League of Legends is planning an update to the ranked system. This is intended to better assign players to the ranks they belong to. This also means: Anyone who smurfs to destroy noobs will soon face serious consequences. Competitor Dota 2 has been doing this for years.
What are Smurfs?
- “Smurf” refers to secondary accounts of (usually exceptionally good) players in German.
- The goal of smurfs is typically to either correct their own rating again, or – more commonly – to play in low ELOs to annoy newcomers.
- For the smurfers themselves, this is great fun, but honest players are really annoyed by such behavior. LoL now wants to take action against it.
This is the change: In the latest developer blog, LoL makers Riot describe how ranks are to be better adjusted in the future. Under the point: “The search for the right starting point,” it says:
So if you are a player who wants to create a new account to have fun destroying players with lower ranks, then we want to be able to recognize that and ban your account. And if you are a high-ranked player who wants to get accounts to high ranks to sell them, we want to recognize that as well.
Specifically, this means: Riot now wants to detect smurfs and potentially ban them. To this end, they are experimenting with “newly implemented tools.” There are no further details. With Split 2, the changes are supposed to go live.
Just like that, competitor Dota 2 has dealt with smurfs. In 2021, there was a change in the Valve MOBA that resulted in smurfs receiving a ban. There, affected users first receive a warning on their main account. If they continue, the ban hammer comes down.
Smurfs have been a problem in LoL for a long time
Just before the announcement, hundreds of users demanded exactly this change on Reddit. There it is said: it happens too often that one has to play with smurfs. This is just not fun.
What’s worse, as a new player, you also get attacked for being new and not knowing anything about the game. The experience as a newbie is terrible. Even watching streamers to learn, they are toxic towards people who do not know the mechanics.
Recently, this very play style caused a bigger story from Brazil. There, a 66-year-old just wanted to play, but was constantly destroyed by smurfs – so much so that he lost interest.
However, someone gifted him a strong account, and the “LoL Grandpa” became a “reverse-smurf,” playing as a much worse player in high ELO. With varying success: he managed to ruin the game for all the nasty people simply by being bad. All of this escalated into a proper dispute: A 66-year-old grandpa becomes a legend in LoL and a nightmare for Riot Games
