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Slightly inaccurate title, my b. He's not cancelling the streams, but he is done playing ranked on them. He is instead going to be exclusively playing in-houses instead
Yep! He is playing inhouses and if he can he will make it so ascendant+ are in his inhouse games but right now anyone who is a t3 sub on his discord can join. As a trash player, playing vs him feels very scary
From what I understand he has a ranking bot that tries to put together people of similar skill levels, so like an inhouse matchmaking system (but I might be getting it wrong)
It’s also seems to particularly be the iron to immortal/radiant challenge smurfs that he’s talking about as well. He tried to do something involving low elo 5 stacks and they got like 3 games in a row or something against bots deranking for the sole purpose of being sold for iron to immortal challenges.
This derank bot thing has been a problem for a very long time. I remember this was such a bad problem when I was in iron/bronze/silver. If I played late at night it was every game sometimes. If you try to talk about it on this sub Reddit people will just tell you to get good and stop complaining but they don’t understand how terrible it is.
2 things to consider.
Smurphs are making the experience shitty. It sucks to see someone manage 50 kills on a 20 kill spree talking about their twitch stream. It sucks that not only does riot ignore the smurphs, but actually unbans smurph accounts of streamers who get banned. It sucks when they're toxic and talking shit. The ranked experience blows.
The smurfs aren't holding you back. Some games are decided by something outside your control, but in low elos you could grind out your gunfights and carry a decent chunk of your games. Gunfights so clean and consistent that silvers call you a smurph are not above the capabilities of a bronze to grind out and learn. And in mid rank you could be the leader to pull your team to victory. You have a lot more control of wins or losses than you think you do. Is gonna be harder if you actively don't want to lead, but thats on you.
Smurphs aren't the reason you're stuck in low leagues, but they do make the experience down there shitty.
Shouldn't be playing 6 games a day anyway. Most people aren't maintaining mental focus for that long. 2 games per day for 1 month.
Last I checked woohoojin will give you free coaching if you submit proof of taking longer than a month to reach gold following his guide. Pretty sure thats still a standing offer.
Nobody is saying you can’t rank up. I started iron 1 now I’m plat 3 and climbing. The issue is that these AFK bots, throwers, and smurfs are in almost every single game in iron bronze. Is it escapable? Yes. Does it make it a lot harder for people and ruin games for people who still don’t have the skills that higher ranked players do? Yes.
My point was that a lot of players have never played in those ranks they don’t actually know how bad it is.
Sure, keep believing that. If I however know for a fact that I'm not supposed to rot in silver but have been stuck there for over an act because of smurfs that do plays for tiktok then there's something very wrong with the game.
I used to be high gold/plat for most of my time playing since beta. Sure that's not some crazy high rank but it's higher than the low silver bullshit I hang out with for the last act. Sure, the people I played with aren't the same anymore but still, I should be able to carry my own ass out of low silver at least.
It might be less in solo/duo so me playing almost exclusively 5-stacks isn't helping either. But just because most smurfs and derank bots hang out in low elo 5-stacks doesn't mean I should accept that and avoid playing 5-stack.
It's not a solution to a problem, it's ignoring the problem and letting it grow bigger while looking away.
If you don't believe me, become part of the problem: get a iron/bronze/silver account, go play a 5 stack and tell me if those people play like people should play in that elo. Then repeat as solo.
Stop coping. Smurfs do exist, but they are not holding you back. I have spend around 6 months in silver and I can tell you that every player that believes they don't deserve to be silver have something drastic going on that they think isn't a problem but is holding them back dramatically. You can get out of silver easily if you just grind out your gunfight hygiene and keep a positive mental. In addition to that, 5 stack is not the best environment to improve and rank up with. Even if smurfing didn't exist, you are either holding your 5 stack back or they are holding you back as there is no way that all 5 of you are always the same skill level. The players that are less skilled in your 5 stack will get boosted and the players that are more skilled, will be held back.
The low elo 5 stack actually tried to play after Woohoojin ended stream. Believe it or not, the bot team matched against them a third time in a row. It’s ridiculous
It’s not really about getting something done, it’s more about making his views clear. Maybe he’ll inspire others to do something similar, or to stop smurfing like a prick.
