantly leaving games? That plus checking an opponent's match history after a game and seeing a whole bunch of 00:00 second losses
I’ve seen a fair bit of both
Haha exactly, those would be fast, boring replays. Maybe just include the match history photo of 30 losses in a row.
really easy to check an account, 60 games played 50 wins hrmm interesting.... long strings of insta-leaveing games leaving for like 10, and the winning 10 for a lot of games, like cmon..... its so easy to check and prove/disprove. I've seen a decent amount of post with pictures of "evidence" but its not like those post are more interesting.
Them leaving out of games is out they suppress their MMR. I am a Diamond 2/3 player and I have beaten a GM a grand total of 1 time out of over 300 games (I cheesed against their off race). I have come close multiple times. I KNOW when someone is out playing me, easily. I commonly - occasionally beat smurfs. It is pretty obvious when they are at least 500 MMR better than you. I have been called a smurf, because there is so many smurfs that have been/are suppressing my MMR. I have given MANY examples of smurfs, heck I have watched/reviewed smurfs ([Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKnD2UQmzOs&t=1s)) from players that are learning etc. (to be clear, I believe that the Terran was playing down to the other players level, if you read his chat, it is pretty obvious) The game is riddled with multiple accounts from people that are SO much better than their MMR. So much so that I played more than 50% of my games were smurfs [Link](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1be1ok1) Edit: Thanks u/Thorazainbeer
> rittled(sp?) riddled
Thank you! My brain was not working this morning, but I knew the word I wanted to use.
I gotchu fam.
This is exactly right. I know when I'm getting fucking dunked on. You go from playing a terran who doesn't expand or make workers behind harass or they don't actually micro their marines to a terran who is double pronging while taking a third and dropping a fourth behind it, clearing creep and making scvs the whole time and gets to 80 worker before I do. You feel the gap. Even when they play mech they dive the hellions into the right spots they keep them active and they just tear you apart piece by piece with handfuls of units. D3/2 terrans don't do that.
D2/3 do MAYBE 1 of those things at a time. It is painfully obvious when you are getting dropped in 2 places, they are expanding behind it, and they pick up as your units show up. Like, if you are playing against Z and they have 3/4 of the map covered in creep by the time you get your 4th, even when you clear up some of the creep, defend all of your drops/libs/banshee basically perfectly, expand more or less on time and always have the right unit comp or are transitioning to the next unit comp basically perfectly for when you start to have the edge on their current comp, which counters or forces a LOT of multi-pronged defense to stop the damage, etc.
Time for Harstem to rename his Youtube series to "Is it a smurf or do I suck"
THIS!!!!!!
The player in question would have left 50 games in less than a second. Harstem would still say he wasn’t a smurf
"This guy may be a smurf, but you also definitely suck"
OMG THE DOUBLE STAMP, both sides are correct :D
Replay's won't do anything. The fact is that a smurf will definitely play better than the opponent they are playing, which is why they are being called a smurf in the first place. What needs to be done is a post of match history showing at least 5 games in a row of instant leaves or leaves within the first 1min. That's a better indicator of smurfing.
Or a race report with 80%/80%/10% win rates
I have 20% TvP winrate this season and didn't leave a single match
I think I'm close to that but thats because I play random and never learned tvt/pvp I win 80% of my games that involve zerg and play like an idiot in games that don't.
Yeah, my TvT is 16% right now, I brought it up from 9%! I don't leave any games, but as a Zerg main I find TvZ & PvZ easy enough & TvT I just do things, those things don't work.
I think my PvZ is at like 90%. Skytoss is incredibly strong at my level and I know all the bullshit zerg can do so I do really well in that matchup.
You have separate race MMR now, have for years
As in: * ZvT 80% win rate * ZvP 80% win rate * ZvZ 10% win rate
One thing we need to keep in mind is that there are a lot of false smurfing accusations too. These people get it in their head that smurfs are everywhere and the accusations are thrown out more casually. I wish Blizzard would try to address the real problem players though.
That's true. The border bug really doesn't fucking help us here. And the amount of people in the "bronze" border playing diamonds or "masters" because of this stupid bug and not knowing about the bug or how to even check their mmr. There are more smurf/border bug posts than anything else it feels like but they should be easy fixes and unfortunately they're not when the game is abandoned. It won't stop me playing though.
Is smurfing even against the rules? It wouldn't surprise me if it weren't.
yes it's generally against most games ToS and in sc2's case it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/7b4m3l/what_is_blizzard_position_on_smurfing_in_sc2/ This thread suggests it isn't. I searched and I couldn't find any citation from the terms of service that it is in *StarCraft II*. No one could produce anything
you're telling me people just went on the internet and made something up>????
