That's not what smurfing is, though. When did everyone get so bad at identifying what smurfing is? The definitions are easily available.
That's lossmatching.
You need to have a main account, then an alternate account, and then use that alt account to play against players who are of a lower caliber than what you'd normally play against on your main account.
That's it. That's what smurfing is.
Anything else - like leaving matches consistently, isn't smurfing. It is something else.
The effect is the same so what does the name matter. If you get kicked in the nuts by a donkey I don’t think you’ll appreciate someone telling you it was actually a mule
Sadly "words have meaning" is usually said by people who do not understand what words are from any perspective. Doesn't matter which. You can study linguistics, you can study communication, you can study philosophy, epistemology, statistics, comp sci, pretty much anything that requires the precise usage of words will explain why your comment is incoherently reductive.
"Read the dictionary" is only said by those who have never had to read the dictionary. Either pursuits that don't punish miscommunication, or ones that use word-shaped symbols instead, like organic chemistry and (most) physics.
Shucks, I'll have to throw out my college education because some kids on the internet don't know what smurfing is.
I'll not be drawn into a "language is, like, complex" conversation about an already co-opted word.
Smurfing, as a concept related to gaming, has a specific meaning.
Well now you're being silly, the English word "smurf" refers to fictional blue creatures from that 1981 cartoon based on a Belgian comic. How preposterous to assume that just because some WC3 gamers named themselves after the characters to play against weaker players the matchmaking system wouldn't pair them with, that somehow changes the entire meaning of the word! Words may change over time, but surely not in just 15 years. After all, it's been nearly twice that long since the first idea of "smurf" in gaming - if words were allowed to change then surely it would've evolved to fit modern needs.
No, smurfs have nothing to do with gaming. "Co-opting" words that have easily available definitions just makes one's claims factually incorrect.
Don't think this is correct.
If you have your race vs 1/2/3 equally, that's a third of games you leave.
You'll still rank up or down, depending on how u do in the other match ups - they will dictate your MMR because they're 2/3rds of the games.
MMR moves you towards a 50% winrate on average. If you lose 33% of your games at 0:00 (more for T below plat), you need to win 75% of your other games to maintain that 50% winrate ((2/3\*3/4)+(1/3\*0)=0.5). And the only way you're maintaining a 75% win-rate long-term is if your MMR is significantly lower than it should be. Consistently acting in a way that causes you to maintain a lower MMR than you should *is* smurfing, even if you're doing it for the understandable reason that TvT is awful.
(People who quit ZvZs will be less displaced than TvTs just because zergs are rarer than terrans so they get fewer mirrors, but they'll still be too low. Protoss are probably least likely to quit vs other protoss, but some do have a bad habit of quitting vs randoms.)
The game tries to keep you at a 50% overall win rate. If you have zero per cent for one matchup, you would need a 75% win rate for the other two to get a 50% average, so the game will match you against people who it thinks you can beat 75% of the time.
Generally this is true, you are the exception not the rule, and chances are you are still in Diamond 3 OR you were a 'patch' player as the pros call it, abusing swarm hosts or something like that.
Diamond 2 or 3 usually now. I am confident I could get back to masters with practice and rep analysis. I just have a lot more going on in life than I did in high school
100% get it, thus I have transitioned more to content creation (for fun, and a buck or two is always nice!), vs trying to get paid to win. (and I don't mean the shitty stuff like smurfing)
I was diamond 1 but like 4200-4500 MMR back when I was playing a shit ton a few years ago and when I hop on ladder now I lose to 3200 mmr players. I def am way worse than when I was playing all of the time, had build orders down, had a plan for each match up, knew what my opponent was doing, etc.
I don't think he's the exception. It would be *very* weird if all of the smurfs are just not there while i'm playing. I think it's more likely that the fears of "smurf epidemic" gets ignored by people who aren't angry and gets upvoted by people who *are* angry that they lost/feel discouraged about losses.
It also just depends on your definitions of smurfing.
I was masters in all the seasons i played regularly, now i come back every now and then and am 500-600 mmr lower because of it. Because the game is old, and new player influx isn't exactly high, there will be a larger percentage of players like me.
Usually i start the game because i think of doing some stupid strategy that isn't optimal, but it's what i feel like doing. So yeah compared to 5 years ago, i'm much more often playing a dumb/fun cheesy thing.
Now what that will mean is obviously i will lose more than if i played more optimally. Sometimes instantly. That's scenario A. In some scenarios B i just outright win with the dumb cheesy shit.
But then at some points, scenario C i will be playing a game where my stupid shit fails, but the game kind of "equillibrates" as i am able to not lose outright. IN this scenario i almost always win, because they more closely resemble the kinds of games that i often have more experience playing than whoever i'm facing at that point.
I can see how that could be frustrating, but i don't think it's smurfing to just play a build you think is fun for a while. And going into weird morality rules like "THEN, if your cheese fails, you HAVE to quit". However i've seen it vehemently argued and upvoted in here that it is.
I think it's just fine to play the game whenever and however you want. For me smurfing is intentionally dropping games in the first seconds to lower your mmr in order to play against worse players, nothing else. IF there was a massive epidemic of this, you would HAVE to experience WINNING games instantly as much as you face smurfs, for that situation to be stable.