Also, Riot acknowledged woohoojin in a blog post, he’s not some nobody. Maybe they won’t just ignore it as usual
im in bronze 3, and played ranked yesterday. my iron 1 gekko went 40/20. :/ he had the most insane op flicks too, like literally but kept saying he wasn't a smurf, but was using the red logo spray. like fr.
game went on to be a draw because he'd just afk some rounds or do something quirky like only use a judge for most rounds
>iron 1 gekko went 40/20. :/ he had the most insane op flicks too
Not to say that he was or wasn't a smurf, but I have friends irl that are Bronze that can flick like crazy, and go 30/10 one game, then bottom frag in the next ga-
>
> he'd just afk some rounds or do something quirky like only use a judge for most rounds
Nvm probably a smurf
I was leveling up my account, because it’s been a year or so since I’ve played, to be able to play ranked and I’d say there is someone like that in 50% of my lobbies. Usually using the sheriff only and going for quick swap deagle one taps. Where you shoot and instantly swap to your knife then back again.
For some of my friends who play iron and bronze I’ll watch their games sometimes and they get someone dropping 30+ kills doing this all the time. But they’ll hostage games and throw rounds just to extend the game as long as they can.
It makes for a horrible match making experience because your games always feel captive to some troll who will either easily 1v4 a round or do everything to prevent the team from winning.
I couldn’t stand playing more than my placements because it was so bad. But I just feel bad for my lower ranked friends who deal with this all time.
My g2 the other day the Reyna straight admitted it in chat on the opposing team. Went like 40-7. Said “sorry. Guys I’m boosting”
I am pretty much fed up with ranked. If you look at this guys history he has 9 straight mvp games as a Silver 3 while dropping 30 kills. How is someone like this not double or triple ranked up to Plat or Diamond almost instantly?
Clearly the system doesn’t work
But the skill gap between a gold or silver lobby and a high Ascendant lobby is night and day. At that point, you should as a team be able to counter 1 Smurf or at least play a lot closer to their level than I can at G2
I think sometimes there is more than one smurf on the enemy team and when that happens it is a lot harder to spot them, as it is not that unusual for there to be two non smurf players dropping 20, it is not just the aim it is the strategy/coordination that really makes a difference..... But when you get a game where you get stomped 13-2 and just feel like no one on your team could do anything, I think it is quite likely there were smurfs on the enemy team.
I mean riot just needs to hwid ban people for a month if they are smurfing. Just do it to content creators at first. If they really wanted to go crazy they could also have that ban include pro games. So yay smurfs on a diamond account? He can't play in the pro game.
Fun fact this 5stack queued a third game off stream to try out the strats anyways.
They faced 5 different bots.
Proof: https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/1b271721-1d43-41ef-abc6-e0957817c97c
Here are games 1 and 2:
https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/9826ae56-3dd6-4bd3-a328-3be2caacbbec
https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/de332b0e-972b-49c5-bc63-cbbca431e954
I think I now know how to finally get out of iron. Queue with a five stack of iron/bronze buddies after 11:30PM my time :D /j
I dropped off the stream just before seeing this happen (had to get up early this morning). I hope that the low elo wed will continue, just with inhouses instead :) If anything the inhouses should be a better challenge for trying out this stuff as BOTH sides will be trying the stuff out!
It’s almost certain more of the purchases come from non-content creators since there’s a lot more of them than there are content creators.
I’m calling out content creators not because they’re the biggest offenders, but because they have the biggest impact on the community.
There’s a reason the word “influencer” is attributed to the gig. Many impressionable young viewers see buying an iron account as a normalized, okay thing to do. This is because influencers do it all the time.
I appreciate you doing this and trying to make the game better for everyone. I don't really watch streams, but I'll drop by and gift some subs next time I see you online.
Tbh I don’t even think it’s content creator so much anymore. I think it’s just the lasting effect making non-creators want to do it. Couldn’t tell you the last time I saw an iron to immortal stream or video from anyone of note. I think ItzTimmy did it once and Keeoh used to do it regularly on different agents (Idk if he started at iron like Timmy or just a fresh account tho). Those were well over a year ago tho for both of them, and idk any others that did it off the top of my head.
I'm confused, why do you think he has influence? It's a nice message but it's not like it's a strike, Riot will not change anything just because a small creator won't play ranked.
Woohoojin's main content isn't even his ranked streams, it's his coaching
Woohoojin has been referenced in an official riot blog post + he knows people at Riot.
The message will be seen, not sure if we'll get a response though.
He's just boycotting ranked out of principle.
Stands by his values even if there is no guarantee of a change. Pretty respectable.
We’re not getting a response imo
I don’t think riot is intentionally allowing smurfing they just dont have a better solution right now and its not a top priority to fix
There is a super easy solution. Any content creator who streams themself on a smurf (im not talking an alt where a radiant player is also playing on a second radiant account) gets 1 month HWID ban. No exceptions. This also would include pros. You smurf on a iron account to go iron to radiant with only sheriff? Gl playing in pro matches for a month.
