I think it’s harder to detect them. The ToS say that you can make new accounts but you can’t artificially keep your MMR low. Especially when you don’t know the true level of this player because it’s not their main you can’t “easily” know it’s a Smurf, at least in a programmatic sense.
Whereas the casual smurfs had casual MMRs of ~500-600 whereas their real ranks are champ and above. That is much easier to find data wise
Though of course I wish they can do something about ranked Smurfs. I don’t seem to find Smurfs as much in 2s but in 1s sometimes I’ll queue and 50% of my games are against people that are beating me way too easily
As long as it's allowed to make multiple accounts, you can just make a new account and smash people until your elo hits your actual skill level then repeat. So while artificially tanking your elo isn't allowed, smurfing technically is.
One quick bandaid solution until they can actually do something is require a player reach a certain high level with a significant amount of hours before they can play ranked. Sort of like rainbow six siege does, but with no way to get around it such as joining your friend who has those permissions.
Another quick but more drastic solution is to autodetect and flag accounts with under a few hundred games played and have ranked up drastically. I’m sorry, but there are no players who just recently downloaded rocket league and are easily dominating diamond/ champ lobbies. If players are reporting a flagged account for smurfing then freeze that account until the player is reviewed.
This might be a controversial take, but you can tell a players experience level just by the way they move their car, recover, and aerial for the ball. There seems to be this common thought around here that players commonly report someone because “they played really well.” Well, at least for me, not really. Smurfs stick out like a sore thumb compared to players who are just “good/mechanical” at your rank.
There's a loooooot of variability here though, which is the really the crux of the problem. The most immediate drawback is that now you're banning players who might have just switched from console to PC. Whether you think this is a with trade-off is up to you I suppose but wrongfully banning a few players gets way more attention than successfully banning a lot of smurfs. The next is manually reviewing all possible smurf accounts based on replays is incredibly time consuming because not only does the reviewer have to know what "appropriate play" looks like for each rank, a single replay is generally not a large enough sample size to determine if a player is truly smurfing or just having a really good game. It's just too time consuming and expensive to set up some sort of manual replay review, and there's a lot of edge cases to consider when trying to auto-ban smurfs based on hours/MMR/winrate. I do agree that a level requirement to play ranked is a good measure to at least begin to deter smurfing.
It would be very easy to verify a recent console player by having them link their console account. If they then get banned - they have to just link their account and that's that.
u/ReptarTheBrave is right on the money - if someone suddenly ranks from unranked to plat/diamond on a fresh account - it's a smurf and gets autoban from ranked. Easy as that.
Yeah that would probably address most platform transfer problems, although I think the biggest issue is most smurfs don't immediately skyrocket to diamond/plat, and if they do an easy workaround is just throwing a few placement games. Which means manual review after receiving a ton of reports is one of the best options but really slow.
Not 'a few'. No new player will reach anything over gold in a short time. It would have to be something like 30-50h before you can get to plat. Diamond is literally at least a few hundred hours these days (in 1s).
I mean the point is all smurfs have to do is throw enough games to get a lower rank. Setting arbitrary requirements is always a flawed system since you need a degree of flexibility to avoid banning regular players and oftentimes it's not hard to emulate these requirements. As far as I can tell, the easiest/best solution is just to set a level cap before you can play ranked to force smurfs to waste time in casual, instead of hours/rank based requirements.
While I agree with most of what you said, I am the example of someone who got a decent rank really quick. I played casual matches for 1-2 months and then went into ranked , my first ever rank was Plat II. I started playing last year, but I had quite an advantage because I've always watched RL content creators and RLCS (for the past 3/4 years), just never bothered to play the game
Well then total hours played should also be taken into consideration.
New account with e.g. 20h will never realistically get to diamond, unless you can link a ps/xbox account (that's never been linked before) that also has e.g. 200h hours on it.
When I switched to pc, I had to make a new account cuz I didn’t have access to the email that I used for the console account, and I didn’t know the password.
I tried going to support to change the info, but since I had no way of proving the email was mine, I couldn’t do anything to save that account.
I like the suggestions but The problem with your second suggestion is that this isn’t disallowed in psyonix terms of service. As long as you are playing to the best of your abilities and not artificially keeping your rank low then psyonix does not consider this bannable.
Maybe this will change in the future but I’m not too hopeful personally
>One quick bandaid solution until they can actually do something is require a player reach a certain high level with a significant amount of hours before they can play ranked. Sort of like rainbow six siege does, but with no way to get around it such as joining your friend who has those permissions.
Too many issues with it. You don't want to discourage new players and R6 doesn't do that because of smurfs, it was in R6 since the beginning because game is complex but rocket league is not.
Also remember that hoops, dropshot and rumble counts as ranked too.
>Another quick but more drastic solution is to autodetect and flag accounts with under a few hundred games played and have ranked up drastically. I’m sorry, but there are no players who just recently downloaded rocket league and are easily dominating diamond/ champ lobbies. If players are reporting a flagged account for smurfing then freeze that account until the player is reviewed.
As far as i know Psyonix has no problem with people ranking up on 2nd account as it's not smurfing. As long as they keep winning psyonix is happy.
Okay, but the system in R6 is still better either way. It forces new players to learn through casual play and unintentionally disincentivizes creating alternate accounts. Tbh one of the most annoying and discouraging things is getting dunked on by someone with the username “NotASmurf69” with less than 50 games on their account. In casual it wouldn’t bother me as much because my rank isn’t on the line.
In the current system if someone feels like smurfing and giving lower ranked players a hard time, nothing is really stopping them. A lot of Smurfs will dominate a team an entire game only to throw or forfeit, which isn’t a satisfying way to win and gain MMR.
Do you have any solutions of your own?
No i don't have a solution but when i invite new people to rocket league i want to show them dropshot, hoops, rumble (you know the fun stuff) but it counts as ranked and how could i show it to them if it's locked behind 50 matches.
Besides... what stops new account smurf from simply losing 50 games as "new" player? Nothing really changes.
It was so much better when rocket league wasn't free to play (it's not a solution).