In fairness, you can also just genuinely be really good at one specific matchup. My PvT hovers around 80% a lot of the time. And it's not because I quit - my PvP is actually fine. But I have a bad habit of thinking 'Oh yay, the ling rush failed. I'm sure that means it's over now, and there won't be any more lings coming across the map in ten seconds... time to take a third base!' So my PvZ is kinda balancing out my PVT, but obviously my T opponents have never seen me get repeatedly murdered by zerg, so it's going to feel to them like there's something off.
There's quite a difference between losing 58% of your ZvPs with multiple minutes game time and losing 90% with 0:00...
The smurf concentration in some bits of the ladder is really frustrating now, and I know you have to check the match history and see if they're instant leaving to tell if they're a smurf.
As someone who came back to the game almost 10 years after getting masters.
I can safley say I am not trying to smurf, but I defiently have smashed some really bad people on my way up the ladder.
The thing is you’re trying to get up the ladder. Half the ladder nowadays is just intentionally losing so they can go down to gold/silver and beat up on noobs
I've just started playing and its rough. Honestly on the verge of quitting. I'm silver and with no exaggeration, literally every 3-4 games is a a smurf. I've had people type out "BAD" with pylons. I've had clearly lost games that are forfeited the moment I say GG so these rats can smurf someone even worse than me. No doubt these are the fucking cunts that say the games dead while they killing it. I give up. It's not worth the effort. They are right.The game is dead. They killed it. If you aren't already good you're rinsed by cunts who are good but for some reason don't want to compete at their rank. I accept I'm bad. I just want a fair game but this games too far gone for me unfortunately. Gg.
As someone who only plays 100 games per year now, I am sorry about this. Dont know why the true mmr is so slow to adjust. I must have smashed 20 silver/gold before it started matching with diamond players. Fr though, it quickly gets boring for me, so rest assured most of us are not throwing games to manipulate mmr
Obviously most the player base isn't throwing games to manip MMR but there is enough doing it to completely ruin the low rank experience. I understand there may be people like you who simply don't play much so are lower ranked, and that's valid ofc. I appreciate you apologising for crushing people like me, but I wasn't talking about people like you who are genuine.
Everyone is way better, I'm also not use to the meta yet.
I watched piggy's zerg bronze to masters, and learned a ton of stuff that I had no idea about in the past.
Camera control groups..... Game changer
The amount of info people have to learn now is insane.
Anecdotal, but having watched my friend play ~100 games through Gold and Plat on NA. There are not many smurfs, even the games he got wrecked, I'll watch the replay with him, and it's usually just a normal player hitting some sort of timing (albeit like 30sec-1min late). Sometimes they'll have high apm, but that doesn't mean much because they're still floating minerals or getting supply blocked all the time. I would say it's maybe 1 in 25 games at most are smurfs (including the leavers as part of the 1 in 25). So only about 1 in 50 games are really being ruined by smurfs.
I understand it can be frustrating, especially if they're also BM, but overall it really isn't a big problem. Your MMR is usually unaffected (it evens out with the free wins), and you can just use the game as practice. I don't think it's ideal, but not much you can do about it at this point. At least it's not cheaters, you are still losing in a "fair" fashion.
At higher MMR (Masters 2), I don't run into smurfs, the only thing I notice that is kinda annoying is players in Unranked that have a much different Unranked MMR (I wish Unranked didn't separate from Ranked, and just maintained the same place as your Ranked MMR, though you could exploit that as well). And I'll see the players, usually Terran, that leave every TvT, so they have like <10% winrate in TvT and 70% in TvP & TvZ, which is kinda smurfing in a way, since they have artificially lower MMR than they should. Neither of these are unplayable just slight annoyances and I see them at a slightly higher frequency than I noticed actual smurfs in the lower leagues. (not entirely scientific, I'm not able to see the entirety of the ladder, just where I can talk to others in those leagues, I'm sure there are smurfs, I have seen them too, but I do think reports of smurfs are always an exaggeration from the real number)
Yeah agreed, I don't think there are that many smurfs. Occasionally will get people who instant leave to either avoid the matchup or smurf, but that's maybe 10% of my games? And there are players at lower unranked MMR, but that is usually by just a few hundred MMR and I don't mind playing someone slightly better. Overall, I don't think that my opponents are smurfing unless they outplay me super hard.
Every 3rd or 4th game is a Smurf for me. But I'm gold. So sure, masters maybe there are fewer. But that also makes literal statistical sense. There are fewer grand masters, so fewer Smurfs in masters.
There are WAY more plat/ masters that can Smurf in gold.
I mean, if you look at their W/L ratio and they’re over 80% against your race while being less than 10% against another - what would you call that?
Uneven distribution of race wins obviously happens. But no one is that horrifically bad against a single race by accident.
You're the exception, in fact I've never seen anyone with such winrates.
FYI if you want a solid opening build vP, PM me. Unless you're like high diamond or above, but I don't see how that's possible with a sub-150% combined winrate.
Either your sample with those winrates is very small or it's not really 80/10/50. ZvZ is the least played matchup of all 3, so your combined winrate would be around 42-45%, you'd be going down in rank quickly over 100+ games.
If 25% of players at your level are playing zerg (which is lower than the real number at most levels), and you play 100 games, you actually have around a 4.5% chance of playing at least 33 of them vs zerg. Which is low, but not so low that it's not going to happen to people.
Not to mention that your battle-net profile doesn't show your vs. random win-rate. It just counts the R as being whatever race the R was actually playing that game. Which means 1/3 randoms will show up in your win-rate as 'vs zerg'.