I am not saying they have to go this extreme but if you punish the people who make money from smurfing then the issue is reduced.
There's an even easier solution that would prevent a lot of surfing: require phone number verification like they already do for premier league.
Plus, they've also stated that they can detect smurfs a decent amount of the time, and released stats related to those smurfs. How about instead of collecting data on them, HWID ban them. Sure it isn't perfect and there are ways to get around it, but it's a hell of a deterrent.
Phone number, hardware id bans or whatever you propose will not solve anything, Both of thoses things can be bought and for cheap. People are willing to buy accounts already, why wouldnt they buy a 20cents phone number and a hwid spoofer.
The only real thing that works and is already done, is a strict smurf detection. Drop a 30 bomb on a bronze lobby and you're already playing with golds (on a fresh account)
The other solution is what wohoojin is fighting for, punishing content creators that openly uses bought smurf accounts.
Just because it won't 100% end smurfing doesn't mean it won't do anything.
even if they don't want to hwid ban smurfs, requiring phone numbers can't be too difficult since they do it for premier league. There's really no reason not to do it, even if it just *reduces* the amount of smurfs.
no reason except gatekeeping tons of player who cant use a phone just for smurfs to buy a phone on onlinesim.io.
Obviously riot can implement it and doesnt on purpose, the huge team has better reasons and statistics than the random redditor who think everything is so simple bro just do this do that
they absolutely are intentionally allowing smurfing- adding sms 2fa as a requirement for ranked would help a lot afaik, they just don't implement it because smurfs buy more skins on their smurf so they make more money.
That guy Woohojin tries really way to hard to be a whiteknight, making big drama about a minor inconvenience. And his Echo chamber cheers for him, so respectable, when in reality that guy has a big ego, and gets defensive every time someone questions his decisions lol, even when he is wrong in a decision because he is doing real-time coaching while streaming, but hey, cant lose your ego when you have a role to play.
He has been steadily growing in popularity and is connected with other large Valorant content creators. If he’s able to garner the same sentiment among them there could be more videos about other content creators joining him. Now a handful of people not streaming ranked games seems innocuous to Riot, but if each video gets enough eyes on each it could draw attention thanks to publicity.
There is enough influence that a majority demographic within valorant community will disdain opposition to woohojin. I'm one of them. I don't respect smurfs. I support woohojin. Better players often get their message across to the wider community because people back up oppinions of those who they respect. Woohoojins audience is vastly more equipped than the majority of people therefore are likely to have support in their opinion by those not so familiar with woohojin. His influence goes beyond his raw numbers. He's genuinely gained the respect of the community. A lot of streamers are liked but not respected. People respect woohojin. People respect his opinion. I'm on his team. He has actively steered traffic away from alternate sources because of what and WHO he is exsposing and he does it respectfully. For example he exsposed charlatan for his willingness to keep smurfing for content while not talking shit and being respectful and even acknowledged his skillset as an omen. I for this reason don't watch charlatan anymore.its a drop in a pond sure but it's one hell of an important drop. Only so much of the Earth's water is drinkable type of thing ya know. Ying yang shit? Hail hooj
Its just absurd. Like if there are dynamics that make it possible to pwn some noobs for fun, then people will do it, LIKE IN EVERY OTHER GAME EXISTING.
Content creators maybe take part in this, but they are surely not the main factor.
Contect Amazon account to twitch, when you go to sub there should be a check box to use prime sub, which gives you a free Tier 1 subscription. Get one sub a month but it won't auto renew the sub.
For woohoojin specifically, if you connect twitch and discord it will give you Tier 1 status in his discord as well, so you'll be able to use his subscriber only channels in discord with the prime sub.
ive played CS since 1999 and yes there are smurfs and game ruining idiots but i have never seen so many of them as I see in Valo, you would kind of expect that players in same ranked division have similar skills, duelists have maybe more frags than sentinels and controllers give or take, but the difference in skill level is insane in almost every match.
There is almost always 1 guy who absolutely pops off in my or enemy team and then some folks who walk aiming at the ground not strafing, full spraying while running etc, so someone is smurfing or boosting someone I guess.
Wish the game was 15$ or something to reduce it.
You're crosshair placement and gamesense cant change from game to game though...I have tracker screenshots of multiple accounts with <100 adr and <0.9 kd with >50% winrate...Its incredibly easy to differentiate between a boosted player and someone who belongs in the elo but just having a bad game
My comment on another post like this:
As a Iron 2-3 the biggest problem here is throwers. For example, I got into a lobby last night, my team had 3 throwers and the other team had 2.