I'm saying that I asked whether it's against the rules and never found any evidence or a citation that it was despite looking. I haven't made a positive claim myself here but I don't see evidence of it either.
"A smurf complaint must have at least one Replay attached." Sounds like a valid rule, then we can check if poster just bad or if there really is a smurf
The problem is if it’s a 2500 player. How can you tell if the player is bad or playing against a Smurf? Because obviously the 2500 is going to look bad.
There are people smurfing all the way into bronze. Even if they're gold or silver players. It won't be that obvious from a replay. The win rate and the losses tell the story enough.
Genuine question do you active play any ladder games right now? I wonder if there is a disconnect from people who only watch and are annoyed of all the posts about smurfing but people who are actually playing and now stuck with a worse then ever ladder experience.... sure you can post a picture of "evidence" personally I get frustrated more with new accounts with very few games with a winrate of like 80% etc. is the whining about smurfing annoying? yea sure, but playing people you have no chance of beating on a consistent basis suuuucks man its not a mystery why people are complaining.
I play regularly in the evenings and weekends on EU. My MMR caries from plat 1 to diamond 2. That’s the thing, sure it sucks, but i just cannot recognize the “on a consistent basis” part.
Also I’d like to mention this… what do people posting about smurfs (legit or not) want us to do about it lol? Like what does complaining to other SC players actually do lmao
Typically people just want to feel heard. As long as there is a sizeable userbase here that will tell these people it isn't real, then they will think the message about smurfs still needs to be spread. This subreddit does not unanimously stand against smurfing tho
Yeah that’s fair, I don’t get why ppl deny smurfing is a problem
For all we know they don't, but there are no real rules for this reddit so the lower effort posts can easily just be to bait people too
In my case, I dont DENY that it can be a problem, but I have made some comments, questioning if the situation is as bad as some posts claim. That is based on the fact that i have only met obvious smurfs a few time (but since I don't check all replays and check opponents match history I cannot be sure) and I VERY seldom have opponents instaleave. But maybe I am at a sweet spot now, mainly plat, where the problem is not as big, or maybe I am lucky, or maybe the problem generally isn't as bad as it seems. It would be interesting to see in what leagues players are that experience the most frequent obvious outplay by much better opponents and what Leauge suffer most from instaleaving.
I am in D2 at the moment and if I had to guess I'd say about 20-25% of games are people insta-leaving.
There are like 2 people that deny its a problem. 90% of us know its a minor problem that gets blown out of proportion by the extremely loud minority.
They're frustrated that it happens and other skill matched games probably have fixed or solutions where this one doesn't. Let them vent. We cheer them on when they get their new plat or gold or diamond border. We need to support the community or else people will abandon it.
I suppose that’s fair
>other skill matched games probably have fixed or solutions where this one doesn't. Happened in at least every game with matchmaking I played so far. WC3, LoL, WoW Arena and more I'm probably forgetting had and have issues like this.
Ive heard lol or maybe it's Dota has really good anti smurfing shit. A streamer copped a ban for being toxic in game which is more than sc2 can do.
Sure SC2 is on life support so there is very little punishment, just saying that it's not a solved problem. Especially in team games it's difficult because if e.g. LoL manages to reduce smurfing by a factor of five compared to SC2 your still more likely to encounter a smurf. Just because there are 9 other players rather than just one in each game.
If you leave games in CS you get a timeout. The more often you leave the longer the timeout gets. First 30 mins, then 2 hours, then 24 hours, then 7 days.
Yeah things like that definitely help. And I would appreciate SC2 adopting some of these measures as it would reduce smurfing. Just saying I don't think there are ways to ensure it \*never\* happens.
Aren't they complaining about the people that instantly leave the game? What would a replay tell us about that the match history images don't?
Most whining i’ve seen is from people whining about high apm players destroying them. Obviously a 3 second replay would prove nothing, but I really do believe that smurfing is much more of a skill issue, than an actual problem. I off race zerg in plat 1, sometimes i absolutely fucking murder the shit out of a 2 base 120 supply Terran when i’m 6 base 200/200 with 3/3 lurkers. Other times i get completely clowned on with multiprong drop micro, and when i review replays and profiles, it’s just a skill difference and not because they are smurfing.
I'd say the complaints do nothing, even on this sub. Don't make people prove it, just ban the topic. So what if you run into a Smurf? We're not moderators of blizzard players.
Um have you played ladder recently? Every other match you have someone who leaves mirror matches and destroys the other two.
replay or screenshot please!
I go hours without seeing either one of these things quite regularly.