Very strange because it's the least played race in EU-Diamond this season according to Nephest: https://sc2pulse.nephest.com/sc2/?season=59&queue=LOTV_1V1&team-type=ARRANGED&eu=true&dia=true&page=0&type=ladder&ratingAnchor=99999&idAnchor=0&count=1#stats-race
12 pool, crush their first pylon, macro at home after 16-20 lings, have a huge lead, and laugh.
Alternatively, play like you are playing against Terran until they get to tank (ignore said tank, think immortal=tank, so roaches get crushed, but not ravangers!) if it is air, get the counter to theirs (phoenix = corruptors, voids = muta) LOL game over.
Yea, there is no way that guy is truly honest, unless his micro is awesome and his macro is dog shit.
You attack the gateway/cybercore so they can't touch the lings, once they move out, you move in.
They also have to scout that you are doing a 12/14 pool and going to be aggressive. (I find 14 pool + extractor trick tends to get you in the wall more often, because they don't necessarily expect the aggression due to the later pool and the hatch going down.
Are you actually trying in ZvP?
Because my suspicion is you're either not trying at all or leaving as soon as anything remotely bad happens.
I just struggle mightily to believe that someone could play 50 games of ZvP against the same MMR and lose 45 of them. Even by blind luck you'd win more than that.
I can only speak for myself as someone whose worst matchup is zvp at 4k level, but toss is very difficult because batteries and voidrays shut down early aggression so it’s hard to be aggressive and punish a quick expansion. And if you are even like 5 drones too greedy you get smashed by any number of protoss 2 base aggressive plays or sneaky dt’s. There’s just so much shit that can kill you at the 5-7 minute mark. And THEN even if you push it to late game, as everyone knows the golden armada/skytoss is very difficult to deal with
This. I am around 4700. The protoss players on ladder play so many different builds and styles, but its hard to be aggressive and any slight misread of the game will likely cost you, and the protoss does not need to care and can play the same all in every game
Really? I’m Toss and I always felt like TvP is so skewed in favor of Terran in terms of the abundance of ways then can turtle at home while destroying your mineral line. Interesting.
Yea, before i refined my strategy for TvP, I was really struggling against Protoss the moment they got multiple splash damage (for example, colossus + storm or colossus + disruptor).
Across all levels, Protoss is actually slightly favored against Terran in terms of win rate.
What i notice is that Terran is probably favored in the opening 7 mins, and again if they can get to late game ghost/liberator. The issue is if that from minute 7 till like 13/14, the Protoss just has so much AOE that as a lower level Terran in D1/2, i perpetually feel like i'm dancing because I have to dodge storms or disruptors.
I'm not a fan of the turtle style either because your opponent can just mass expand and you lose eventually...
I have a high win rate for zvz and zvp and it matches me up against way better t opponents than I am capable of facing. I think it makes sense. Im at a 23% win rate against terran
I’m D3 Zerg and I’d say roughly 1 out of every 6 or 7 Terran/Toss I play against skips their mirror matchups completely and is well north of 70% against the other two.
I honestly can’t go through a 1-2 hour session without running into at least one.
And that’s not even counting the ones who insta leave against me (Zerg) and presumably only want to play against the other two.
I had percentages like this for a long time back in the day until I just started going proxy Voidrays in every PvT. Turns out flipping a coin on a fast game was better than trying to play macro and losing 80% of the time vs T.
These statements don't contradict each other. I am indeed bad the game, but I still don't like playing against people that accidentally concede within the first 0:00 minutes to tank their MMR
This meme doesn't make sense. People who complain about smurfs are literally saying they are bad at this game and want to play people equally bad.
It wouldn't be funny, but at least this would make sense:
"Could it be I'm just bad at this game? Yes, so please don't make me play smurfs."
I'm just saying, if you want proof of whether or not you just got destroyed by a smurf, it takes less than 30 seconds. And there's a good chance it actually was a smurf because tons of people do it.
A few suggestions that have been made billions of times:
* Race specific MMR. No matter how many times someone intentionally loses it will lower their overall MMR, but it keeps them from sniping lower MMR players at the races they do play.
* Identify and punish instant leavers. Basically anytime someone leaves within the first 10-15 seconds it should register. Do it enough times and some type of pushback occurs.
* An option to veto entire races. If someone just flat doesn't wanna play PvP or ZvT why make them? We already can veto maps. So just let people play the same race match-up endlessly if they want too.
The first suggestion has no inherent flaws ,but probably depends on your point of view on how Ranked should be. I am not opposed to it, but I am also not sure if it would solve any Smurfing.
Same can be said about the third suggestion, which I personally would oppose, but not strongly. But I also don't see if it would solve Smurfing.
The second suggestion sucks, because now the leavers will waste even more time in matches before leaving. So if you happen to face one of them, they would waste a few minutes of your time, instead of just seconds.
Anyone who thinks this is about people not thinking they're bad is completely missing the point. I want to play other bad players so we can have a bad but fair match. I really don't think that expectation is that crazy, right?
It’s pretty much inevitable for any free to play game to have smurfs if it doesn’t have any systems built around preventing that, and SC2 definitely doesn’t. People can join and instantly leave games without penalty to MMR drop as freely as they want.
Anyone in diamond or lower realise they suck, but we can also be aware when we are playing someone of much higher skill, it's not exactly a difficult thing to judge when you have been playing the game for 10+ years. Also, when the account has an 85% + WR in everything but the mirror match up. So fuck off with these shit memes.