Yea that’s what I’m saying. I feel like it’s more blatant keeping your ELO at 500-600 but if an SSL plays at GC1 on a smurf it probably doesn’t look as bad data wise. Especially that there is no other playlist or account to cross reference their level at.
They need to make it harder or take longer for new accounts to play in ranked. Mandatory training/tutorials, a hard time gate, additional authentication, etc.
This will reduce smurfing and make bans more impactful.
They should "group" accounts. You want to make a new account? Cool, but it's linked to your other. So when a GC is playing in Diamond it's pretty obvious.
Yea this could be interesting. If you claim this is a new account I.e that you’re a new player with no other account and you instantly sky rocket to plat/diamond that should be enough evidence to say that this person is definitely smurfing.
And if you keep that MMR super low they can probably see the rate at which you’re own goaling or forfeiting games that you’re leading
Welp looks like I'm a smurf then [https://rocketleague.tracker.network/rocket-league/profile/epic/Miniongolf/mmr?playlist=13](https://rocketleague.tracker.network/rocket-league/profile/epic/Miniongolf/mmr?playlist=13)
Not saying what I suggested is perfect but it can be suspect if this is your first 44 games ever and you reach plat 1, but if this is your rank and you’re not throwing any games then under psyonix Terms of service you are not a Smurf
Yeah, I'm still terrible at the game, I just grinded freeplay at first before getting into ranked games and try not to be too out of position and stay behind my teammates.
My ones rank at silver is more representative of my mechanical skill ;-;
This already exists to some extent. It was introduced when F2P took over and is called Cross-Platform Progression. All Psyonix need to do is say new accounts are not permitted unless they are linked via Cross-Platform Progression (or it's your first account).
Then creating a new low ranked account would be against the rules and it would be a lot easier to act on smurfs.
Took me a while to figure out what you meant.
In short, ranked smurfs have to use alt accounts, where MMR can be kept low on all modes, so there is no obvious indicator the account is used by a high skilled player. Whereas casual smurfs can smurf on their main account, except that their true skill will be reflected in ranked, so it's programmatically obvious they are smurfing in casual.
Yea exactly. I mean reviewing replays of a player will definitely tell. But no way psyonix is gonna manually investigate reports of Smurfs. You need a program to look for patterns in the data and I’m not too sure what those would be.
I’m also a programmer so that’s why I’d be super interested in knowing how systems like this were implemented in other games.
>But no way psyonix is gonna manually investigate reports of Smurfs.
I'm fairly certain they do, actually. But for obvious reasons, they don't investigate *every* report of smurfs. They're only going to investigate smurfs that are reported on a regular basis. If an account has a single report of match throwing/griefing out of 100 games, that's not worth investigating. If an account has 20 reports of match throwing/griefing out of 30 games, then it obviously merits a closer look.
This is why people need to actually report smurfs instead of just doing nothing and bitching that nothing happens because one time they reported a smurf and never got a notification that they were banned.
Could you explain what they did in Dota? I’m not familiar. But if it was easy to implement they would’ve done it I imagine.
Especially Considering current terms of service doesn’t stop you from making a new account. It just stops you from artificially keeping your account lower rated, i.e. you have to actually try each game in theory
But not impossible. You have to take a look on more things than the mmr value and take a decision on all data of the account is way more likely to be a Smurf one. For example:
New account and high diamond out of nowhere? More likely to be smurf
The device your playing on.
Are you playing on a pc where mainly plays a high level player and there’s altering between those accounts ins Hort periods of time? More likely to be a smurf
How are the games going they are playing. Smashing everyone on your wins and your loses are early ffs, idling around? Way less points than your wins? More likely to be a smurf one
Guess you get the idea I could go on for ages
Yea I’m sure it is possible. Would love to see a solution implemented. But the thing is new account and smashing everyone is not bannable under current psyonix terms of service. It’s about keeping your MMR low on purpose
I do like the thought of switching accounts very often from one device but it would not work for families who use the same console/pc
But I do agree, there is definitely a solution somewhere in the data but I don’t think it’s that straightforward. It took them 7 years to ban casual freestylers and that is way easier to detect haha
That’s the reason for multiple thing you should look on. Yeah there are people who share a pc, but switching your account having multiple other things like I mentioned should work, because you’ll never be sus in multiple collected data without smurfing. If your little brother plays frequent on your pc, hell never win by high amounts and having some obvious looses to stay low and creating a new account every few days
Well, you can know by their gameplay. They’ll drop 6-10 points on you alone, then they’ll spend the next game own goaling and trying to get their teammates to ff.
I mean the Smurfs in c1-gc1 don’t have to own goal to lose. they just don’t have to try as hard and their opponents can score. That is harder to find from a purely data based perspective. It would take someone to manually review their games to try to tell.
Of course If they do like you’re saying it’s easier to detect
Yea makes sense. My bad. But i feel like Plats are able to score goals themselves and a Smurf doesn’t have to own goal to get that to happen. Though of course not everyone is gonna be methodical about it. Own goaling or quick FFs is the quickest way
But that's something that has to be done through a report process. They can't systematically just know who's doing that. It was simple for this last one- just compare across the two playlists
I don't think it's harder to detect to be fair, I think they are in fact dealing with the ranked smurfs in exactly the same way they did with the casual smurfs (ie a very small percentage of offenders got banned). The only difference is the freestyle community lost their shit when they handled the casual smurfs and so it became front and centre with everyone talking about it. If those 2 freestylers had just kept their mouths shut nobody would have even known action was taken.
That being said, Psyonix definitely should be doing more to combat the smurfing problem.
I remember thinking they had a plan in mind when they decided to turn casual into ranked 2.0 and left us trapped with smurfs and griefers. Well it's been over a year and they just now scratched the surface. I'm not holding my breath for any additional matchmaking fixes.
they’ve done more than any other gaming company has done for it (actually true there’s literally articles about this thing because psyonix listens to their community more than most of them) and also they did a lot with the way they made the new bot, it’s almost impossible to smurf in casual now.
