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Smurfing within League of Legends can be one of the most annoying things to deal with if you’re not directly benefitting from the smurf. If you’re playing with one of your friends that are smurfing, then it’s fantastic. You essentially get hard carried.
Dealing with smurfing has to be one of the more frustrating issues for Riot Games to deal with. Rioters WookieCookie and Ghostcrawler both spoke about their dealings with smurfing.
WookieeCookie: We don’t endorse smurfing, but tackling it is a very difficult issue because of our player population size and the ease of account creation. We agree that smurfing can really ruin the game, such as when a smurf stomps lower-tier players. However; from past attempts we’ve learned that it’s a real uphill battle to create powerful restrictions on alt-accounts without inadvertently affecting the majority of our players who don’t smurf at all.
Instead of cumbersome systems to blanket restrict smurfing we’re looking for targeted answers that attack specific pain points. For example, if we find a player is using a smurf to actively hurt the game and other players we’ll take direct action on that account, and in some cases their main account as well.
Instead of trying to restrict or prevent smurfs, various teams across Riot try to minimize issues caused by smurfing. For example, one of the teams that works on meta-game systems developed pretty good detection methods that quickly separate new players from experienced smurf accounts in the early levels. Within a few matches, smurf accounts only end up playing against other smurf accounts.
Ghostcrawler: Sometimes players are smurfing because they are trying to accomplish something that League isn’t offering – in other words, the need is unmet. For example, playing with a friend with a different skill set is a noble pursuit that League doesn’t support very well. Other players might make a smurf account because they want a sense of rapid progression that they experienced when leveling from 1-30 or maybe even climbing through Bronze and Silver.
So we should be careful not to paint all smurfs with broad strokes and assume that they are trying to grief actual new players. They may have other intentions. That said, taken on the whole, I’m not a fan of smurfing and worry the potential harm to other players outweighs the benefits to those players with unmet needs.
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