Smurfing

[Hygro]

Smurfing is when you pose as lower level than you are in order to "compete" against those who stand no chance.

While I've only seen the term used in online gaming where you are matched by an ELO, I think it applies to much of human interaction.

When is smurfing good, when is it bad, and when should we care?

 

[Ajidica]

Does "smurfing" involve you playing casually when you normally play competitively, or playing competitively with a skill in excess of what you are advertising your alleged skill to be?
If it is just playing casually, I don't think it is an issue. If you are pretending to be unskilled to rack up cheap wins, shame.

 

[JollyRoger]

There is a reason Smurfs are blue beyond balls. There is only one female Smurf and she is smitten by any jolly ole Roger from outside the tribe.

 

[sophie]

Does "smurfing" involve you playing casually when you normally play competitively, or playing competitively with a skill in excess of what you are advertising your alleged skill to be?
If it is just playing casually, I don't think it is an issue. If you are pretending to be unskilled to rack up cheap wins, shame.

The only context that I'm familiar with is in League of Legends. In LoL you smurf for one of three reasons:

1) You're a high Elo player, which means finding a game in matchmaking can take 45+ minutes, depending on how popular the position you play is (there was a support player for Team Liquid who famously would take power naps while waiting for matchmaking to find him a game; he was sitting in queue for 2h at a time between games while playing in the least contested position in the game). You create smurf accounts so you can have multiple accounts trying to find games at once. This was a huge issue last year when Elo degradation due to inactivity was quite slow, and there was little incentive to strive to be anything more than top-200 (Challenger tier) unless you were in contention for the #1 spot on the ladder. At the peak of the problem there were maybe 100-150 people occupying the top-200 Challenger spots, with the other 50 (and many of the high-Masters spots) occupied by various smurf accounts. The result was that the matchmaking bottleneck was further exacerbated as the number of available Challenger-level players to match up was lower. This problem has been fixed by increasing Elo atrophy and adding incentives to reach Challenger rank, so there's more reason to focus on quality accounts rather than quantity.

2) You are a streamer. Streamers get paid to be entertaining. It's easier to be entertaining when you are styling on chumps that are worse than you. The lower level of competition also allows the streamer to dick around with weird builds and off-meta picks that are also more entertaining to watch. A lot of streamers have smurf accounts that they intentionally (i.e. play until they rank up, then shift to a smurf and let account A drop back down to the lower tier) keep in lower Elo tiers for this reason.

3) You are an ******* who needs to validate your self-worth by styling on people. A lot of these are people who get worn down playing competitive games where they don't get to be The Guy (tm) and need to let off some steam. Or the other thing you said. You have one higher-Elo account for playing seriously, and one for dicking around.

 

[Mise]

I would rather people created a new character and smurfed at low ELO, than deliberately throw games in order to reduce their ELO.

 

[sophie]

I would rather people created a new character and smurfed at low ELO, than deliberately throw games in order to reduce their ELO.

? Was that directed at me? Generally you don't intentionally lose to reduce Elo. It kind of defeats the purpose of the process. You create a smurf to play on while you wait for the Elo on your main account to decay through inactivity back to a desired tier-level.

Also just a PSA: Arpad Elo was a person. The system he developed for rating and matchmaking players of equal talent is named after him. Therefore the system and its points are called Elo. Not elo. Not ELO. Not E.L.O.. Just Elo.

 

[Mise]

Not directed at you. Some people do intentionally lose games to keep their Elo (thanks for the Psa) low or intentionally reduce their Elo.

Recently it's been popular on Overwatch for streamers/YouTubers to do series on grinding their way from the lowest SR rank to the highest. Partly this may be to teach people the problems in each rank and how they might overcome them (i.e. to help people in low ranks rank up), or it may be simply to make funny videos of people (children, I suspect) playing the game really, really badly.

It may also happen if they have friends in lower Elo ranges, but the matchmaking system forbids them from playing together; in this case, one might throw a bunch of games, end up in a lower Elo range, and thus be able to team with your friends. If you ever accidentally ranked up higher than your friends, again making it impossible to play a game together, you would deliberately lose a bunch of games to again return to the matchmaking radius of your friends.

This may also happen in games where a new account costs money, or where they have other perks, abilities, weapons, etc tied to their main account that they don't want to lose. I can't think of any games like this but I can imagine it happening.

 

[BvBPL]

I tie half my brain behind my back, just to make it fair.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Outside of online gaming, this is usually called sandbagging. In money games (e.g. pool, poker) it's hustling - you throw a game or two to make yourself look bad, then raise the stakes.

I haven't played World of Tanks in a couple of years, but in that game there were two issues:

- Smurfing, as described, where an experienced player creates a fresh account in order to look like a new player. This was used, in part, because of a 3rd-party mod that enabled people to scrutinize the stats of every player, in order to give them an overall quality score. With this mod, you could instantly identify the high-caliber players on the other team in a given battle. Those players could then be singled out for quick elimination. (Conversely, very poor players could be identified too, and you could ignore or quickly eliminate them en route to whatever your objective was.) So smurfing was sometimes a counter-strategy, to conceal one's skill from people who shouldn't (yet) know how good you are.