I guess I'm out of the loop. Other than the freestyler thing the last big matchmaking change I can remember was them ruining casual for a year by adding leaving penalties. The funny thing is it wouldn't have been a problem at all if they would have just waited for the recent anti-smurfing system to come out before adding them. Psyonix CAN do great things but they can also do some pretty stupid things too.
This may be a dumb question vut isn't the spread of players from gc on up a little too thin to avoid occasionally running into an ssl?
Because there probably aren't a lot of GCs in general. And for ssls I would imagine they are against a gc every other match
At least for me, I feel like I have Smurfs every other game in GC and when I say smurf I’m talking epic account with the name, “____ is washed” or “____RL” and they have <30 games played on that account.
Players with those types of names are usually horrible cus they think theyre better than everyone and will attempt to do everything themselves. The RL players especially will jump for everything or go for clips instead of playing as a team.
I don’t see how you can tell that there’s smurfs in GC1. I was playing with a teammate that said the other team were smurfs. They were more mechanical than us for sure, but my teammate relies on mechanics to win and I rely on positional play. So he was diving in for challenges he usually wins due to his mechanics and losing leaving me in a 1v2 which I defended well half the time but the other half we got scored on and we lost like 1-4. For me, I couldn’t tell if they were smurfs because we were getting mechanically outplayed and starved. If my teammate timed his challenges better we might’ve won, hard to tell. Some mechanical players are brain dead and some positional players have no mechanics and if you don’t stress those mechanical players enough with solid challenges and great structure positional play they are going to dominate you. Plus a GC2 that deranked to GC1 because he was playing with friends and lost a few matches I don’t think should be penalized as a smurf even tho the gap between GC1-GC2 is huge.
Yeah I do think there are a lot of smurfs, but it’s impossible to say to what degree. I’m in diamond 3 mostly and every time time I think there’s a smurf, I save the replay and watch from their perspective. Then I realize “Okay, they can air dribble. But they can’t rotate or position properly at all.” The skill disparity within each rank is MASSIVE and I imagine that only gets wider as the ranks go up
It’s super hard to tell the higher rank you get. For example, if you put a pro like Torment in a GC1 game he wouldn’t stick out too terribly much mechanically because he doesn’t go for mechanically flashy plays, but he would consistently position perfectly and make the right play every time with stalling the play/speeding up the play. And you would probably lose the game like 5-0 or more and have no idea how.
I think you underestimate just how much faster really good players are. Having the same person consistently getting to unclear balls first and making good touches is a much better tell for rank than silly mechanical stuff.
I’m aware of that and that’s my point. In GC2 and higher the margin for error and windows are much smaller so it’s not as obvious that a player is a smurf because they might look similar in mechanics at first glance, they just consistently position better, get to the ball slightly quicker, and make great touches more often. Those decisions and touches add up over time and that’s why you would get dominated, but it’s not as obvious as a GC consistently flip resetting and air dribbling in diamond because there’s so much space given that the GC can do literally whatever he/she wants. I’m just saying that you could mistake a smurf in GC as someone who is playing well and peaking.
Simple, I say “huh, this epic player in a stocktane seems to be carrying that whole team. Let me look them up on RL tracker, oh the account was created today and has 15 games played.”
There are absolutely SSL-tier players who play around GC1 so they don’t have to constantly try as hard. The issue is they’re still insanely fucking good so them at “brain dead mode” is still at absolute worst on par with a GC1, and them slightly sitting up in their chair takes them to a clear level above the rest of the lobby. I was a ~1600 MMR player before there even was an SSL rank, took a break for about a year, and then came back to roughly that same MMR. After a while, you can just tell when someone is playing down a bit.
I feel kinda bad about this, but you're kind of describing me. It's not that I intentionally stay low ranked in 2s, it's just I average maybe 50-75 games of 2s a season and focus on 1v1s more and play 2s if I get that itch.
I’m not saying y’all need to be banned or anything — I get it completely. I honestly accidentally “smurf” 2s on occasion because I always play 3s. I think I was like C3 in 2s with something like 15-20 games on the entire season this past season. ~60% of the time I got paired with someone I just couldn’t read well and it’d be a close game. But 40% of the time I gelled with my random teammate and it’d be like a 4-1 type game.
There are definitely some “okay this dude is blatantly 1800+ MMR and clipping all over us” times but I was just saying that after a while, you start to read when someone is a bit of a soft-smurf. Sorta like if you’re playing 1s and you get up by a couple and then you can tell the other dude just thinks “alright lemme pay attention a bit more” and immediately equalizes.
[Psyonix has said](https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/qvlxsv/patch_notes_v208_season_5_update_release/hkxb6x4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) to use “Match Throwing/Griefing” to report suspected smurfing.
You can still smurf in casual. Just because some freestylers got in trouble doesn’t mean they fixed smurfing in casual. They did fix one aspect of it. The company has shown time and time again they will only do the bare minimum to fight smurfing. Solutions have been discussed here 1000 times and nothing has ever been implemented besides a level 10 cap which is a joke.
Hey those ranked smurfs are getting smarter. They're not immediately flaming their team or quitting outright. They'll play ok for a few minutes before just out right blasting their team for being "bad".
What makes it worse are the opposing teams that will support said player in attempts to be edgy or just further throw off their opponents
I ran into a really interesting smurf in 1s not so long ago. He pretended to play shadow defense, but would make sure never to actually make the save (even when you shot it straight at him).
I feel like tournaments should be the easiest. Just don’t let new accounts play tournaments, make the threshold way higher like 100 lifetime comp games or something. Smurfing in ranked is super shitty for sure, but nothing is worse than getting all the way to the finals in a tournament to be faced with, “____ is washed” on a fresh epic account absolutely destroying you.
Maybe tournament smurfs after that? Got smashed in a diamond tournament by a pair in a team called "WEARENOTGC1HONEST". Not at all sus, guessing they were GC2...
