For those who don’t want to read the article to know what this has to do with Smurfs:
Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence.
As always: if leaving or sucking ruins a game for everyone else, your game is badly designed.
Only MOBAs have this level of toxicity. All MOBAs have this problem. Maybe lashing strangers together for forty-five minutes, in a zero-sum contest where half of them will lose, with so much inter-dependence and complexity that nobody feels responsible, is not great for the human psyche.
You can’t even kick someone. Losing them for any reason ruins the game. You have to tough it out, for most of an hour, after waiting however long just to start the game, and the inevitable loss will still count against you. No kidding people get wound-up.
I’d add the caveat “badly designed for solo matchmaking.” Dota with friends–especially a five stack you get along with and play well with–is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you’re not in the total shit tier ranks it’s usually pretty fun.
By that logic we should ban pick up soccer too.
It is astounding how “this you?” is always dead-on, and “by your logic” is always complete nonsense.
No shit, stomping players of lower ELO is not cool?
Smurfing was pretty bananas in Rocket League too.
Mixed that with people convinced they should be ranked much higher and the only thing holding them back was their teammates and yes that could be pretty toxic too.
I once unknowingly let my nephew play ranked on my account and I had to rank back up from gold, which is the closest I’ve come to smurfing.
It was only a few games until the mmr leveled out, but the gold games were honestly harder than plat or diamond because of how many people don’t even have the self-awareness to know they’re messing up.
I mean, I’m messing up all the time too, I just don’t need to blame my teammates.That said, I haven’t played much since Epic got their hands on it.