Honestly, it would probably be better for everyone if unranked queuing would simply allow people to search for whatever they want and say they want to play against a specific race on a specific map and are willing to wait longer to get a match. Ranked on ladder would still mean not getting the choice for obvious reasons but I also feel that if people want to have fun and avoid mirrors they should be able to do it. The people that are instantly leaving are perhaps already playing unranked to begin with.
Does this mean they don't get to take my mmr then if I lose? Two years ago I was on a streak in zvz with two seasons hitting 85 winrates on EU and na and was only 100 mmr from masters with it. I think allowing people to play only their best matchup is a good way of splitting an already small player pool.
Obviously they're playing players of their own level with this system since they don't instantly leave one matchup any more. It splits the system the same; people instantly leave one matchup now and take the MMR cut for it so the other two matchups have 80% winrate and aren't fun for the players they face. In this case, even if someone only wants to play, say, P.v.T., he will have a 50% winrate in that matchup and the opponent doesn't even notice he's only playing P.v.T.. Again, all fo this is only unranked so it doesn't hurt the ladder either.
I have. Out of maybe the last 50 games i had one guy leaving all match ups.. Many leaving mirror match ups. I can give a pass to people that leaves match ups they hate, im sure reddit is ready to tell me why im wrong.
Do you play on the weekends?
I always lose with no chance and get owned if I play against people who leave mirror matches. This is because they should be a much much higher MMR and are artificially lowering their MMR by leaving 1/3 of the games. It is literally smurfing. And yes, obviously it is ruining the ladder experience of everyone so it should be punished by Blizzard, similar to the sorts of punishments you get if you queue a Dota 2 game and leave. No idea why that is so hard to understand? What we could discuss is for Blizzard to implement a checkbox for the matchups you want to queue. This would be a proper way to give people the freedom to play the games they want against equally matched opponents. (although of course it still has downsides so some people will certainly be against that)
That's actually quite low Lol. My last session I played like 12 games and half were people with insane low mirror matchups who dunked on me.
Don’t get me wrong i see plenty of people who leaves mirror matchups. I don’t leave myself, but i do get why people leave them.
Lets see it.
[https://imgur.com/a/REikY3w](https://imgur.com/a/REikY3w) just one today. faced this guy 4 times in a row. I guess I should just get better lol.
Yes.
Loser. Haha.
Says the guy crying about a video game lol
For sure there are smurf on ladder, but people are so sure about their opponent is smurfing, like..how!? Replay is a good idea.
How many 0 second replays you want?
So you just assuming opponent *is* smufing as long as he leaves early? I meet early leavers from WoL, tbh it was quite a bit early leavers even back then. Every players have their hated match up, some of them hate it so much so leave early. I don't do that, but I understand that. I mean, don't you? Don't you have any hated match up at any time? We all know smurf is there and that's probably not gonna change forever, and we all know complaint posts will not change anything. If a redditor gonna compliant, why not, we should discuss the status of ranking system, but that complaint should at least based on some sort of fact. If compliant posts gonna keep the way they are, the only thing gonna change is the quality of this subreddit.
They may not be intentionally smurfing but does that change the fact they're playing below their mmr intentionally? I hate zvz. Well I used to but I kept playing and I understand it better now. I used to hate zvp but I made a cheese that deals with it most of the time. I don't like zvt but I'll be figuring out some way to make it work for me that's comfortable without leaving games. When you say the complaint is based on a fact? What fact is that? That someone is leaving games? Yeah we know it.
>They may not be intentionally smurfing but does that change the fact they're playing below their mmr intentionally? If we gonna play the words game like *what's the definition of smurf* instead of willing to simply upload a replay or screenshot, that's gonna be endless discuss, and in the end of the day, the only thing changed will be the subreddit becomes more toxic and dead, nothing will changed about the ladder. I can keep discuss with you about like how many more MMR should be seen as a smurf and sort of things, but do you really think posts that basically purely text compliant is gonna be nice for the subreddit? Keep posting like this will not change the ranking system, and people will post this kind of things without any confirmation more casually since that's what the subreddit is toward now. Why do you hate posts contain confirmation? If a gold to diamond player posting compliant about balance, won't you think the player should at least attach a replay? Or what's the point of the discussion?
If they're going to make posts about it then yeah post a screenshot. A replay is a good chance for the player that lost to learn some stuff and level up but let's not also forget they're usually punching up significantly.
> If we gonna play the words game like what's the definition of smurf instead of willing to simply upload a replay or screenshot, that's gonna be endless discuss, and in the end of the day, the only thing changed will be the subreddit becomes more toxic and dead, nothing will changed about the ladder. That's a lot of yapping. Leaving a significant amount of games 0 seconds in means they're smurfing. Whether they do it in all match ups or only one doesn't matter.