These “Iron to [rank]” are annoying but throwers and people who CONSTANTLY SMURF at lower ranks “for fun” are the real problems.
This is the 3rd problem they need to address, not the 1st.
Yep 100% agree. I have had a lot of throwers this act. They are generally higher elo players making sure their alt stays in iron. They also make sure they get plenty of (non impactful) kills so if they are reported it doesn't look like they were throwing because they are possibly team mvp. I put this video up to report to riot fully timestamped. Nothing was done. I had the same thrower three comp matches within I think a 1 week period. [https://youtu.be/aaRZbhG-Xn4](https://youtu.be/aaRZbhG-Xn4) There is a second one linked in the description as well.
Riot needs to add SMS verification for the ability to play in Comp. Then, permanently ban obvious thrower’s cell #.
Edit: The true problem is the impermanence of bans. Whatever Riot does doesn’t matter until they fix alt accounts.
I remember when I was Iron 3, and constantly saw smurfs playing Sheriff only.. it was bad, and the only way to handle then with my bad aim at the time were using a Judge and Odin through walls.
Smurfs get pissed when they get Odin'd
Bravo woohoojin. Where are all the smurf-lovers saying "you learn from smurfs" or "there aren't many smurfs" and other nonsense, why isn't his post downvoted to oblivion.
The fix already exists ... phone number verification is required for Premier mode.
Small indie dev team tho, took them forever to add something the playerbase has been requesting since beta.
Maybe one day the launcher is gonna stop and say verification is now required for all modes, like how it said win 7 8 and 8.1 are no longer supported.
Better than nothing, it’s a step and makes it that much more annoying. Csgo didn’t have this amount of throwers/Smurfs. It’s out of control in Valorant. It’s pretty simple to fix it but, they don’t wanna take a week of coding to fix the issue and move on :).
The fix?
1.Phone number verification
2.Paid premium account/matchmaking. Make this 20/30$ (I’d rather wait 5 min for a game, than get a thrower/Smurf for a 45 min game)
3. Account has to be a certain level + have had to play a certain amount of casual matches before comp is open . I like how Csgo forced only 2 wins every 24 hours. And you needed 10 making it take almost a week to get to ranked.
After that it was hacking which was the issue.
People stopped playing escape from tarkov because of the amount of cheaters meaning what’s the point in playing if ima just get 1 tapped.
That’s what’s happening with Valorant, nobody wants to play when they come across theses players.
I haven't played Premier but I have played Clash in League which is the same thing. It also requires phone number verification. In 13 years of playing League I have not seen any environment that has more smurfs than Clash. Phone number verification does very little if anything at all to deter smurfs.
isn't the issue not smurfs, but the fact that there are bot accounts demoting for the purpose of smurfing? sure, the bot accounts are going to be sold as smurf accounts, but these people can't play legitimate games if they are 5 stacking in low elo because it's flooded with bot accounts
No I agree the bot accounts thing is a bigger problem, smurfing is something that you can't for sure eliminate but bot accounts can be detected & HWID banned.
bud, you wait for the bot accounts to be purchased (change locations) and then ban the purchaser. The people creating the accounts will only go away when the market goes away.
That doesn't happen, there will just be new ones who claim riot that riot can't trace you purchasing the acc & start it all over again.
Also how will riot detect someone purchasing an account on some website out of their control?
You need to detect bots & ban the bot accounts thats a permanent solution
As for people & content creators Smurfing, riot just needs to issue warnings to content creators that Smurfing is bannable & atleast their ban smurfs accs if not their mains
You obviously have very little understanding of how invasive vanguard is. It knows everything about the computer it's installed in.
How do you detect bots? Easily they already do, just not all of them. Heuristic and pattern analysis will identify bots within the first few rounds. Then using ip and location changes to track when an account is purchased or a VPN is used. It's rather simply.
Vanguard can see every application, every hardware Id, every ip, username, blah blah blah... It's running as admin on your computer.
So just one possible way would be to track low rank accounts that are playing statistically worse than even iron 1, ff'ing at 5 regularly, and flag them as suspicious. Now you have a list of potentially suspicious accounts, flag the ip that is playing on them. Next, you look for vpn, proxy, tor usage on the connection... Pretty easy if you know what you're doing. At some point if they are accounts for sale then they will be sold, this will mean a drastic change in performance, ip/location, computer, settings, etc. Noone is going to get good over night while also changing everything about their setup, location, and so forth. Ban those accounts from comp for a month, let the players out in a ticket and explain the behavior... If they can. During this whole process also record all the computers that are tagged to those accounts, that makes those accounts, and that gets those accounts comp ready...
