Riot Games devised a new way to counteract smurfing in League of Legends. A simple change that might prove effective.
League of Legends is now almost 15 years old and went through many phases of gameplay and visual changes. Since then, there have been a number of high-elo players that create new accounts to easily destroy lower level players.
Riot Games has always been working against these 'smurfs', but the developers have now come up with a new safety measure for this problem.
How To Counter Smurfing
Up until now, when players created a new account, they had to get the profile to level 30 and own at least 20 champions to play ranked games.
Getting your account to level 30 is a tedious act since you would have to play a lot of matches that might last from 30 up to 45 minutes.
Smurfs have devised a strategy to get to level 30 more quickly, by either playing ARAMs, which have much shorter durations, or playing games against AI, that can also be finished in 15 to 20 minutes, since the League of Legends AI is no match for experienced players.
Riot's new answer to this is that as of Patch 14.15, new accounts have to play at least 10 normal games against other players. This will make the journey to level 30 longer, and it helps to assess the player's skill level.
What These Changes Mean For Non-Smurfs
The strategy devised by Riot Games might work in favor of newer players. If all goes well, players with less experience won't get bodied as hard by smurfs and might have a chance to actually enjoy the game.
But for many other players, this change is a disadvantage. Every League of Legends account has a hidden stat called MMR. Your MMR is not the same as your current rank most of the time.
If your MMR is higher than your current rank, then you gain more LP from winning ranked games and lose less LP from losing.
The same principle works the other way around if your MMR is lower than your current rank. You win less LP and lose more LP.
Ever since players realized that their account might be suffering from low MMR, making it impossible to climb the ranks, they created new accounts with a fresh MMR.
So, the fact that you have to put in even more work to play ranked on a new account, will definitely annoy non-smurfs as well.
As always, only time will tell if these changes help the game or not. I, for one, am not too excited about this.
What do you think? Are you suffering from smurfs in your games?
Tell us in the comments!