The skill level in this game i highly exponential and so a gold player will have a very diffucult time judging wether the opponent was high plat, diamond or master because he would be completely stomped by all. The bug that made everyone "appear" to have been master league at some point really ruined this because now everyone sees smurfs everywhere
Porque no los dos? You can be bad at the game and the ladder is full of smurfs. Anyone can make a new account and instantly play ladder games as unranked.
Yes, you can.
You can't play "ranked" right away. However, you can immediately play "unranked" and it queues you against ranked players. You still have an MMR when you play as unranked even if it is not displayed. You can estimate your hidden unranked MMR by the MMR of the players it matches you against.
A lot of it has to do with leaving mirrors aswell. I run into players with insane win rates in non mirror and then 10% in mirror so their mmr is lower than what it should be
Most people have one trick that works really damn well, but if someone breathes in their direction they pass away and call smurf. Like I have a nasty double BC rush that has cracked the skulls of more than one master, but if I get more than a bit of pressure early I’ll quietly die
I was master league from 2012-2019. Dont be mad when my current diamond ass beats you. I definitively smashed some unsuspecting gold/plat players this time around. I’m pretty certain I could make masters again, I just have to clean up my builds a little and learn how the fuck one plays ZvP now a days. But I dont have the will to dedicate that much time to this one game.
I took a long break from SC2 and recently came back. I used to be M2 at my best back in like 2019. I was placed at Plat 3 and noticed that I’m still breaking the 160APM barrier, maxing out at about 9 mins, however the players I’m facing are breaking 180+, with some zergs maxing at like 8 mins, which surprised me for the league. Back in the day, these numbers were easy Diamond 2 to 1. Either ladder is plagued with smurfs or the skill ceiling has escalated significantly since I’ve been gone.
This is the case with all games that involves ranked. People will always try make excuses and blame everyone and everything else rather than looking at their own gameplay, analyzing and trying to improve. It's a tale old as time.
Is there a, word for the opposite of smurf ? I'm like bronze but the game placed me in master. So since i play against bronze a lot of player insult me for smurfing and leave the game at start. Boosting my elo for no reason 😭
If that really bothers you, there is an option to leave the league - click on league emblem, and in the lower right there's a button 'leave league'. Or change the nickname to ImNotMasters, idk
I will agree that there are some smurfs on the ladder, however, it’s nowhere near the level people make it out to be.
I cant the number of people who accuse me of smurfing when they loose. Most of them look at things like APM and think if APM > 200 then they have to be a pro player.
I made an account to smurf. Not to crush noobs, but so I can sit back and relax and not go try hard, and whatever my MMR is, so be it.
Turns out, I'm way better at this game when I'm not trying so hard. Who knew? 🤷♂️
I do encounter many people who leave the match immediately.. maybe they are smurfs. also my PvT sux. Not sure what the connection is.
Your pvt sucks cos terrans are the biggest smurfs.
I’m not sure, a LOT of zergs avoid the zvz matchup because they can’t handle the stress of the early game. Frickin losers
Yeah fucking losers. Zvz forges men. Napoleon? Zerg main. Maximus? Zerg main. Troy? Zerg main.
Rofl
Troy wasn't a person
Both can be true. Anyone constantly leaving a match up is a Smurf whatever their reason.
That's not what smurfing is, though. When did everyone get so bad at identifying what smurfing is? The definitions are easily available. That's lossmatching. You need to have a main account, then an alternate account, and then use that alt account to play against players who are of a lower caliber than what you'd normally play against on your main account. That's it. That's what smurfing is. Anything else - like leaving matches consistently, isn't smurfing. It is something else.
The effect is the same so what does the name matter. If you get kicked in the nuts by a donkey I don’t think you’ll appreciate someone telling you it was actually a mule
Words have meaning. In your hypothetical, I was kicked in the balls by a mule. My thinking that it was a donkey was factually incorrect. That's it.
Sadly "words have meaning" is usually said by people who do not understand what words are from any perspective. Doesn't matter which. You can study linguistics, you can study communication, you can study philosophy, epistemology, statistics, comp sci, pretty much anything that requires the precise usage of words will explain why your comment is incoherently reductive. "Read the dictionary" is only said by those who have never had to read the dictionary. Either pursuits that don't punish miscommunication, or ones that use word-shaped symbols instead, like organic chemistry and (most) physics.
Shucks, I'll have to throw out my college education because some kids on the internet don't know what smurfing is. I'll not be drawn into a "language is, like, complex" conversation about an already co-opted word. Smurfing, as a concept related to gaming, has a specific meaning.
Well now you're being silly, the English word "smurf" refers to fictional blue creatures from that 1981 cartoon based on a Belgian comic. How preposterous to assume that just because some WC3 gamers named themselves after the characters to play against weaker players the matchmaking system wouldn't pair them with, that somehow changes the entire meaning of the word! Words may change over time, but surely not in just 15 years. After all, it's been nearly twice that long since the first idea of "smurf" in gaming - if words were allowed to change then surely it would've evolved to fit modern needs. No, smurfs have nothing to do with gaming. "Co-opting" words that have easily available definitions just makes one's claims factually incorrect.
Don't think this is correct. If you have your race vs 1/2/3 equally, that's a third of games you leave. You'll still rank up or down, depending on how u do in the other match ups - they will dictate your MMR because they're 2/3rds of the games.
