Today, we permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts that have been active over the last few months. 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.

Additionally, we have traced every single one of these smurf accounts back to its main account. Going forward, a main account found associated with a smurf account could result in a wide range of punishments, from temporary adjustments to behavior scores to permanent account bans.

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[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

League of Legends has a very unique account selling problem that Riot have proven outright fucking incompetent in addressing.

You need to hit level 30 on your account to start playing Ranked, which can take about 112 hours of cumulative play time to achieve. This has created a black market for fresh League accounts that have been pushed to Level 30 and are ready to be played in Ranked.

Unranked League accounts that are level 30 fetch about $1 - $10 on illicit websites because there are whole industries of Chinese gold farming firms and bots infiltrating the game. If you want an account that's in Iron 3 or Iron 4 (the two lowest divisions in Ranked), it can fetch a few hundred dollars at bare minimum, at least if DongHuaP is to be believed. Iron accounts are so expensive because of how hard they are to actually get into Iron in the first place without tripping Riot's automated reporting systems and getting banned, but also they're lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do 'Iron to Grandmaster' series.

I'm somebody who peaked at Archon rank in DOTA 2 (LoL equivalent would be Platinum) and used to play StarCraft II at Master level (second highest league in the game, Grandmaster is top-200 in the region), so I'm not exactly incompetent at RTS or MOBA games. But in League my account is borked and I'm in literal elo hell. I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.

[–] sonovebitch@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

DongHuaP mentioned. Auto upvote.

But yeah ELO hell is real... I tried to combat that by only playing with at least 1 premade (duo). If I bring someone in, that makes one less spot for inter/AFKer/troll in my team, right? Yes. But matchmaking also sends you to harder matches because "you are at advantage of playing with a premade".

Each past season since S07, I reach gold then quit. This season I fell from Gold 4 10LP straight to Silver 4 25LP. 15 loses streak. The hardest I've ever fallen. Soul crushing. And I usually end up top 3 players of the match. I make mistakes, but they don't cost us the loss.

Even in bottom silver, I saw matchmaking sending Platinums in my enemy team (based on porofessor.gg pre-match info). I thought it wasn't possible to play with 2 divisions difference. Get your shits together and fix matchmaking, Riot.

[–] xep@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.

If this is the case, then how does this happen?

they’re lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do ‘Iron to Grandmaster’ series.

[–] matter@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

2 is higher than 3 or 4.

Presumably OP is about as skilled or a little more than Chinese account farmers (who are bound to be pretty good to make any money...) and less skilled than professional YouTubers.

[–] scoops@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Fascinating!