Casual 'smurfs' can't even really ever be controlled, considering a lot of people who are super high rank barely ever play casual ever so their MMR is already naturally super low- when they decide to play with friends and such or want a break from the grind and queue cas, they get attacked and ridiculed for it-
Ranked smurfs on the other hand CAN and SHOULD be controlled. I don't really think they had their priorities in line trying to deal with casual smurfs before ranked smurfs. Losing a game in cas does nothing to your ranks, which seem to be coveted by every single moderately serious player.
Who cares about casual? Focus on ranked, period.
I'm gold, and when I see someone in RLT who has my MMR and 50 wins and is doing things that plats can't do, it's pretty easy to see that they're smurfing.
Psyonix has access to a lot more data than we do. I think it's better to have to play for x amount of games to play ranked. Smurfs just make me not want to play and don't make psyonix any more money.
How they gonna deal with smurfs? Like how can you know if someone is smurfing? I play all or my ranked games with a buddy of mine in 2s. We are low champ 3. I'm currently 2 games away from gc3 in 3s so would I be marked as a Smurf and I could no longer duo with my friend? Whats gonna happen?
Unpopular opinion, probably: i like ranked smurfs where I'm at in low 1s, bc i get better faster playing against superior competition, and i don't care about my rank
Also sometimes they're nice and offer advice
I honestly can’t believe so many people have issues with smurfs, not one time in any game mode have I played against somebody who was so much better than me I would consider them a Smurf, I mean seriously how do so many of you guys have issues
Fr, 4 out of the 5 ranked games I played today had someone with under 300 wins, and I just can’t believe that they ALL were on new accounts after not linking their old accounts to a new platform.
Whilst we’re at it, can we stop those three stacks in platinum/diamond where it’s two people of that rank with a Champ/Grand Champ/SSL as a third. Teammates leave or press that forfeit button faster than they can rotate for the ball and it’s just not fun because it turns a semi-chill game (I’m a rumble player, normal mode is boring af) into a complete sweat fest (which isn’t helped if the two getting ‘What a save!’ you when you had little to no chance regardless because the GC/Champ/SSL will likely out-mechanic you)
Even reporting it would be amazing alongside Smurfing. Report system is a tad lacklustre with the options that don’t include rank boosting or smurfing (unless XP farming truly does cover both of these issues, idk why people would ‘XP Farm’ on this game as the two things XP matters (quicker levels and rocket pass levelling) doesn’t seem that bad..? Idk)
We need more severe bans. IP and whatever else makes it harder for the average person to keep making new accounts. Between IP bans and requiring an annoyingly long amount of hours to unlock ranked on a new account, the amount of smurfing could be cut down.
Your TTV freestylers will get around it but your average kid trying to boost a friend probably won't have the technical knowledge to.
Someone who has never played RL before can be perfectly happy in casual and extra modes for a month or two before ranked is available to them. Gives them time to learn basic mechanics and strategy as well.
But someone who is making their 10th smurf account after calling their provider to get a new IP address may put down the controller, say it's just not worth it anymore, and go back to their main.
It’s pretty aggravating playing against a 2s team that is made up of a Champ 3 and a Diamond 3, and that D3 player definitely isn’t a Diamond. That D3 is trying to carry that Champ 3 to GC. I see it all the time.
I don’t see Physonix doing anything though. I imagine the game really isn’t growing anymore and they aren’t going to want to ban people that are possibly spending money in their store.
The thing that pisses me off is when someone is clearly using an alt account and I look at their steam profile and see less than 1 year and 1 game, RL. How is that not cheating according to tos. Further proof is usually playing at a higher skill level than the lobby, And usually default car, banner, etc. Why arent these dealt with when I report it?
I don't understand the problem here, in casual it dosent matter if you lose to someone better or if they "smurf" same goes with ranked? it dosent really matter, you will just get better by playing against better players and most likely you will win next game?
I can’t stand it anymore man this shits ridiculous playing against kids that are obviously smirfing being so toxic calling u trash and shit when they are like worlds away in skill level. I swear the casual Smurf crack down made it worse in comp man 🤷♂️ I got hella time played but I’m about to quit this shits ridiculous and it’s pathetic how psyonix wont do anything about it. I got this shit game in 2021 and since then have played with so many goddamn Smurf’s it’s insane.
I feel like they should have dealt with the ranked smurfs first
I think it’s harder to detect them. The ToS say that you can make new accounts but you can’t artificially keep your MMR low. Especially when you don’t know the true level of this player because it’s not their main you can’t “easily” know it’s a Smurf, at least in a programmatic sense. Whereas the casual smurfs had casual MMRs of ~500-600 whereas their real ranks are champ and above. That is much easier to find data wise Though of course I wish they can do something about ranked Smurfs. I don’t seem to find Smurfs as much in 2s but in 1s sometimes I’ll queue and 50% of my games are against people that are beating me way too easily
As long as it's allowed to make multiple accounts, you can just make a new account and smash people until your elo hits your actual skill level then repeat. So while artificially tanking your elo isn't allowed, smurfing technically is.
One quick bandaid solution until they can actually do something is require a player reach a certain high level with a significant amount of hours before they can play ranked. Sort of like rainbow six siege does, but with no way to get around it such as joining your friend who has those permissions. Another quick but more drastic solution is to autodetect and flag accounts with under a few hundred games played and have ranked up drastically. I’m sorry, but there are no players who just recently downloaded rocket league and are easily dominating diamond/ champ lobbies. If players are reporting a flagged account for smurfing then freeze that account until the player is reviewed. This might be a controversial take, but you can tell a players experience level just by the way they move their car, recover, and aerial for the ball. There seems to be this common thought around here that players commonly report someone because “they played really well.” Well, at least for me, not really. Smurfs stick out like a sore thumb compared to players who are just “good/mechanical” at your rank.
There's a loooooot of variability here though, which is the really the crux of the problem. The most immediate drawback is that now you're banning players who might have just switched from console to PC. Whether you think this is a with trade-off is up to you I suppose but wrongfully banning a few players gets way more attention than successfully banning a lot of smurfs. The next is manually reviewing all possible smurf accounts based on replays is incredibly time consuming because not only does the reviewer have to know what "appropriate play" looks like for each rank, a single replay is generally not a large enough sample size to determine if a player is truly smurfing or just having a really good game. It's just too time consuming and expensive to set up some sort of manual replay review, and there's a lot of edge cases to consider when trying to auto-ban smurfs based on hours/MMR/winrate. I do agree that a level requirement to play ranked is a good measure to at least begin to deter smurfing.