- "Seal-clubbing" was a separate issue: In World of Tanks, it's the vehicles that have grades, not the players. The players are all lumped together in 15-v-15 battles in a very Darwinian competition. When you first start playing, you're only able to play "tier 1" tanks, and you unlock tiers as you improve, using earned Experience Points as one of the game's currencies. Veteran players, with thousands of games played, are still able to play in those low tiers, where brand-new players abound (because brand-new players, by definition, can only play in low tiers).

Personally, I was much more offended by seal-clubbing than by smurfing in World of Tanks. I avoided playing tiers 1-3 unless I was working my way up a new line of vehicles (and being an experienced player with a pile of the game's in-game currencies, I knew how to zip through those low tiers). Tier 4 was where I felt, "okay, noobs, the game starts for real now - your [butt] is grass, and I'm a lawnmower." At those low tiers, I just felt it was rude to prey on people who literally don't know what they're doing yet, and it's bad for the game's growth. Who knows how many new players give the game a try and then say "f this"?

 

[shadowplay]

You mess with Electric Light Orchestra, you mess with me.

 

[Hygro]

You mess with Electric Light Orchestra, you mess with me.

What's got you so blue?

 

[dusters]

I'm a master tier elo in League of Legends. I smurf, because I have 7 accounts (three of them were gifts from friends who quit the game) and I don't care if one or two them get banned.

However, I usually play off-meta picks like Le blanc suppport (she is 98% times played as a middle lane champion) or sometimes I play morgana support which isn't a troll pick, but I build it in a non-support way and splitpush as a support. Of course it is trolling then, but since I'm smurfing, I as a support can outduel most of enemies anyway,

 

[Groff]

I'm a master tier elo in League of Legends. I smurf, because I have 7 accounts (three of them were gifts from friends who quit the game) and I don't care if one or two them get banned.

However, I usually play off-meta picks like Le blanc suppport (she is 98% times played as a middle lane champion) or sometimes I play morgana support which isn't a troll pick, but I build it in a non-support way and splitpush as a support. Of course it is trolling then, but since I'm smurfing, I as a support can outduel most of enemies anyway,

Can you get banned in LoL for smurfing or playing off meta picks? I play Dota and know that a lot of high mmr (elo)/pro players smurf, usually it's because finding a match can take a really long time when you're that high of a rank.

 

[dusters]

No, you can't.

 

[Hygro]

2) You are a streamer. Streamers get paid to be entertaining. It's easier to be entertaining when you are styling on chumps that are worse than you. The lower level of competition also allows the streamer to dick around with weird builds and off-meta picks that are also more entertaining to watch.

This is a good reason to smurf.

Many people hate losing and smurfs increase their lifetime loss rate by +1. most of these games are balanced about 50-50 because of the ELO system, so once your ranking is correct (aka played enough games), every time you get smurfed, your ELO drops and you slightly slightly end up smurfing someone yourself. It's like a smurf ripple effect. So for these people smurfs hurt them.

But many people, such as myself, really enjoy learning the difference between my skill level and that of a better person. It helps give me perspective. I know my win rate is algorithmically going to be 50%ish so the next game I get to play around a bit myself... or the one after that. So for me, smurfing is alright. To the point I've experienced it, anyway.

Then from the smurfer's side, there's the positive of playing a relaxing or experimentation game, and showing people what "better means"
but
There's also that the smurf is holding themself back by not practicing against harder opponents, and holding others back by challenging them too hard and frustrating.

That to me is the basic smurfing matrix.


With that in mind, I wonder about social smurfing. There are numerous hierarchies of people, from ability to get the joke to kindness to being fun to being useful etc. We figure out generally fairly quickly where someone falls in relation to other folks in any areas we compare folks. I wonder if there's an analogous smurfing logic.

 

[Hygro]

Then I ask, is a person moving from a more complex faster paced area like NYC to a slower place like Portland smurfing? Is smurfing a form of gentrification of a rank or colonialism of another peoples (whose ELO in defending themselves against aggressors is lower)?

 

[Flying Pig]

With that in mind, I wonder about social smurfing. There are numerous hierarchies of people, from ability to get the joke to kindness to being fun to being useful etc. We figure out generally fairly quickly where someone falls in relation to other folks in any areas we compare folks. I wonder if there's an analogous smurfing logic.

This seems like a variation on the old wisdom that if you're the cleverest person in the room, you need to find another room.

 

[CavLancer]

How would you know?

 

[Hygro]

This seems like a variation on the old wisdom that if you're the cleverest person in the room, you need to find another room.

Does that shrink someone else's room?

 

[CavLancer]

Amigo, don't mess with the ego of those who unjustly imagine they are worthy, unless the consequences are light, or you are stubborn. General rule. I am encouraged however Hygro. Where are you again? Do you drink beer or rhum? Just so I know what to bring. I will be in a lovely place, the coast of Oregon. Let me know if that suits better.