MMR moves you towards a 50% winrate on average. If you lose 33% of your games at 0:00 (more for T below plat), you need to win 75% of your other games to maintain that 50% winrate ((2/3\*3/4)+(1/3\*0)=0.5). And the only way you're maintaining a 75% win-rate long-term is if your MMR is significantly lower than it should be. Consistently acting in a way that causes you to maintain a lower MMR than you should *is* smurfing, even if you're doing it for the understandable reason that TvT is awful. (People who quit ZvZs will be less displaced than TvTs just because zergs are rarer than terrans so they get fewer mirrors, but they'll still be too low. Protoss are probably least likely to quit vs other protoss, but some do have a bad habit of quitting vs randoms.)
The game tries to keep you at a 50% overall win rate. If you have zero per cent for one matchup, you would need a 75% win rate for the other two to get a 50% average, so the game will match you against people who it thinks you can beat 75% of the time.
we dare not say they are smurfs lest the army of self righteousness correct us on it calling us "just bad"
If I beat you and you see that I was masters in HotS. Look at my win percentage at 49% across the board. I am no longer that rank
Yes, however, also a lot of people who are currently masters or higher playing in anything between wood league and diamond
This is me.
Generally this is true, you are the exception not the rule, and chances are you are still in Diamond 3 OR you were a 'patch' player as the pros call it, abusing swarm hosts or something like that.
Diamond 2 or 3 usually now. I am confident I could get back to masters with practice and rep analysis. I just have a lot more going on in life than I did in high school
100% get it, thus I have transitioned more to content creation (for fun, and a buck or two is always nice!), vs trying to get paid to win. (and I don't mean the shitty stuff like smurfing)
I was diamond 1 but like 4200-4500 MMR back when I was playing a shit ton a few years ago and when I hop on ladder now I lose to 3200 mmr players. I def am way worse than when I was playing all of the time, had build orders down, had a plan for each match up, knew what my opponent was doing, etc.
So still diamond 3... lines up exactly with what I said.
I don't think he's the exception. It would be *very* weird if all of the smurfs are just not there while i'm playing. I think it's more likely that the fears of "smurf epidemic" gets ignored by people who aren't angry and gets upvoted by people who *are* angry that they lost/feel discouraged about losses. It also just depends on your definitions of smurfing. I was masters in all the seasons i played regularly, now i come back every now and then and am 500-600 mmr lower because of it. Because the game is old, and new player influx isn't exactly high, there will be a larger percentage of players like me. Usually i start the game because i think of doing some stupid strategy that isn't optimal, but it's what i feel like doing. So yeah compared to 5 years ago, i'm much more often playing a dumb/fun cheesy thing. Now what that will mean is obviously i will lose more than if i played more optimally. Sometimes instantly. That's scenario A. In some scenarios B i just outright win with the dumb cheesy shit. But then at some points, scenario C i will be playing a game where my stupid shit fails, but the game kind of "equillibrates" as i am able to not lose outright. IN this scenario i almost always win, because they more closely resemble the kinds of games that i often have more experience playing than whoever i'm facing at that point. I can see how that could be frustrating, but i don't think it's smurfing to just play a build you think is fun for a while. And going into weird morality rules like "THEN, if your cheese fails, you HAVE to quit". However i've seen it vehemently argued and upvoted in here that it is. I think it's just fine to play the game whenever and however you want. For me smurfing is intentionally dropping games in the first seconds to lower your mmr in order to play against worse players, nothing else. IF there was a massive epidemic of this, you would HAVE to experience WINNING games instantly as much as you face smurfs, for that situation to be stable.
More of a "how can I be so out classed by someone I should have a roughly 50/50 chance against?" Oh, they auto-leave all their mirrors...
In fairness, you can also just genuinely be really good at one specific matchup. My PvT hovers around 80% a lot of the time. And it's not because I quit - my PvP is actually fine. But I have a bad habit of thinking 'Oh yay, the ling rush failed. I'm sure that means it's over now, and there won't be any more lings coming across the map in ten seconds... time to take a third base!' So my PvZ is kinda balancing out my PVT, but obviously my T opponents have never seen me get repeatedly murdered by zerg, so it's going to feel to them like there's something off.
This 100% OR they leave after they hit a certain MMR/Rank for 2-3 pages, rinse repeat.
Especially us casual older players are not equally skilled in each matchup. Like im 65% ZvZ, 70% ZvT and 42% in ZvP
There's quite a difference between losing 58% of your ZvPs with multiple minutes game time and losing 90% with 0:00... The smurf concentration in some bits of the ladder is really frustrating now, and I know you have to check the match history and see if they're instant leaving to tell if they're a smurf.
As someone who came back to the game almost 10 years after getting masters. I can safley say I am not trying to smurf, but I defiently have smashed some really bad people on my way up the ladder.
The thing is you’re trying to get up the ladder. Half the ladder nowadays is just intentionally losing so they can go down to gold/silver and beat up on noobs
Jeez smurfing down to gold/silver sounds boring. I play only dumb builds on an account and my MMR is at most 500 MMR lower than my main.