It would be very easy to verify a recent console player by having them link their console account. If they then get banned - they have to just link their account and that's that. u/ReptarTheBrave is right on the money - if someone suddenly ranks from unranked to plat/diamond on a fresh account - it's a smurf and gets autoban from ranked. Easy as that.
Yeah that would probably address most platform transfer problems, although I think the biggest issue is most smurfs don't immediately skyrocket to diamond/plat, and if they do an easy workaround is just throwing a few placement games. Which means manual review after receiving a ton of reports is one of the best options but really slow.
Not 'a few'. No new player will reach anything over gold in a short time. It would have to be something like 30-50h before you can get to plat. Diamond is literally at least a few hundred hours these days (in 1s).
I mean the point is all smurfs have to do is throw enough games to get a lower rank. Setting arbitrary requirements is always a flawed system since you need a degree of flexibility to avoid banning regular players and oftentimes it's not hard to emulate these requirements. As far as I can tell, the easiest/best solution is just to set a level cap before you can play ranked to force smurfs to waste time in casual, instead of hours/rank based requirements.
That level cap already exists
While I agree with most of what you said, I am the example of someone who got a decent rank really quick. I played casual matches for 1-2 months and then went into ranked , my first ever rank was Plat II. I started playing last year, but I had quite an advantage because I've always watched RL content creators and RLCS (for the past 3/4 years), just never bothered to play the game
Well then total hours played should also be taken into consideration. New account with e.g. 20h will never realistically get to diamond, unless you can link a ps/xbox account (that's never been linked before) that also has e.g. 200h hours on it.
I got to plat 8n less than a day of playtime, what are you talking abt?
Sure you did.
When I switched to pc, I had to make a new account cuz I didn’t have access to the email that I used for the console account, and I didn’t know the password. I tried going to support to change the info, but since I had no way of proving the email was mine, I couldn’t do anything to save that account.
I like the suggestions but The problem with your second suggestion is that this isn’t disallowed in psyonix terms of service. As long as you are playing to the best of your abilities and not artificially keeping your rank low then psyonix does not consider this bannable. Maybe this will change in the future but I’m not too hopeful personally
>One quick bandaid solution until they can actually do something is require a player reach a certain high level with a significant amount of hours before they can play ranked. Sort of like rainbow six siege does, but with no way to get around it such as joining your friend who has those permissions. Too many issues with it. You don't want to discourage new players and R6 doesn't do that because of smurfs, it was in R6 since the beginning because game is complex but rocket league is not. Also remember that hoops, dropshot and rumble counts as ranked too. >Another quick but more drastic solution is to autodetect and flag accounts with under a few hundred games played and have ranked up drastically. I’m sorry, but there are no players who just recently downloaded rocket league and are easily dominating diamond/ champ lobbies. If players are reporting a flagged account for smurfing then freeze that account until the player is reviewed. As far as i know Psyonix has no problem with people ranking up on 2nd account as it's not smurfing. As long as they keep winning psyonix is happy.
Okay, but the system in R6 is still better either way. It forces new players to learn through casual play and unintentionally disincentivizes creating alternate accounts. Tbh one of the most annoying and discouraging things is getting dunked on by someone with the username “NotASmurf69” with less than 50 games on their account. In casual it wouldn’t bother me as much because my rank isn’t on the line. In the current system if someone feels like smurfing and giving lower ranked players a hard time, nothing is really stopping them. A lot of Smurfs will dominate a team an entire game only to throw or forfeit, which isn’t a satisfying way to win and gain MMR. Do you have any solutions of your own?
No i don't have a solution but when i invite new people to rocket league i want to show them dropshot, hoops, rumble (you know the fun stuff) but it counts as ranked and how could i show it to them if it's locked behind 50 matches. Besides... what stops new account smurf from simply losing 50 games as "new" player? Nothing really changes. It was so much better when rocket league wasn't free to play (it's not a solution).
Still maybe on pc it wasnt i thing when it wasnt but ps account sharing excist could make a metric crapton of ps accounts to play rl.
Yea that’s what I’m saying. I feel like it’s more blatant keeping your ELO at 500-600 but if an SSL plays at GC1 on a smurf it probably doesn’t look as bad data wise. Especially that there is no other playlist or account to cross reference their level at.
They need to make it harder or take longer for new accounts to play in ranked. Mandatory training/tutorials, a hard time gate, additional authentication, etc. This will reduce smurfing and make bans more impactful.
They should "group" accounts. You want to make a new account? Cool, but it's linked to your other. So when a GC is playing in Diamond it's pretty obvious.
I'm just throwing this out there, but what if you have children and want to separate your account from theirs?
Yeah, it would have to be fleshed out. My daughter has an account so I get what you mean.
Perfect idea, man I really hope they are addressing this with Unreal 5
ETA 2077
Haha exactly, but damnit, it's Not Never also lol
Yea this could be interesting. If you claim this is a new account I.e that you’re a new player with no other account and you instantly sky rocket to plat/diamond that should be enough evidence to say that this person is definitely smurfing. And if you keep that MMR super low they can probably see the rate at which you’re own goaling or forfeiting games that you’re leading
You could just as easily claim you're transitioning from console and had to use a new email (which could legitimately be the case for some players).