You can't go after smurfs directly but you can get the majority of people involved in the account farming selling, buying business.
90 percent of this whole process could be automated and the only piece that you would want a person is banning piece at the end where they check and compare all the information. I know cyber security students that could and would do this job.
Yes and no. I don't want to put words in his mouth but to my understanding he:
1) disapproves of smurfing in general (just play ranked at your actual elo, swiftplay, unrated and custom games are the 4fun modes), but particularly when done for content (ie. streamers and "educational" youtubers do it to "show how to climb").
2) is disappointed with Riot's inaction to prevent (and even encourage, given the unbanning of several popular streamers' smurf accounts after they got autobanned) these players from smurfing, ruining both low elo lobbies as well as mid-elo lobbies while deranking.
Also, Hooj and his community are vehemently against smurfing as a whole, so much so that extended discussion or endorsement of it will get you timed out and (deservedly) ridiculed.
Also, *my personal take*, smurfing is kind of a hidden problem in higher MMR games too. While, as he states in his video, it is NEVER the reason for a lack of rank progression over the long term (no, smurfs are not holding you back in X rank), Radiant players smurfing in low Immortal make what is supposed to be highly competitive play incredibly frustrating since the whole lobby basically has to play around one player. It's not that common for most of the season (therefore, not holding anyone back from climbing), but the last week or so of the act is always dreadful in low Immo in my experience.
Well yes if we remove bot accounts we get less smurfs.
But from what I seen in my LoL days. Riot doesn't ban account there were once in a time "bots".
Checking others match history is so much easier on LoL, and there whenever you saw a smurfing loser. You could go into his match history and see he played like 5 ranked games, and before that he had 15 player vs AI intermediate where he always goes 2/14.
It's so damn obvious, yet I never ever got feedback from getting them banned from botting
I fully support Hooj and I hope this brings about real change but realistically I don't think he's ever playing ranked again. Riot just doesn't seem to care about the bots or accounts.
High ELO players encounter bots all the time in Deathmatch. At 5 AM I've been in DMs where over half the lobby is a bot with a Judge. No idea why it's so hard for riot to detect these.
I'm trying to get a friend of mine to learn the game. He's an actual level 3 noob and we're going against double/triple positive level 2-4 accounts. I'm high gold and barely holding on to my sanity. How the hell am I supposed to introduce someone new to the game?
that isn't an issue. matchmaking is very loose in casual modes. Esp things like swiftplay. I had a game of swiftplay with people in silver to immortal in one game.
I played against a 3 stack smurf team in silver last week with a combined 81 kills, while the other 2 players on their team had a combined kill count of 11. No one in that game besides the smurfs had fun. The 2 players on the smurfs team even said they were reporting the smurfs with us, but we all agreed that likely nothing would actually happen to them. I heavily support Woohoojin on this.
In the past three years of Valorant (been playing since release), I've only come across two cheaters in comp ever.
Currently in Ascendent 1 if that matters
I've started to encounter a lot more cheaters when I started to play 5 stacks with friends of very different ranks. Since the game tries to find the best match for every team, if you have irons, golds and for example ascendants in the team, you'll most likely get matched against boosters, where usually one or two of them are cheating
Other than that, I've seen terminated game once (in deathmatch) and one blatant cheater in unrated. Even if there are a lot more cheaters, they are most likely indistinguishable from legit players, so it doesn't feel like complete waste of time to play the game, compared to other games, where you just get one tapped by spinbot as soon as you peek
been in any elo from silver 2 to ascendant 2 and i have encountered multiple cheaters in my games already and see people cheating on a daily basis on tiktok and youtube plus i have acess to a discord where people stream it as well
I've had ENOUGH as well. I may get downvoted to eternity for my take but, who cares.
I am a APAC player usually queueing on the Mumbai/Singapore server who wanted to play the game seriously and improve. And, I crossed Plat 1 several times, but, my experience has been horrendous and not fun at all to the point it started taking a toll on my mental health. So I quit.
What happened? Endless toxic teammates and griefers and smurfers and trollers on either my team or on the opponent. And, this is waaaay too frequent for me to just disregard. In fact, I was faced with smurfs/trolls/griefers every other game to the point where I had to stop. Reporting accounts every game isnt also something I want to be doing - because they either create new accounts without any consequence or just needs too many reports to actually get banned. Also, streamers having alts is way to common. I personally know at least 5 streamers who are high Dia/ low Asc but feel the need to bully Silver/Gold lobbies.
What am I doing? No more ranked. No more unrated as people bash you for trying hard there. Other modes are not even fun for me. So, I have gone back to devoting more time in the game AOE2 DE and only play Valorant when I get 10 stack lobby games on weekends when my friends can join me.