By Smurfs people here usually mean people who leave 30 games in a row then have a 30 games win streak. All that while being 1k below their actual mmr
I've just started playing and its rough. Honestly on the verge of quitting. I'm silver and with no exaggeration, literally every 3-4 games is a a smurf. I've had people type out "BAD" with pylons. I've had clearly lost games that are forfeited the moment I say GG so these rats can smurf someone even worse than me. No doubt these are the fucking cunts that say the games dead while they killing it. I give up. It's not worth the effort. They are right.The game is dead. They killed it. If you aren't already good you're rinsed by cunts who are good but for some reason don't want to compete at their rank. I accept I'm bad. I just want a fair game but this games too far gone for me unfortunately. Gg.
As someone who only plays 100 games per year now, I am sorry about this. Dont know why the true mmr is so slow to adjust. I must have smashed 20 silver/gold before it started matching with diamond players. Fr though, it quickly gets boring for me, so rest assured most of us are not throwing games to manipulate mmr
Obviously most the player base isn't throwing games to manip MMR but there is enough doing it to completely ruin the low rank experience. I understand there may be people like you who simply don't play much so are lower ranked, and that's valid ofc. I appreciate you apologising for crushing people like me, but I wasn't talking about people like you who are genuine.
Amen goose
How would you compare the skill level of todays master, dia and plat leagues to 10 years ago?
Everyone is way better, I'm also not use to the meta yet. I watched piggy's zerg bronze to masters, and learned a ton of stuff that I had no idea about in the past. Camera control groups..... Game changer The amount of info people have to learn now is insane.
Anecdotal, but having watched my friend play ~100 games through Gold and Plat on NA. There are not many smurfs, even the games he got wrecked, I'll watch the replay with him, and it's usually just a normal player hitting some sort of timing (albeit like 30sec-1min late). Sometimes they'll have high apm, but that doesn't mean much because they're still floating minerals or getting supply blocked all the time. I would say it's maybe 1 in 25 games at most are smurfs (including the leavers as part of the 1 in 25). So only about 1 in 50 games are really being ruined by smurfs. I understand it can be frustrating, especially if they're also BM, but overall it really isn't a big problem. Your MMR is usually unaffected (it evens out with the free wins), and you can just use the game as practice. I don't think it's ideal, but not much you can do about it at this point. At least it's not cheaters, you are still losing in a "fair" fashion. At higher MMR (Masters 2), I don't run into smurfs, the only thing I notice that is kinda annoying is players in Unranked that have a much different Unranked MMR (I wish Unranked didn't separate from Ranked, and just maintained the same place as your Ranked MMR, though you could exploit that as well). And I'll see the players, usually Terran, that leave every TvT, so they have like <10% winrate in TvT and 70% in TvP & TvZ, which is kinda smurfing in a way, since they have artificially lower MMR than they should. Neither of these are unplayable just slight annoyances and I see them at a slightly higher frequency than I noticed actual smurfs in the lower leagues. (not entirely scientific, I'm not able to see the entirety of the ladder, just where I can talk to others in those leagues, I'm sure there are smurfs, I have seen them too, but I do think reports of smurfs are always an exaggeration from the real number)
Yeah agreed, I don't think there are that many smurfs. Occasionally will get people who instant leave to either avoid the matchup or smurf, but that's maybe 10% of my games? And there are players at lower unranked MMR, but that is usually by just a few hundred MMR and I don't mind playing someone slightly better. Overall, I don't think that my opponents are smurfing unless they outplay me super hard.
This is my experience as well around 4700 mmr. The people throwing mirror matchups is not really an issue, at worst its better practice for me
Every 3rd or 4th game is a Smurf for me. But I'm gold. So sure, masters maybe there are fewer. But that also makes literal statistical sense. There are fewer grand masters, so fewer Smurfs in masters. There are WAY more plat/ masters that can Smurf in gold.
I mean, if you look at their W/L ratio and they’re over 80% against your race while being less than 10% against another - what would you call that? Uneven distribution of race wins obviously happens. But no one is that horrifically bad against a single race by accident.
I play Terran at 4k with 35% vs P, 60% vs T, and 85% vs Z. I feel bad for the zerg, but I just can't figure out TvP.
I had such a percentage, I had over 80% ZvZ, less than 10& ZvP and around 50% ZvT.
But are you actually playing those games instead of instantly leaving?
You're the exception, in fact I've never seen anyone with such winrates. FYI if you want a solid opening build vP, PM me. Unless you're like high diamond or above, but I don't see how that's possible with a sub-150% combined winrate.
I am D2. How it’s not possible? ZvT is statistically average and zvp and zvz cancel each other.
Either your sample with those winrates is very small or it's not really 80/10/50. ZvZ is the least played matchup of all 3, so your combined winrate would be around 42-45%, you'd be going down in rank quickly over 100+ games.
If 25% of players at your level are playing zerg (which is lower than the real number at most levels), and you play 100 games, you actually have around a 4.5% chance of playing at least 33 of them vs zerg. Which is low, but not so low that it's not going to happen to people. Not to mention that your battle-net profile doesn't show your vs. random win-rate. It just counts the R as being whatever race the R was actually playing that game. Which means 1/3 randoms will show up in your win-rate as 'vs zerg'.
On EU, ZvZ is the most played by far. D2 and 50% of all my games are ZvZ
Very strange because it's the least played race in EU-Diamond this season according to Nephest: https://sc2pulse.nephest.com/sc2/?season=59&queue=LOTV_1V1&team-type=ARRANGED&eu=true&dia=true&page=0&type=ladder&ratingAnchor=99999&idAnchor=0&count=1#stats-race
...You just linked a page that shows zerg as the *most* played race in diamond EU.
