Quickplay is my gamemode, but smurfs are here too

General Discussion
1

I just bought this game a couple of days ago with the Humble Bundle monthly bundle. Been wanting to play for ages and this deal was too good to pass up.

I’m obviously new to the game, but have played games similar to Overwatch before, so I knew what to expect and how the basics of the game worked.

I don’t enjoy ranked/competitive play in any “e-sports” game as it just leads to toxicity, so I find refuge in the standard game-modes.

So far, I’ve played a few matches and not had any real issue. A couple of leavers here and there and people who obviously didn’t have a clue what they were doing. It’s normal, at this level we’re all noobies learning characters and testing out who fits our playstyles.

Last 2 matches I played, that all changed.

The enemy had a blatant smurf, who even openly admitted to it over chat and just… well, it was a slaughter-fest.

Spawn, move 5 feet toward the objective, get sniped.

Yes, they were playing Widowmaker, a character that I have been trying to learn myself.

This person just completely obliterated us and any fun we were having.

Constantly getting quad+ kills, 70+ eliminations in the game, completely unkillable because they were so skilled you would almost think they had a headshot aim-bot.

To make it worse, we had the same guy in our next match! Yet again they played Widow. and it was the same story all over again.

It got to the point where half of us rage-quit and the other half of us just sat at our spawn doing nothing till the game ended; to be fair we weren’t even safe there as said player would come find us for some easy kills.

As a new player it has somewhat put me off this game already as it is completely anti-fun.

Legitimately new players are getting screwed by these sorts of people.

This smurf said that they had nowhere on their main to practice, so maybe, as people on these forums have said, there needs to be a way for them to practice with other heroes, without having to create smurfs and take a huge dump on us actual noobies.

For those of you who say “git gud scrub”, how am I meant to “git gud” when stuff like this happens at my level?

1 Like
2

You’ll come across smurfs in all PvP games especially the popular ones. This problem doesn’t have a perfect solution. Overwatch is no exception. Fortunately smurfs who enjoy destroying significantly lower skilled enemies are relatively rare.

Killing “noobs” is not fun for most people - less fun than killing hard AI (which is also unfun for a skilled player). I had many 1v1 matches where a significantly better player realised after a few seconds that I had significantly lower skills, stopped shooting, said hello, waved, and then left the game.

You played quite a few matches before reaching level 7. If only 2 of them had smurfs than most of your matches were fine. With time the community of the game might develop into a smaller one consisting of mostly hardcores/pros (this actually happened to some games) but we aren’t yet there.

2 Likes
3

If it’s quick play then it’s not a smurf.

To get to your point it’s unlikely that you’ll get that kind of player in your game often and even when you do it’s not exactly anything that blizzard can fix as it’s just someone q’ing for qp.

Blizzard is also unlikely to add aim training modes as that’s only useful for a very small minority of players who’ll use it

1 Like
4

It is important to mention that smurfs need to level up until level 25 so it is reasonable to complain about smurfs completely obliterating the ‘‘normal’’ low-levels.
There are smurfs out there who just queue in quickplay to stomp on the noobs.

5

Yea but what’s the difference between a ‘smurf’ and a high ranking person playing qp

6

Quick play teams often consist of players of very different skill levels. The same team can easily have gold and master players especially at midnight when the number of online players is lower. Competitive is better in this regard, the spread in skill rating in the 2 teams is usually low.

Players who never played overwatch before can have experience from other first person shooter games and can have good aim. For this reason they might be significantly better than other beginners from the start with some heros like mccree or widow. They aren’t necessarily smurfs. However, the system should find out quickly that they are better and they should be matched against other good players.

Unfortunately QP is a mess, the wild west where a lot of players with very different goals are mixed. It’d be difficult for me to treat QP seriously but some casual gamers try to use it as “Unranked Competitive” with very limited success.

7

It’s funny you say this as after making this post, I mained Ana for a few matches and did quite well (in my opinion). Every game following these good games, I no longer got matched with people of my own level, but people at much higher levels. For around 10 or so games, I was matched with people that were minimum level 25 (I was level 7/8) and I was by far the lowest level person on either team.

Is this what QP is? Like a hidden “elo”?

The game has now ranked me as being somewhat “skilled”, so is placing me with players of those levels as it judges me to play as well as them?

Sorry if I don’t understand everything like QP and whatever :stuck_out_tongue: I am still a newbie!

8

People should be allowed to tick a ‘solo-queue-only’ box, at the cost of longer queues.

2 Likes
9

QP = quick play

In Competitive (you’ll be able to play it from level 25) the matchmaker will try to set up 2 teams in which all 12 players have more or less the same skill rating with relatively small difference. This of course doesn’t guarantee good teams, e.g.: if all 6 players mainly play healers then the team will be bad. This is why it’s a good idea to use “Play / Find Group” (aka LFG - Looking For Group). With LFG you can guarantee that you have X number of healers and Y number of tanks because most players want to play damage heros. An even better idea for devoted players is finding regular friends and playing with them instead of rolling the dice and playing with random players.

In QP in my experience a team can have players of very different levels and skill ratings. E.g.: having golds, masters and a lot of ranks very far apart. Spread in player skill can be huge but the matchmaker tries to do some magic to still make teams more or less equal.

Level doesn’t mean much. It’s much closer to measuring the time you played. Some people have several hundreds and thousands of levels but are still average players. Of course the first 50-100 levels are important because you gain very important basic knowledge passively even if you don’t want it but after that you quickly hit a plateau in skills if you don’t actively learn.

10

shame on you quickplayers

11

Yes, there is a hidden elo in QP. The Game seems to have marked you as being more skilled than average, and is now matching you with what it thinks are fairer opponents.

This is actually a GOOD thing. If you keep doing well in QP and then do your placement matches in Competitive, you will probably be given a high rank.

(Like a friend of mine who had FPS experience and started playing OW, then later did his placement matches and got placed in Masters).

12

smurfs have always been in every game and they will be always there, so you should accept that, stop whining about them and git gud.

13

They’re still new, as someone who has never played any FPS, it took me at least a few 100 levels to actually “git gud”. Just remember back when you we’re just starting out. Imagine if this happened to you.

I’m not sure if you’re just trolling.