Bam! You are dead. It was a headshot from afar with the same weapon you use. Damn, they’re pretty good. Maybe even at good. Could they be smurfing?
These are the considerations players make in the heat of a competitive FPS like CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, or Valorant. If a teammate or opponent appears to be underperforming based on their rank, they may be a higher rank player using a different account (a ‘smurf’ account). The Ethics of Smurfs (opens in new tab) are complicated, but most would agree that playing against a smurf sucks. Some believe that smurfing is a problem that developers have little incentive to solve.
That was the conclusion of a commenter on a Valorant subreddit post, who claimed that Riot “downplays the game’s glaring problems”, namely Smurfs, in order to increase the total number of players and sell more skins. The comment specifically invoked Valorant senior competitive designer EvrMoar, who personally wrote a 3,400-word response (opens in new tab) on the note – not something that happens every day.
The core? EvrMoar says Riot developers are not “shadowy figures” trying to massage Valorant’s player numbers. He says his team views smurfs as a serious problem, but wants fans to know that internal research suggests that “smurfs are less common than players think”.
“Every decision we’ve made for ranked has always had the question ‘will this reduce smurfs’ or ‘how can we change this to reduce smurfs’ during the design phase,” he said.
EvrMoar says the claim that more Smurf accounts means more success for Riot is false.
“Some of the strongest data we have in the entire game industry because why matchmakers should even have skill-based matchmaking is that people are playing the game more and quitting less based on how fair matches are. to have more smurfs, we would have more unfair matches, causing more players to quit our game,” said EvrMoar. “Why would we want to chase players away?”
It is not always short and sweet. I’ve previously wondered if players who have alternate accounts end up buying twice as much cosmetics. After all, in Valorant, you never see anyone peeking into a corner with a bog-standard, skinless pistol. EvrMoar also shoots this idea down, acknowledging that he is separate from the revenue side of Valorant and can’t be quite sure.
“The idea that we want smurfs [because] ‘they spend more money’ is not true. In general, and there will always be exceptions, alt accounts/smurfs don’t actually generate revenue,” he said.
That doesn’t take away my smurf fear, though. It’s one thing to know that Riot (and any other competitive game developer for that matter) is aware of the problem, but it’s another to feel solutions in action.
What does Valorant do to counter Smurfs?
According to Riot, Valorant has a reliable (but imperfect) system for dealing with Smurfs. In October 2021, EvrMoar wrote: (opens in new tab) that Valorant’s automated systems are “really good at detecting Smurfs” and quickly correct their MMR once dialed in.
So why do some players still do it? to feel like Valorant is full of smurfs? Maybe it’s because Riot uses automatic fixes that are invisible to the players, while it deliberately doesn’t do visible things that other games do. For example, both PUBG and Rainbow Six Siege require two-factor authentication to play ranked.
“I think a lot of it is also that we don’t want to be completely transparent about how we approach Smurfs. We don’t want Smurfs to know how we’ve changed our BMR detection, how we can better track them, and how they can bypass our systems said EvrMoar.
What Valorant? is doing to do:
- Automatically detect when a player is smurfing
- Quickly adjust their MMR after several matches
What Valorant? does not to do:
- Requires two-factor authentication to use Ranked . to play
- Need a phone number to get Ranked . to play
Riot has considered two-factor and SMS authentication to fight Smurfs, but EvrMoar argues that these tactics aren’t tackling the problem for what it is and instead create a “secondary solution that keeps people from playing the game because we don’t have it.” unable to solve the problem”. an immediate problem.”
To illustrate this point, EvrMoar described a hypothetical situation where implementing SMS/Two-factor authentication could halve the number of Smurf accounts, but at the same time block multiple legitimate players playing Valorant in a game cafe or no phone (even if that’s only 3% of the players, it’s still a lot if less than 1% are smurfs).
EvrMoar thinks these measures may not be worth it when players committed to creating a smurf account can simply create a new email address or sign up for a different phone number to get around this. However, he doesn’t completely close the door on two factors: “We just don’t think we’ve exhausted all our attempts at solutions and have yet to fall back on solutions.”
Whether or not these invisible solutions will ever completely “solve” Smurfs, it’s nice to see Riot being more publicly proactive about the problem than other developers. Last month patch 5.01 (opens in new tab) began testing for “New Smurf Detection Functionality” in North America. The patch notes weren’t more specific than that, but EvrMoar said the results “look promising.”
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