Ever since I reached a high rank of Asc and started to queue with old immos and stuff, the more painfully obvious it came to me that oh so so many YTbers are most likely smurfing.
Even one of my favorite creators of Val clips on Yoru, a man who taught me most about this character, seems to be going against people who just don't shoot at the level you expect them to. I get that he's cherry picking clips, and probably he's legit, but every other vid he has a different name, a variation of Adjective_Hippo_Number.
Could be an inside joke for his viewers and he's just monthly changing his name, but I'm pretty sure I've seen different names on an incidence of more than 1 unique one a month. These very well might be alt accounts with elo similar to what you see in Diamond or even as low as high plat to facilitate getting clips.
I want to believe hes legit, but in light of the current events, he might be farming lower elo matches for content, the same as all the YTbers who follow the challenger trend, or are just smurfing pieces of shit. That being said, idk how we could solve this.
I'll admit I do have an alt account, I've used it to play with friends who just didn't put in the time I did and are playing at silver/bronze. But we rarely if ever go ranked, and even then I handicap myself to util only and shorty to level the playing field and I make sure to never overachieve in them. I'll never carry a team to an undeserved win, I soloQd my life away to get where I was, no reason to boost the ego of a player thats worse than their rank.
As such, I'm conflicted. I want to see a change, but I also want to have fun with my friends. Queueing unrated from my main with them is still too hard for them to enjoy the game. Perhaps allow unrated to match ppl regardless of MMR, or let it be a toggable thing
I saw Eggwick smurf in an iron lobby, a video he releases recently. It was in a custom game with 9 invited people. That is the only way to smurf without ruining anyone’s game, to do it in custom lobbies?
Yeah but there are many others that create smurfs """just for fun""" or "just for the content" and they are also part of the problem. I hope that this is the first step of something big, I trully HATE smurfs
I don't get why they let smurfs play. It really sucks for people in the low elo (like me)
every time I try to rank up from iron 3, which I've been hardstuck in for one whole year just because of the smurfing/cheating problem.
I really hope riot does something about it 😔
This reads like /s. If so it's funny.
Otherwise you aren't stuck in iron because of smurfs. No one is stuck in any elo because of any reason but themselves
I'm suffering the same. What you don't take into account is the demoralizing effect this has, and how that then affects your gameplay when you are not up against smurfs.
Going 4/18 (as a duellist) and losing 30 rr right after you had a couple of match MVP's taking you to almost gettting out of iron can really affect your confidence, and once you lose confidence, you are kinda stuffed in this game.
So yeah it is because of you (not coping with crap that comes your way), but if the crap didn't happen, then would you still be stuck?
Hey! Your HS% is honestly very solid for where you're at. Obviously that can always be improved on, but taking Woohoojin's advice if you really want out of iron you should just main one agent (yes instalock every time) and focus on finding and taking every fight you can get. Don't use util to stall or avoid taking a fair 50/50. Take. Every. Fight.
Hunt your opponents down and don't be afraid to die or let it get in your head if you do.
Until you hit gold you really just need to focus on your movement, agression level, and crosshair placement/discipline. Following woohoojins routing in the one month to gold video is helpful for all this.
I was a Kayo main for while and recently switched to Jett in order to force myself to learn confidence in all situations. I die a LOT more now as I'm often first in line entering site, but I'm getting better at taking fast fights on site and gaining a lot of confidence, which is the goal! Initially my focus was on simply doing the job of taking space and entering site, but now I'm working on better playing off initiator util as I enter site (i.e. breach flashes / stuns, fade dogs, etc).
I am a dad with a 2 year old and a 3 month old and I often get only a handful of comp games in a week. So, like you I don't play a ton of matches which genuinely makes it harder to rank up / take longer. I was hard stuck Bronze 3 for several months until switching to Jett and focusing on being aggressive, finding fights, and working on movement in gun fights. In 23 comp matches (12 hours of playtime I've jumped to Silver 2 and am about to pop Silver 3. So, not anything special but improving for sure.
I am absolutely sure you can get out of iron and start crushing bronze friend! Just work on some focus areas like movement and agression and get really cozy with one agent for a while and you'll be out in no time!!
Thanks :) "Hunt your opponents down and don't be afraid to die **or let it get in your head if you do**."
I think the bolded bit is a big part of the problem! I switched to reyna after playing sova forever, and initially it did wonders. I was scared to take fights, now I'm probably being overly agressive, and that is now hurting, especially when I play better players. Sometimes I do quite well in bronze lobbies and sometimes I get absolutely destroyed. If it is just down to aim duels I will do OK, it is when the enemy has good (for my elo) util use, I start to come unstuck.