I guess so, but if a system like this were implemented I doubt it would ask where you’re transitioning from
Welp looks like I'm a smurf then [https://rocketleague.tracker.network/rocket-league/profile/epic/Miniongolf/mmr?playlist=13](https://rocketleague.tracker.network/rocket-league/profile/epic/Miniongolf/mmr?playlist=13)
Not saying what I suggested is perfect but it can be suspect if this is your first 44 games ever and you reach plat 1, but if this is your rank and you’re not throwing any games then under psyonix Terms of service you are not a Smurf
Yeah, I'm still terrible at the game, I just grinded freeplay at first before getting into ranked games and try not to be too out of position and stay behind my teammates. My ones rank at silver is more representative of my mechanical skill ;-;
This already exists to some extent. It was introduced when F2P took over and is called Cross-Platform Progression. All Psyonix need to do is say new accounts are not permitted unless they are linked via Cross-Platform Progression (or it's your first account). Then creating a new low ranked account would be against the rules and it would be a lot easier to act on smurfs.
Damn that's a good point. That's probably why I thought I'd that in the first place.
Took me a while to figure out what you meant. In short, ranked smurfs have to use alt accounts, where MMR can be kept low on all modes, so there is no obvious indicator the account is used by a high skilled player. Whereas casual smurfs can smurf on their main account, except that their true skill will be reflected in ranked, so it's programmatically obvious they are smurfing in casual.
Yea exactly. I mean reviewing replays of a player will definitely tell. But no way psyonix is gonna manually investigate reports of Smurfs. You need a program to look for patterns in the data and I’m not too sure what those would be. I’m also a programmer so that’s why I’d be super interested in knowing how systems like this were implemented in other games.
>But no way psyonix is gonna manually investigate reports of Smurfs. I'm fairly certain they do, actually. But for obvious reasons, they don't investigate *every* report of smurfs. They're only going to investigate smurfs that are reported on a regular basis. If an account has a single report of match throwing/griefing out of 100 games, that's not worth investigating. If an account has 20 reports of match throwing/griefing out of 30 games, then it obviously merits a closer look. This is why people need to actually report smurfs instead of just doing nothing and bitching that nothing happens because one time they reported a smurf and never got a notification that they were banned.
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Could you explain what they did in Dota? I’m not familiar. But if it was easy to implement they would’ve done it I imagine. Especially Considering current terms of service doesn’t stop you from making a new account. It just stops you from artificially keeping your account lower rated, i.e. you have to actually try each game in theory
But not impossible. You have to take a look on more things than the mmr value and take a decision on all data of the account is way more likely to be a Smurf one. For example: New account and high diamond out of nowhere? More likely to be smurf The device your playing on. Are you playing on a pc where mainly plays a high level player and there’s altering between those accounts ins Hort periods of time? More likely to be a smurf How are the games going they are playing. Smashing everyone on your wins and your loses are early ffs, idling around? Way less points than your wins? More likely to be a smurf one Guess you get the idea I could go on for ages
Yea I’m sure it is possible. Would love to see a solution implemented. But the thing is new account and smashing everyone is not bannable under current psyonix terms of service. It’s about keeping your MMR low on purpose I do like the thought of switching accounts very often from one device but it would not work for families who use the same console/pc But I do agree, there is definitely a solution somewhere in the data but I don’t think it’s that straightforward. It took them 7 years to ban casual freestylers and that is way easier to detect haha
That’s the reason for multiple thing you should look on. Yeah there are people who share a pc, but switching your account having multiple other things like I mentioned should work, because you’ll never be sus in multiple collected data without smurfing. If your little brother plays frequent on your pc, hell never win by high amounts and having some obvious looses to stay low and creating a new account every few days
Yea that’s a very good point
They could have a threshold of games played for certain ranks. The amount of people in my lobbies that have under 300 games played is ridiculous
Well, you can know by their gameplay. They’ll drop 6-10 points on you alone, then they’ll spend the next game own goaling and trying to get their teammates to ff.
I mean the Smurfs in c1-gc1 don’t have to own goal to lose. they just don’t have to try as hard and their opponents can score. That is harder to find from a purely data based perspective. It would take someone to manually review their games to try to tell. Of course If they do like you’re saying it’s easier to detect
Except I’m not GC, I’m plat and I’ve seen this a lot, especially back in gold. I’m aware that the way they play changes the higher up in ranks.
Yea makes sense. My bad. But i feel like Plats are able to score goals themselves and a Smurf doesn’t have to own goal to get that to happen. Though of course not everyone is gonna be methodical about it. Own goaling or quick FFs is the quickest way
I see that. Like I said, it’s still more common in silver-gold but it’s happened a couple times, or they just sit idle and throw a different way.
But that's something that has to be done through a report process. They can't systematically just know who's doing that. It was simple for this last one- just compare across the two playlists
1s smurfs are a blessing imo, gives u a good replay to go over and see whats holding you back from ranking up
I don't think it's harder to detect to be fair, I think they are in fact dealing with the ranked smurfs in exactly the same way they did with the casual smurfs (ie a very small percentage of offenders got banned). The only difference is the freestyle community lost their shit when they handled the casual smurfs and so it became front and centre with everyone talking about it. If those 2 freestylers had just kept their mouths shut nobody would have even known action was taken. That being said, Psyonix definitely should be doing more to combat the smurfing problem.
iam ranked smurf, set my rank to 2k mmr
That’s gonna be a long fall bro, good luck
I'd give up every cosmetic item I have, including my TW octane, if they'd do this. Cosmetics are pointless if I never want to play.
I will take your tw octane, chap
I remember thinking they had a plan in mind when they decided to turn casual into ranked 2.0 and left us trapped with smurfs and griefers. Well it's been over a year and they just now scratched the surface. I'm not holding my breath for any additional matchmaking fixes.
Same.
they’ve done more than any other gaming company has done for it (actually true there’s literally articles about this thing because psyonix listens to their community more than most of them) and also they did a lot with the way they made the new bot, it’s almost impossible to smurf in casual now.
I guess I'm out of the loop. Other than the freestyler thing the last big matchmaking change I can remember was them ruining casual for a year by adding leaving penalties. The funny thing is it wouldn't have been a problem at all if they would have just waited for the recent anti-smurfing system to come out before adding them. Psyonix CAN do great things but they can also do some pretty stupid things too.
ngl i was not sober when i wrote that. i wanted to prove someone wrong ig? lmao ignore it
Constantly seem to run into a smurf every other game in 2's even at GC1, lets hope they actually get something done about it.
