For those who don’t know, a smurf is essentially a high-ranking player who intentionally plays in low-level matches to face off against less experienced players. This can be done either by deliberately removing ranks or by creating a new account.
Riot Games had acknowledged the smurfing issues on Valorant with their May Ask Valorant session, saying they had collected and incorporated feedback from all channels in order to dig deeper into and resolve the issue.
An action plan was not made available at the time, but Riot showed his willingness to fix the problem by cryptically saying he would set foot on the Smurfs with bad intentions, but after killing the smurfs. inducement for smurfs without malicious intent.
However, the game developer has somehow played down the spread of the smurf issue on Valorant by saying that “it’s not as widespread as some in the community might have you believe.”
Now, of course, we’re not going to sniff out fact-checking to confirm the reasonableness of the statement, but we can actually highlight what the community itself has to say and let you be the judge.
Lower elo games suck because all other games have a troll / throw. How has Riot not taken better steps to deal with this yet? They have great anti-cheat, but the IP cannot ban smurfing players and ruin the game for people trying to get in.
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the only thing these count levels have done is make me realize how many smurfs we actually have… anyone else thinks that way? every game a new reyna / raze with lmao level 2 account now you can actually see his new accounts and it’s sad how many of them are in almost all ranked games.
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As emerges from the above reports, and many others [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] on social media, the smurf problem that Valorant suffers from is indeed (allegedly) serious. Players have complained about bumping into it game after game which just ruins the overall experience.
Some smurfs also love the attention and make their presence felt by announcing that they are a smurf and that winning or losing doesn’t matter to them, which is pretty toxic. Such behavior has become quite common lately.
But there are always two sides to every story, and the entire Smurf Trial is no exception. See, Riot was actually right to some extent when they said the problem isn’t as widespread as you might think.
There are also several instances of players who are actually good at the game but are labeled by other paranoid players as smurfs, if they get a higher kill score than usual.
Such players can play as skillfully as possible, but are pulled down by their average Joe teammates due to their inability to reach the ranks they deserve and are instead matched with those with less experience.
So yes, clearly not all experienced gamers are smurfs. But still, it is undeniable that Riot has done little to address the problem to date.
The problem has been around forever and while its spread is questionable, a crackdown on malicious Smurfs, regardless of their numbers, has now become more necessary than ever, lest the situation escalate further.
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