I am in low masters, and almost every single game I get GM-level smurfs either in my team, or enemy team, or both.
Usually they have little to none communication, so sometimes it is possible to organize a team, come up with good strategy and win. But in most cases it’s a lottery: “who get smurf and which smurfs are better”.
On the bright side, when there are no smurfs - games are usually great and well balanced.
The question is: how many seasons does Blizzard really need to fix this problem?
How do you spot a smurf in master considering the relatively low SR difference? In low ranks it isn’t very difficult to spot a high rank tracer or DF smurf but they are rare in my games.
It’s easy to see a smurf. There is a large difference between GM and Masters. And yea, it feels like every game is decided by who gets better smurfs.
I’ve played in basically every rank other than low bronze and GM, and the amount of smurfs in ~3500 is larger than every other rank, and only seems to be increasing.
And you don’t see it as much because of performance based SR that is in place below diamond, which does not exist in masters.
Master and GM together are less than 10% of all accounts. That is less volume to dilute smurfs if they are a real problem.
It’s relatively easy for support player to spot people outside of their real rank. Both “too low” and “too high” options are obvious after ~2-3 minutes.
I mean, you can’t really talk about smurfing in diamond or above as at that point people drop down to 3000 sr so the only difference between someone who hasn’t played in a while and a ‘smurf’ is their level.
I have no experience in above-3000SR gameplay but below 3000SR the quality between two players of the same rank can be huge. People often complain about “fairness”, smurfing and aimbotting in a lot of cases where these things aren’t present in my opinion.
Rank is a very rough estimation of skills in a game where you are supposed to deal with a lot of heros/situations but you can master only a few heros. If two players have equal skills but one’s main hard counters the other’s then would it be a fair fight between them? I’ve heard that high ranks have a lot of OTP players (I have no clue…) but if that’s true then the previously mentioned hard counter situation can be a huge problem. In low ranks (around 2000SR) it’s easy to play a lot of heros decently.
The difference between a diamond and master player is game sense and that’s about it, the difference between GM and master is once again game sense and usually a huge and skill based on that game sense. Though there are always exceptions of course
Even if you were say, 3600, and you decayed down to 3000 and then played a game, you would get put in 3600 games. If you win you would get like 80 sr, and lose less than 10.
I was playing for last few days, and it only gets worse. The queue time is getting longer (probably due to lack of genuine players in this rank), and smurfs are more and more frequent.
Now it is ~2 smurfs on average. It’s very uncommon to have a game with 0 smurfs. It’s not fun at all.
Eh, no.
You’re put in diamond games of anywhere between 3000-3300 and you only gain around 50-60 sr
Still doesn’t change my point
I can understand having multiple accounts, especially if you’re a streamer. Sometimes you just want to play the game without being messaged every x seconds or group invite spammed. But smurfing is a problem, and it ruins the game for everyone except you for that comp match.
One possible solution is that your comp SR is linked over your accounts. Another solution is that comp is disabled for all accounts you register past your “main” account (and you’d have to either set which account will be your main for the season; lock it to the first account you play comp on, I guess).
There’s a few ways to fix it, and until it is resolved, comp rank is meaningless.
When you hang around Mid/High masters, smurfs tend to be less affiliated in carrying a team. Low Masters it still tends to be players skilled around Diamond tiers.