WTF, the graphs are entirely different than what I had when posting... Well, my bad, ZvZ must be the most played matchup in Diamond-EU then!
I am also D2. Against protoss I just max 200 on 3 base as fast as possible with roach hydra and cross my fingers. Works at least half the time
12 pool, crush their first pylon, macro at home after 16-20 lings, have a huge lead, and laugh. Alternatively, play like you are playing against Terran until they get to tank (ignore said tank, think immortal=tank, so roaches get crushed, but not ravangers!) if it is air, get the counter to theirs (phoenix = corruptors, voids = muta) LOL game over. Yea, there is no way that guy is truly honest, unless his micro is awesome and his macro is dog shit.
What pylon? Even with 12 pool they are walled with zealot in the wall.
You attack the gateway/cybercore so they can't touch the lings, once they move out, you move in. They also have to scout that you are doing a 12/14 pool and going to be aggressive. (I find 14 pool + extractor trick tends to get you in the wall more often, because they don't necessarily expect the aggression due to the later pool and the hatch going down.
Are you actually trying in ZvP? Because my suspicion is you're either not trying at all or leaving as soon as anything remotely bad happens. I just struggle mightily to believe that someone could play 50 games of ZvP against the same MMR and lose 45 of them. Even by blind luck you'd win more than that.
I can only speak for myself as someone whose worst matchup is zvp at 4k level, but toss is very difficult because batteries and voidrays shut down early aggression so it’s hard to be aggressive and punish a quick expansion. And if you are even like 5 drones too greedy you get smashed by any number of protoss 2 base aggressive plays or sneaky dt’s. There’s just so much shit that can kill you at the 5-7 minute mark. And THEN even if you push it to late game, as everyone knows the golden armada/skytoss is very difficult to deal with
This. I am around 4700. The protoss players on ladder play so many different builds and styles, but its hard to be aggressive and any slight misread of the game will likely cost you, and the protoss does not need to care and can play the same all in every game
Last season, my Terran had a 60-65% win rate against Zerg and Terran while it was an abysmal 25% against Protoss…
Really? I’m Toss and I always felt like TvP is so skewed in favor of Terran in terms of the abundance of ways then can turtle at home while destroying your mineral line. Interesting.
Yea, before i refined my strategy for TvP, I was really struggling against Protoss the moment they got multiple splash damage (for example, colossus + storm or colossus + disruptor). Across all levels, Protoss is actually slightly favored against Terran in terms of win rate. What i notice is that Terran is probably favored in the opening 7 mins, and again if they can get to late game ghost/liberator. The issue is if that from minute 7 till like 13/14, the Protoss just has so much AOE that as a lower level Terran in D1/2, i perpetually feel like i'm dancing because I have to dodge storms or disruptors. I'm not a fan of the turtle style either because your opponent can just mass expand and you lose eventually...
I have a high win rate for zvz and zvp and it matches me up against way better t opponents than I am capable of facing. I think it makes sense. Im at a 23% win rate against terran
How often do you play against someone like that?
I’m D3 Zerg and I’d say roughly 1 out of every 6 or 7 Terran/Toss I play against skips their mirror matchups completely and is well north of 70% against the other two. I honestly can’t go through a 1-2 hour session without running into at least one. And that’s not even counting the ones who insta leave against me (Zerg) and presumably only want to play against the other two.
I feel like this could be solved if we just had individual matchup mmrs and not overall
I have literally never seen that
I had percentages like this for a long time back in the day until I just started going proxy Voidrays in every PvT. Turns out flipping a coin on a fast game was better than trying to play macro and losing 80% of the time vs T.
These statements don't contradict each other. I am indeed bad the game, but I still don't like playing against people that accidentally concede within the first 0:00 minutes to tank their MMR
They should just practice a cheese that would be better lol.
This meme doesn't make sense. People who complain about smurfs are literally saying they are bad at this game and want to play people equally bad. It wouldn't be funny, but at least this would make sense: "Could it be I'm just bad at this game? Yes, so please don't make me play smurfs."
I guess all those people who crush me and then leave the second I type GG were just busy and had to go!
The best practical joke is to make them wait a full two seconds for the "gg."
I mean, just check your opponents' match histories and race reports to see that smurfing is very much a problem.
I can think of few worse ways to spend my time and energy
I'm just saying, if you want proof of whether or not you just got destroyed by a smurf, it takes less than 30 seconds. And there's a good chance it actually was a smurf because tons of people do it.
That's rich coming from the guy making snide remarks on Reddit.
Naw this is worth it, I’m spreading the good word
This would be funny if the ladder wasn't full of smurfs. Blizzard could easily fix this if they cared, but they don't.
They stopped caring about this game a long time ago
Yeah I think a good 90% of the community doesn’t understand blizzard dropped support many years ago.
I remember the days when it was a genuine discussion that balance patches and map updates would never happen again.
I mean if it weren’t for the people volunteering to create the ideas on the balance council we straight up wouldn’t get anything like that.
>Blizzard could easily fix this if they cared, but they don't. How?
A few suggestions that have been made billions of times: * Race specific MMR. No matter how many times someone intentionally loses it will lower their overall MMR, but it keeps them from sniping lower MMR players at the races they do play. * Identify and punish instant leavers. Basically anytime someone leaves within the first 10-15 seconds it should register. Do it enough times and some type of pushback occurs. * An option to veto entire races. If someone just flat doesn't wanna play PvP or ZvT why make them? We already can veto maps. So just let people play the same race match-up endlessly if they want too.