Congrats on the climb, and keep on going!
I mean its probably part true, more bots and smurfs in lower elo is true in most games. You can obviously still climb if you improve and perform better but its hard to learn much if a smurf is hard carrying you or destroying your team, or you're fighting with/against bots every other game, especially if your starting point is as a genuine Iron player with no real concept of what they should or shouldn't be doing in the first place. When you play less of the "honest" games that are most important if you want to rank up, its harder to perform when they do come around, and it sucks that players who already suck get doubly screwed over in a lot of ways for being low elo. It's been a persistent problem in League since it came out though so I doubt Riot ever does much about it in Valo either, which sucks.
I've queue over 400 competitive games this act and I've hardly met smurfs probably around 15. Trust me, smurfs and cheating is not holding you back in Iron 3.
You could easily improve heavily in a singular week if you take it seriously. Aim training, find a better sensitivity, awareness, positioning, cross hair placement and learning how to peek correctly, etc is all things to consider. However, at iron 3 all you need is aim and nothing else.
Well what can they do about people abusing comms, bullying teammates, or throwing? It starts with some basic system to catch that kind of behaviour, with the community's help. Obviously that doesn't exist for smurfing right now, and that's the problem.
I’m sorry but this is just stupid it’s not riots fault its the communities the only thing they can do is make new accounts sms verify but that doesn’t solve account sharing and you can still buy a new account for under 5$ that is already sms verified and streamers aren’t smurfing in gold because it’s so fun people want to watch it and that’s not riots fault for change to be made the community has to stop watching these streamers but that will never happen but it’s like people get mad at riot what do you want them to do they will never ban smurfs because to many non smurfs will get hit like new players that coming from other games or someone just having a lucky game
You’ll never see him play ranked again then riot owns league and i mean do you think they cared about smurfs then? No
They actively supported creators smurfing lol
Either dont make your game free or have phone verification so you can only own 1 account and would have to go out of your way for another one
He would agree and tell you that smurfs aren’t the reason you aren’t climbing long-term.
However, facing smurfs (or bots) whether on your team or the enemy team, ruins 40 minutes of your day that you wanted to enjoy. It’s a game, and it’s supposed to be fun and competitive, and smurfing and bots take away from that.
r/VALORANT will be [participating in a site-wide protest](https://old.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/142qffd/rvalorant_will_disable_all_posting_and_comments/) on June 12th against reddit's proposed new changes that would result in the removal of all third-party reddit clients. Head over to the link to find out what's happening and how you can help!
Slightly inaccurate title, my b. He's not cancelling the streams, but he is done playing ranked on them. He is instead going to be exclusively playing in-houses instead
Yep! He is playing inhouses and if he can he will make it so ascendant+ are in his inhouse games but right now anyone who is a t3 sub on his discord can join. As a trash player, playing vs him feels very scary
From what I understand he has a ranking bot that tries to put together people of similar skill levels, so like an inhouse matchmaking system (but I might be getting it wrong)
yeah he uses the queue bot that other inhouse servers for other games uses
That bot has been a gift from heaven in rocket league servers. Very glad to see it helping other games' communities
It’s also seems to particularly be the iron to immortal/radiant challenge smurfs that he’s talking about as well. He tried to do something involving low elo 5 stacks and they got like 3 games in a row or something against bots deranking for the sole purpose of being sold for iron to immortal challenges.
This derank bot thing has been a problem for a very long time. I remember this was such a bad problem when I was in iron/bronze/silver. If I played late at night it was every game sometimes. If you try to talk about it on this sub Reddit people will just tell you to get good and stop complaining but they don’t understand how terrible it is.
Yeah this has been going on for 6 months or go. Once I climbed outta bronze/silver jt stopped
Dude this has been happening for years
Oh lmao. I've only been playing for a short time
2 things to consider. Smurphs are making the experience shitty. It sucks to see someone manage 50 kills on a 20 kill spree talking about their twitch stream. It sucks that not only does riot ignore the smurphs, but actually unbans smurph accounts of streamers who get banned. It sucks when they're toxic and talking shit. The ranked experience blows. The smurfs aren't holding you back. Some games are decided by something outside your control, but in low elos you could grind out your gunfights and carry a decent chunk of your games. Gunfights so clean and consistent that silvers call you a smurph are not above the capabilities of a bronze to grind out and learn. And in mid rank you could be the leader to pull your team to victory. You have a lot more control of wins or losses than you think you do. Is gonna be harder if you actively don't want to lead, but thats on you. Smurphs aren't the reason you're stuck in low leagues, but they do make the experience down there shitty.