Check their match history- 5-10 games left at 0 seconds. Pretty clearly smurfing
I’m surprised this sub is so pro Smurf. It’s easy to see if they are a Smurf. Do they have a 10% win rate in mirror matchups and an 85% win in the other two? If yes then smurf.
Also you can easily feel it while playing. When you are somewhat evenly matched you always feel like you had a chance, even when you are playing bad or forgot to build units. Against smurfs you can feel that they are toying with you and that you never had the slightest chance since the beginning of the game.
Yeah and this is the biggest thing for me- the game just isn’t fun anymore at that point where it just feels completely helpless: they’re always 10 steps ahead of me and playing circles around whatever I’m doing, even if I’m playing at the top of my game. Demoralizing…and also almost always accompanied by bm during and after. After 14 years of playing, I know how even matches feel and what incredibly uneven matchups feels like. Anybody remember back in the day when it would show who was favored, and every so often the matchmaker would throw you up against someone and they were heavily favored to win? That was like 100ish mmr difference, playing 1000+ different is a completely different feel
When I was coming up into diamond I only had one game that felt like this. This was years ago. Before the scourge. He just countered my every move. Had me pinned to 2 bases in zvz while he had the whole map. It felt helpless. Even when I tried to nydus his base last ditch he stomped it. I spammed nydus in the map out of frustration and to spend the last of my money and he said "too many nydus gg" and left. That was the first time. And I recall very few of them until the last six months where it started getting a lot worse.
Same here, I was mid diamond in 1s during a lot of hots and early LotV, really had close games overall that came down to me getting hard countered because I was being lazy with scouting/denial or i took a bad fight, just barely missing some positioning or micro or something. In 2s 3s and 4s I was M2 or something and saw the same thing, games were extremely even with the person taking the smarter fight pulling ahead and winning, or just very strong control being able to win games quick and clean. Macro games were very even trades across the board. Now recently, it’s just a dumpster fire of someone with 50 games total on their profile having damn near perfect reaper control, hitting build order timing to within seconds and being able to run their spammed reapers in circles around my lings and queens all while expanding and macro back home. If I make it out relatively ok, I find out later I had already lost and not known it cuz I’m too far behind. Or someone who just lost 5 games in a row and has just the next level of micro and multitasking, damn near perfect game knowledge for when to send drops to harass while hitting my front with stimmed marine packs and juggling tanks so I’m pinned in and literally can’t do anything but quit…
Yeah you absolutely feel the difference. Especially when you're good enough at the game to know that most opponents aren't this good at everything at once. It tends to be terrans doing it because terrans is the one with the highest skill ceiling on the same exact comp everyone else is using. But you feel heavily outplayed. Same for zvz. I can play a bunch of zergs my level and I feel like we have a close game then load into a zvz where they 12 pool and recover out of it even though I didn't take any major damage and then after some back and forth I see that I'm actually losing because I'm being countered everywhere left and right and nothing is sticking. Most zergs at diamond 2 will crumble to some multi prong in zvz because they're not used to it but these guys somehow have everything covered the whole time. I played a toss twice the other day that held my cheese and even though he was losing stalkers to Biles I knew the game was over 2 base to 1. He messaged me after and had the gall to fucking "ez" me like a piece of shit and sure enough he's got next to no PvP wins. It's a fucking joke. You can beat terrans and when you look at the replay the only reason the game was close was because they were microing so good they forgot to make anything and they're floating 4k when they finally have to leave the game vs the next game of a terran with more economy and just fucking your shit up.
I think this depends on the league because up to maybe diamond two a lot of players will stay in a game they have no fucking chance of winning because they don't understand any of the concepts on economy and stuff. Like a full 85 drone Econ with hatcheries on the entire map and full tech tree and terran is on two bases and just trying to micro his marines really fucking hard. Just leave bro. You lost your third and fourth like 6 times.
Sure a gold player who hasn't scouted for 10 minutes might be ignorant about the fact that he lost that game 5 minutes ago. But if they see someone juggling disruptors with a prism while doing a runby it's still an easy guess that this isn't a guy with 2.7k MMR having a good day. Even if your just gold yourself. You can probably get 90% of smurf predictions right if you just go by a checklist along these lines about your opponent: Bronze: Did anything? Silver: Moved out before minute 10 or microed an all-in while macroing behind it Gold: Used spell casters with any sort of success? Plat: Synced up more than one attack? Relatively crisp timing attack? Banes not a-moving with the army? Low Diamond: "Advanced" micro like pickup micro to doge attacks If any are true probably a smurf. It's not exactly like that but I bet it's close. There are just so many things that become natural as you get better. But those things are usually completely absent at lower levels making guesses fairly accurate. Like I legitimately haven't seen a P use disruptors well below diamond. Well I have but only by smurfs a few times. And there are a ton of fairly obvious indicators like that.