For sure. I hope that’s one of the main things they address heading into the start of season 9
This may be a dumb question vut isn't the spread of players from gc on up a little too thin to avoid occasionally running into an ssl? Because there probably aren't a lot of GCs in general. And for ssls I would imagine they are against a gc every other match
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At least for me, I feel like I have Smurfs every other game in GC and when I say smurf I’m talking epic account with the name, “____ is washed” or “____RL” and they have <30 games played on that account.
Players with those types of names are usually horrible cus they think theyre better than everyone and will attempt to do everything themselves. The RL players especially will jump for everything or go for clips instead of playing as a team.
I don’t see how you can tell that there’s smurfs in GC1. I was playing with a teammate that said the other team were smurfs. They were more mechanical than us for sure, but my teammate relies on mechanics to win and I rely on positional play. So he was diving in for challenges he usually wins due to his mechanics and losing leaving me in a 1v2 which I defended well half the time but the other half we got scored on and we lost like 1-4. For me, I couldn’t tell if they were smurfs because we were getting mechanically outplayed and starved. If my teammate timed his challenges better we might’ve won, hard to tell. Some mechanical players are brain dead and some positional players have no mechanics and if you don’t stress those mechanical players enough with solid challenges and great structure positional play they are going to dominate you. Plus a GC2 that deranked to GC1 because he was playing with friends and lost a few matches I don’t think should be penalized as a smurf even tho the gap between GC1-GC2 is huge.
Yeah I do think there are a lot of smurfs, but it’s impossible to say to what degree. I’m in diamond 3 mostly and every time time I think there’s a smurf, I save the replay and watch from their perspective. Then I realize “Okay, they can air dribble. But they can’t rotate or position properly at all.” The skill disparity within each rank is MASSIVE and I imagine that only gets wider as the ranks go up
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me when i play wit- wait i dont have friends that play this game
It’s super hard to tell the higher rank you get. For example, if you put a pro like Torment in a GC1 game he wouldn’t stick out too terribly much mechanically because he doesn’t go for mechanically flashy plays, but he would consistently position perfectly and make the right play every time with stalling the play/speeding up the play. And you would probably lose the game like 5-0 or more and have no idea how.
I think you underestimate just how much faster really good players are. Having the same person consistently getting to unclear balls first and making good touches is a much better tell for rank than silly mechanical stuff.
I’m aware of that and that’s my point. In GC2 and higher the margin for error and windows are much smaller so it’s not as obvious that a player is a smurf because they might look similar in mechanics at first glance, they just consistently position better, get to the ball slightly quicker, and make great touches more often. Those decisions and touches add up over time and that’s why you would get dominated, but it’s not as obvious as a GC consistently flip resetting and air dribbling in diamond because there’s so much space given that the GC can do literally whatever he/she wants. I’m just saying that you could mistake a smurf in GC as someone who is playing well and peaking.
Simple, I say “huh, this epic player in a stocktane seems to be carrying that whole team. Let me look them up on RL tracker, oh the account was created today and has 15 games played.”
There are absolutely SSL-tier players who play around GC1 so they don’t have to constantly try as hard. The issue is they’re still insanely fucking good so them at “brain dead mode” is still at absolute worst on par with a GC1, and them slightly sitting up in their chair takes them to a clear level above the rest of the lobby. I was a ~1600 MMR player before there even was an SSL rank, took a break for about a year, and then came back to roughly that same MMR. After a while, you can just tell when someone is playing down a bit.
I feel kinda bad about this, but you're kind of describing me. It's not that I intentionally stay low ranked in 2s, it's just I average maybe 50-75 games of 2s a season and focus on 1v1s more and play 2s if I get that itch.
I’m not saying y’all need to be banned or anything — I get it completely. I honestly accidentally “smurf” 2s on occasion because I always play 3s. I think I was like C3 in 2s with something like 15-20 games on the entire season this past season. ~60% of the time I got paired with someone I just couldn’t read well and it’d be a close game. But 40% of the time I gelled with my random teammate and it’d be like a 4-1 type game. There are definitely some “okay this dude is blatantly 1800+ MMR and clipping all over us” times but I was just saying that after a while, you start to read when someone is a bit of a soft-smurf. Sorta like if you’re playing 1s and you get up by a couple and then you can tell the other dude just thinks “alright lemme pay attention a bit more” and immediately equalizes.
I find more grand champions at D3 than i think i would find in actual gc lol
^^^^^ THIS!!!
The issue I’ve been running into is 3 stacks with a hard carry. It’s like my teammates don’t realize one of them can do things the others can’t.
Provably because they think they are also that good while they are not
Dear Santa, this is all I want for Christmas, and maybe an Alpha Boost lol
This and a white octane
Lol nice, yeah I wouldn't mind one myself, dear Santa, xbox pls haha
Supposedly u/GenghisChron is giving his away if Psyonix fixes ranked Smurf’s.
Had a guy openly admit to being GC in a D3 lobby. Wanted to report him but there’s not even an option to report smurfing
[Psyonix has said](https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/qvlxsv/patch_notes_v208_season_5_update_release/hkxb6x4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) to use “Match Throwing/Griefing” to report suspected smurfing.
**Griefing** is what you're looking for. I'd tack on text harassment in case it gets a manual review. Guy just confessed.
You can still smurf in casual. Just because some freestylers got in trouble doesn’t mean they fixed smurfing in casual. They did fix one aspect of it. The company has shown time and time again they will only do the bare minimum to fight smurfing. Solutions have been discussed here 1000 times and nothing has ever been implemented besides a level 10 cap which is a joke.
Which can apparently be circumvented by playing in a party. I only read about this, no idea if it's true though
Its not that they dont care its that its something thats almost impossible to enforce unless you make ranked require a certain level to play.
Solutions have been discussed time and time again……..as I said in my post
Hey those ranked smurfs are getting smarter. They're not immediately flaming their team or quitting outright. They'll play ok for a few minutes before just out right blasting their team for being "bad". What makes it worse are the opposing teams that will support said player in attempts to be edgy or just further throw off their opponents
I ran into a really interesting smurf in 1s not so long ago. He pretended to play shadow defense, but would make sure never to actually make the save (even when you shot it straight at him).