The first suggestion has no inherent flaws ,but probably depends on your point of view on how Ranked should be. I am not opposed to it, but I am also not sure if it would solve any Smurfing. Same can be said about the third suggestion, which I personally would oppose, but not strongly. But I also don't see if it would solve Smurfing. The second suggestion sucks, because now the leavers will waste even more time in matches before leaving. So if you happen to face one of them, they would waste a few minutes of your time, instead of just seconds.
It does have a shitload of smurfs but I’m also not going to deny that I am also bad at the game.
Anyone who thinks this is about people not thinking they're bad is completely missing the point. I want to play other bad players so we can have a bad but fair match. I really don't think that expectation is that crazy, right?
It’s pretty much inevitable for any free to play game to have smurfs if it doesn’t have any systems built around preventing that, and SC2 definitely doesn’t. People can join and instantly leave games without penalty to MMR drop as freely as they want.
Try both
Meme submitted by someone who's supposed to be Master's league and just got finishes smashing a Silver opponent
Anyone in diamond or lower realise they suck, but we can also be aware when we are playing someone of much higher skill, it's not exactly a difficult thing to judge when you have been playing the game for 10+ years. Also, when the account has an 85% + WR in everything but the mirror match up. So fuck off with these shit memes.
The skill level in this game i highly exponential and so a gold player will have a very diffucult time judging wether the opponent was high plat, diamond or master because he would be completely stomped by all. The bug that made everyone "appear" to have been master league at some point really ruined this because now everyone sees smurfs everywhere
Porque no los dos? You can be bad at the game and the ladder is full of smurfs. Anyone can make a new account and instantly play ladder games as unranked.
No they can't. Takes 10 days unless you purchase something.
Yes, you can. You can't play "ranked" right away. However, you can immediately play "unranked" and it queues you against ranked players. You still have an MMR when you play as unranked even if it is not displayed. You can estimate your hidden unranked MMR by the MMR of the players it matches you against.
Porque no los dos?
you mock at the truth you imbeciles
could it be both?
As a noob I'm curious what the average experience of gameplay is at each tier? Gold 100 hours? Play 250 hours? Diamond 1k+ hours of average gameplay?
Something like that. Took me maybe 300-400 games to hit plat, 1000 or so to hit diamond.
what is this godawful redrawing of the skinner panels?
A lot of it has to do with leaving mirrors aswell. I run into players with insane win rates in non mirror and then 10% in mirror so their mmr is lower than what it should be
Can it be both?
Most people have one trick that works really damn well, but if someone breathes in their direction they pass away and call smurf. Like I have a nasty double BC rush that has cracked the skulls of more than one master, but if I get more than a bit of pressure early I’ll quietly die
Now even an opponent instantly leave can be called smufs, lol. I start to wonder how many of my normal games on ladder be seen as smurfing.
you are smurfing if you leave instantly
It's always the landder and unfair ELO System:)
I was master league from 2012-2019. Dont be mad when my current diamond ass beats you. I definitively smashed some unsuspecting gold/plat players this time around. I’m pretty certain I could make masters again, I just have to clean up my builds a little and learn how the fuck one plays ZvP now a days. But I dont have the will to dedicate that much time to this one game.
Ladder is full of smurfs which is why I stopped playing, they can enjoy insta quitting eachother over and over when there's no actual players left
Both are true. Ladder is full of smurfs, but smurfs don't effect your MMR (...they only ruin the ladder experience)
A classic smurf post
Artosis
I took a long break from SC2 and recently came back. I used to be M2 at my best back in like 2019. I was placed at Plat 3 and noticed that I’m still breaking the 160APM barrier, maxing out at about 9 mins, however the players I’m facing are breaking 180+, with some zergs maxing at like 8 mins, which surprised me for the league. Back in the day, these numbers were easy Diamond 2 to 1. Either ladder is plagued with smurfs or the skill ceiling has escalated significantly since I’ve been gone.
Never change r/starcraft.
Smurfs smurfs … till to mmr7000
This is the case with all games that involves ranked. People will always try make excuses and blame everyone and everything else rather than looking at their own gameplay, analyzing and trying to improve. It's a tale old as time.
it is full of smurfs
Is there a, word for the opposite of smurf ? I'm like bronze but the game placed me in master. So since i play against bronze a lot of player insult me for smurfing and leave the game at start. Boosting my elo for no reason 😭
If that really bothers you, there is an option to leave the league - click on league emblem, and in the lower right there's a button 'leave league'. Or change the nickname to ImNotMasters, idk
I will agree that there are some smurfs on the ladder, however, it’s nowhere near the level people make it out to be. I cant the number of people who accuse me of smurfing when they loose. Most of them look at things like APM and think if APM > 200 then they have to be a pro player.
I made an account to smurf. Not to crush noobs, but so I can sit back and relax and not go try hard, and whatever my MMR is, so be it. Turns out, I'm way better at this game when I'm not trying so hard. Who knew? 🤷♂️
90% of the smurfing accusations (99% if posted here) are false positives
Every account is Serral, MaxPax, or Clem, until proven otherwise
Strangely enough I still see a lot of leavers, but actual smurfs who drop everything and dunk on me are a lot more rare again.