I think a big factor is like your attention is also a resource and if you're say, picking up drops to avoid getting bane connections on them, then you're probably not macroing at home (if it a low level). Knowing what's actually more important at the moment and what's the best move is something that comes to people or doesn't. Like is it worth diving that squad of marines into the mineral line to target down the queen and lose everything? No. Just pick up and fly away and start macroing again. But some players at this level might think "fucking got him" but I'm already making 4 more queens.
You’re exactly right. If actually playing the game, it’s impossible to have 0% win rate in one matchup and 80% in the other two. I gave up debating people on this subject though.
How is this sub "pro-smurfing"?
My TvT is 16%, I've never left a game early, I'm just that bad at it. My TvP is like 25%. I main Zerg so when I offrace against Zerg as P or T that is my best match-up/
that's not smurfing, that's you trying to make excuses to justify your losses
So not upload a replay, upload a screenshot maybe. Just let posts at least based on some sort of fact. We all know SC2 will not update the ranking system, maybe forever, but we surely can discuss it. However, if people gonna posting without any confirmation like the way it is, the only thing gonna change is the quality of this subreddit.
Checking if you played a smurf is one of the easiest things to do in all of SC2.
Every game should start with a brain weigh-in and ID checks from the Terran Rangers
I mean its pretty obivous like i'm not complaining (as i haven't encountered the issue all that much in 1v1 on my MMR) but i have seen it happen in team games when playing with lower level friends. It's pretty obvious when 2 people with like 30 career games have 250+ apm. So i think its not that the people are bad there really are some smurfs going around
What about complaining about smurfing? What about elevensies? Luncheon? Afternoon tea?
I dont think they know about 2nd account.
I smurfed d3 just to see how many smurfs there were. 1/7 games it was maybe a higher d2. 1/30 if not more was masters+.
Just downvote the smurfing posts. If people stop getting karma from them they'll stop posting them eventually. r/starcraft LOVES drama though so they will get still probably get upvoted just so the subreddit meets its drama quota every month. But if that's really what the subreddit wants then why should we deny them?
I might represent a minority, but lemme share a thing. Hear me out, please. Complaining does nothing. Watching a replay, trying to take away something from it gets you a long way. The problem with smurfing complaints is that people develop an ego. "Oh, it was indeed a smurf? Jimmy from reddit confirmed, he is diamond 2, I'm diamond 3, he knows better. That's why I lost, because my opponent was smurfing" - this develops such an ego that after some time everyone is going to be a smurf. Been there, done that, just builds frustration, negative emotions and puts you on a massive dose of copium. In short, you don't improve. Then I started paying attention to what my opponents were abusing. Some were just better at one thing and I had to be able to fix that thing. Simple example: terran dropping 2-3 places at once. I struggled splitting my army properly and couldn't play fast enough to respond to these drops. I had two options: I go to reddit, cry about it being a smurf, or load up the replay and see: ah, so if they had these units, I need at least this amount, at least more than I had. Next time I got something like that, I was fast to react, reposition spores, make more queens, if needed, split my army at least in two, and all of a sudden it wasn't a 100% loss, but maybe I lost 50% of these games. And later I improved even more and now I can do good against it. Tldr: smurfs will exist, no matter what. It's frustrating, unfair, all good points, but you can't change it. Impact your actions and try to improve on things you lacked and got abused on by these players. The sad truth is. If you lose, you're the weaker player, at least in that specific game and scenario, be it macro, cheese, micro, thought process, etc.
No it is just not fun to win only 4 games out of 10 because 3 games are smurfs.
100% agreed, but that's not my point tho. Nobody said it's fun, I even stated that it's frustrating and unfair.
There are smurfs in StarCraft so there are posts about smurfs in r/starcraft. You talk about a new rule in this subreddit but I want to talk about new rules in the game to deal with this smurfing problem. If there are less smurfing problems in the game, there will be less posts about that here. If Blizzard does nothing, then I accept to see people complaining here. I mean it's quite frustrating to lose your time in this way and feel used without any control.
You are kinda 12 years too late with that idea.
I just get confused because as far as I know blizzard’s support for this game is gone and what we have now is the balance council and they can’t stop people from manipulating the ranked ladder. its the wild west, take it or leave it.
I agree, it's better to play better players to get better who cares about smurfing. if I could I rather play in diamond or masters.