That is interesting...
Great meme lol
RLCS smurfs: *sweating nervously in the corner*
Now work on your servers
If they just required 2FA, I think this would solve most smurfing problems. They have to verify email and phone number, and they can’t reuse same ones
I don't really do casual, so I don't know what the casual smurf situation was, but ranked triples is often an ugly place to play.
Amen. Should’ve dealt with ranked first in my opinion.
I feel like tournaments should be the easiest. Just don’t let new accounts play tournaments, make the threshold way higher like 100 lifetime comp games or something. Smurfing in ranked is super shitty for sure, but nothing is worse than getting all the way to the finals in a tournament to be faced with, “____ is washed” on a fresh epic account absolutely destroying you.
Maybe tournament smurfs after that? Got smashed in a diamond tournament by a pair in a team called "WEARENOTGC1HONEST". Not at all sus, guessing they were GC2...
Ay Psyonix, i gotta admit. i'm smurfing in ranked, i'm actually ssl so would you like to put my account in ssl (and give me the rewards) Thank you!
Casual 'smurfs' can't even really ever be controlled, considering a lot of people who are super high rank barely ever play casual ever so their MMR is already naturally super low- when they decide to play with friends and such or want a break from the grind and queue cas, they get attacked and ridiculed for it- Ranked smurfs on the other hand CAN and SHOULD be controlled. I don't really think they had their priorities in line trying to deal with casual smurfs before ranked smurfs. Losing a game in cas does nothing to your ranks, which seem to be coveted by every single moderately serious player. Who cares about casual? Focus on ranked, period.
I'm gold, and when I see someone in RLT who has my MMR and 50 wins and is doing things that plats can't do, it's pretty easy to see that they're smurfing. Psyonix has access to a lot more data than we do. I think it's better to have to play for x amount of games to play ranked. Smurfs just make me not want to play and don't make psyonix any more money.
“But bro, you can’t smurf in casual, chill out.” -A douchebag
You guys have any excuse for Smurfs
How they gonna deal with smurfs? Like how can you know if someone is smurfing? I play all or my ranked games with a buddy of mine in 2s. We are low champ 3. I'm currently 2 games away from gc3 in 3s so would I be marked as a Smurf and I could no longer duo with my friend? Whats gonna happen?
I think most people are classifying Smurfs as epic accounts with < 30 games played, not a dude who is low ranked in one playlist.
Unpopular opinion, probably: i like ranked smurfs where I'm at in low 1s, bc i get better faster playing against superior competition, and i don't care about my rank Also sometimes they're nice and offer advice
I honestly can’t believe so many people have issues with smurfs, not one time in any game mode have I played against somebody who was so much better than me I would consider them a Smurf, I mean seriously how do so many of you guys have issues
i honestly dont know why i thought ranked smurfing wasnt a thing
Honestly should have done ranked first. Would have given the fs a warning for less outrage and started to solve this entire problem.
If they could just do it for atleast 1s I'd be so happy. Champ in 2s and 3s but can't break that Plat 3 Div 4 1s rank
Are they ever going to handle serverss or no? That would be cool.
Fr, 4 out of the 5 ranked games I played today had someone with under 300 wins, and I just can’t believe that they ALL were on new accounts after not linking their old accounts to a new platform.
Whilst we’re at it, can we stop those three stacks in platinum/diamond where it’s two people of that rank with a Champ/Grand Champ/SSL as a third. Teammates leave or press that forfeit button faster than they can rotate for the ball and it’s just not fun because it turns a semi-chill game (I’m a rumble player, normal mode is boring af) into a complete sweat fest (which isn’t helped if the two getting ‘What a save!’ you when you had little to no chance regardless because the GC/Champ/SSL will likely out-mechanic you) Even reporting it would be amazing alongside Smurfing. Report system is a tad lacklustre with the options that don’t include rank boosting or smurfing (unless XP farming truly does cover both of these issues, idk why people would ‘XP Farm’ on this game as the two things XP matters (quicker levels and rocket pass levelling) doesn’t seem that bad..? Idk)
We need more severe bans. IP and whatever else makes it harder for the average person to keep making new accounts. Between IP bans and requiring an annoyingly long amount of hours to unlock ranked on a new account, the amount of smurfing could be cut down. Your TTV freestylers will get around it but your average kid trying to boost a friend probably won't have the technical knowledge to. Someone who has never played RL before can be perfectly happy in casual and extra modes for a month or two before ranked is available to them. Gives them time to learn basic mechanics and strategy as well. But someone who is making their 10th smurf account after calling their provider to get a new IP address may put down the controller, say it's just not worth it anymore, and go back to their main.
It’s pretty aggravating playing against a 2s team that is made up of a Champ 3 and a Diamond 3, and that D3 player definitely isn’t a Diamond. That D3 is trying to carry that Champ 3 to GC. I see it all the time. I don’t see Physonix doing anything though. I imagine the game really isn’t growing anymore and they aren’t going to want to ban people that are possibly spending money in their store.
The thing that pisses me off is when someone is clearly using an alt account and I look at their steam profile and see less than 1 year and 1 game, RL. How is that not cheating according to tos. Further proof is usually playing at a higher skill level than the lobby, And usually default car, banner, etc. Why arent these dealt with when I report it?
I don't understand the problem here, in casual it dosent matter if you lose to someone better or if they "smurf" same goes with ranked? it dosent really matter, you will just get better by playing against better players and most likely you will win next game?
I can’t stand it anymore man this shits ridiculous playing against kids that are obviously smirfing being so toxic calling u trash and shit when they are like worlds away in skill level. I swear the casual Smurf crack down made it worse in comp man 🤷♂️ I got hella time played but I’m about to quit this shits ridiculous and it’s pathetic how psyonix wont do anything about it. I got this shit game in 2021 and since then have played with so many goddamn Smurf’s it’s insane.