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For those who don't want to read the article to know what this has to do with Smurfs:
Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence.
As always: if leaving or sucking ruins a game for everyone else, your game is badly designed.
Only MOBAs have this level of toxicity. All MOBAs have this problem. Maybe lashing strangers together for forty-five minutes, in a zero-sum contest where half of them will lose, with so much inter-dependence and complexity that nobody feels responsible, is not great for the human psyche.
You can't even kick someone. Losing them for any reason ruins the game. You have to tough it out, for most of an hour, after waiting however long just to start the game, and the inevitable loss will still count against you. No kidding people get wound-up.
I'd add the caveat "badly designed for solo matchmaking." Dota with friends--especially a five stack you get along with and play well with--is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you're not in the total shit tier ranks it's usually pretty fun.
I absolutely agree. I think the time investment is the biggest reason. I can easily shrug off a loss if it only took 5 minutes. It's much harder to swallow when you feel like you just wasted the last hour of your life. Honestly I don't know how to fix it though - the farming and leveling is kind of baked into the formula. You can speed up the process like Heroes of the Storm did but it's going to feel like a "lite" version of the original.
If you could leave, you'd never be trapped in a long game. You would enjoy every long game. The ones that suck wouldn't last.
Root problem: the game requires a fixed number of human players, from start to finish. If bots worked then you could just take the L and quit. Or safely eject someone who's being a total cock. Or possibly even split the game in two, so both the "fuck this" and "fuck you" groups see everyone else replaced with bots.
Bots don't have to be good with every character. Bots don't even have to play by the same rules as humans. They just need to be balanced. Which you'd figure these developers are really really good at, after fifteen years of pouring new characters into these games.
Individual scoring would be almost as powerful. A high-level player with a low-level team should ideally be scored on their skill - not a binary win / lose condition. Especially if half the players are guaranteed to lose. Long matches provide oodles of time to evaluate. And if bots work at all, the game can quietly run simulations from snapshots of the ongoing match - checking if players did better or worse than a player-like script would, and by how much.
Compare sports. You have a regulation basketball game. On one side is the 2023 Miami Heat, minus Jimmy Butler. On the other side you have the AZ Compass Prep Dragons, plus Jimmy Butler. The Dragons' chances of winning are approximately diddly over fuck. But a talent scout watching those high-schoolers get smoked 132-15 can still recognize which of them are doing especially well under the circumstances. And Erik Spoelstra can still give Tyler Herro side-eye for ever missing a free throw. Despite a blowout loss, every individual can be judged for how they played, both in terms of independent actions and productive teamwork. (This new kid at Arizona, Jimmy somethingorther, is really good.)
Yet in a video game - where every moment can be scrutinized frame-by-frame, and statistical analysis is so easy you'd think this was baseball - there is only total victory and utter defeat, and only for whole teams. Everything from Smash Bros to Overwatch has little trophies to hand out for leading performance in a bunch of arbitrary details. So why doesn't a loss caused by one feeding troll count as 90% of a win for the players who almost eked it out in spite of them?
More importantly: why doesn't the game make it feel like they were doing good, when they were doing great?
Hit the nail on the head, I'd say. Some future competitive game that endeavors to weigh in an evaluation of personal contribution over just the binary win/loss condition and that implements ways to automatically mitigate the negatives enumerated for long duration matches is going to start off in a really good place.
Handling those issues honestly seems like Step 1 in tackling the kind of negativity that is notorious for cropping up in these sorts of games. If everyone's having a better time and doesn't feel punished for things outside of their control, it seems reasonable to assume that the baseline behavior will be a lot more chill.
If the smurf detection/etc is good, then that's the first way to alleviate those toxic behavior. It's a really bad feedback cycle when smurfs are involved. My main game is rocket league, you can have smurf that win the game single-handedly and then start to play 1v3 or 2v4 because he decides that he wants to lose these games to keep playing at lower rank, or something you did the smurf don't like, and you might be some MMR away for your next promotion and it doesn't matter. The MMR matchmaking this little shit to your matches because he decides to smurf instead of playing at his normal level.
I don't know much about dota or moba games, but the idea is the same, smurf will pump more negativity into the game.
By that logic we should ban pick up soccer too.
It is astounding how "this you?" is always dead-on, and "by your logic" is always complete nonsense.
I stopped playing dota 3 years ago and my quality of life has greatly improved.
Same
No shit, stomping players of lower ELO is not cool?
You'd be surprised at how hard people will circumvent that logic
Some people literally don't even believe themselves after admitting to smurf. Eg: https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/167e3ne/i_got_vac_smurfing_ban/
People are shit.
Too little, too late. This has been ignored for far too long.
One of the biggest reasons I stopped playing Overwatch on PlayStation a few years ago.
Smurfing is out of control there (unlimited free accounts), and most matches down where I lived in Gold were determined by which team had more Masters players on their team.
90.000 seems also rather low. I guess they definitely only banned the worst ones.
Hopefully that sends the right message to the rest.
... or, you know, you could just match them with eachother and some bots, so they don't realize anyone is onto them, don't ruin the experience for others, and still get to play what they've paid for(sorry if DoTA2 is f2p ... but even there, the best players will usually have spent some money).
Robot Warfare on mobile seems to do something like this(you'll find references to "AI Hell"/"bot hell" on reddit). Part of what players don't like about it is that you'll have maybe one, usually none, lower-ranked human player besides yourself on your team, and the opposing team is usually all bots or all noobs, so you either shoot fish in a barrel or invent challenges/handicaps for yourself.
When I would let my daughter play on my account while I built up hers so she would have a good "mech" or three(she still doesn't carry matches or get more than a few kills if any, but surviving to the end of a match with her dad on her team is a big deal for a 7yo), I would find my account stuck like so for a good while. Honestly prefer it to playing with the super-competitive "elite", who all use the same OP bot and play the same ways as eachother(I legit prefer the smaller/weaker/faster mechs ... ones where I often would be the first to run out of lives in a higher-teir game).
EDIT: removed the s at the end of bot. There's one bot specifically that the Pay2Win wannabe's spam.
Smurfing was pretty bananas in Rocket League too.
Mixed that with people convinced they should be ranked much higher and the only thing holding them back was their teammates and yes that could be pretty toxic too.
I once unknowingly let my nephew play ranked on my account and I had to rank back up from gold, which is the closest I've come to smurfing.
It was only a few games until the mmr leveled out, but the gold games were honestly harder than plat or diamond because of how many people don't even have the self-awareness to know they're messing up.
I mean, I'm messing up all the time too, I just don't need to blame my teammates.
That said, I haven't played much since Epic got their hands on it.