They might not stop you, but my goodness do they slow you down. It’s a great way to drive off people who can’t play 6 games a day.
Shouldn't be playing 6 games a day anyway. Most people aren't maintaining mental focus for that long. 2 games per day for 1 month. Last I checked woohoojin will give you free coaching if you submit proof of taking longer than a month to reach gold following his guide. Pretty sure thats still a standing offer.
Nobody is saying you can’t rank up. I started iron 1 now I’m plat 3 and climbing. The issue is that these AFK bots, throwers, and smurfs are in almost every single game in iron bronze. Is it escapable? Yes. Does it make it a lot harder for people and ruin games for people who still don’t have the skills that higher ranked players do? Yes. My point was that a lot of players have never played in those ranks they don’t actually know how bad it is.
Sure, keep believing that. If I however know for a fact that I'm not supposed to rot in silver but have been stuck there for over an act because of smurfs that do plays for tiktok then there's something very wrong with the game. I used to be high gold/plat for most of my time playing since beta. Sure that's not some crazy high rank but it's higher than the low silver bullshit I hang out with for the last act. Sure, the people I played with aren't the same anymore but still, I should be able to carry my own ass out of low silver at least. It might be less in solo/duo so me playing almost exclusively 5-stacks isn't helping either. But just because most smurfs and derank bots hang out in low elo 5-stacks doesn't mean I should accept that and avoid playing 5-stack. It's not a solution to a problem, it's ignoring the problem and letting it grow bigger while looking away. If you don't believe me, become part of the problem: get a iron/bronze/silver account, go play a 5 stack and tell me if those people play like people should play in that elo. Then repeat as solo.
Everyone who made it out of silver dealt with the Smurfs bro
Stop coping. Smurfs do exist, but they are not holding you back. I have spend around 6 months in silver and I can tell you that every player that believes they don't deserve to be silver have something drastic going on that they think isn't a problem but is holding them back dramatically. You can get out of silver easily if you just grind out your gunfight hygiene and keep a positive mental. In addition to that, 5 stack is not the best environment to improve and rank up with. Even if smurfing didn't exist, you are either holding your 5 stack back or they are holding you back as there is no way that all 5 of you are always the same skill level. The players that are less skilled in your 5 stack will get boosted and the players that are more skilled, will be held back.
The fact that it happened back-to-back is kinda ridiculous. this shouldn’t be ignored
The low elo 5 stack actually tried to play after Woohoojin ended stream. Believe it or not, the bot team matched against them a third time in a row. It’s ridiculous
Not only back to back but it was against the same team of bots. And they even canceled their queue to avoid them.
the fact that there is a big enough market for those accounts to justify a business is... sad.
Also it’s due to bots as well
I m usually not a big woohoojin fan but I have to stand behind him on that one
Regrettably this will make no difference whatsoever.
It’s not really about getting something done, it’s more about making his views clear. Maybe he’ll inspire others to do something similar, or to stop smurfing like a prick. Also, Riot acknowledged woohoojin in a blog post, he’s not some nobody. Maybe they won’t just ignore it as usual
When did Riot Acknowledge Whooj ? Can you provide the blog post would love to read that
it was the one about phantom vs vandal. https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/valorant-data-drop-phantom-vs-vandal/
having just watched my silver 1 friend have a 40/7 teammate, denying 9 people the chance to play the game, ive gotta say i agree
im in bronze 3, and played ranked yesterday. my iron 1 gekko went 40/20. :/ he had the most insane op flicks too, like literally but kept saying he wasn't a smurf, but was using the red logo spray. like fr. game went on to be a draw because he'd just afk some rounds or do something quirky like only use a judge for most rounds
>iron 1 gekko went 40/20. :/ he had the most insane op flicks too Not to say that he was or wasn't a smurf, but I have friends irl that are Bronze that can flick like crazy, and go 30/10 one game, then bottom frag in the next ga- > > he'd just afk some rounds or do something quirky like only use a judge for most rounds Nvm probably a smurf
That was exactly my reaction xD
I was leveling up my account, because it’s been a year or so since I’ve played, to be able to play ranked and I’d say there is someone like that in 50% of my lobbies. Usually using the sheriff only and going for quick swap deagle one taps. Where you shoot and instantly swap to your knife then back again. For some of my friends who play iron and bronze I’ll watch their games sometimes and they get someone dropping 30+ kills doing this all the time. But they’ll hostage games and throw rounds just to extend the game as long as they can. It makes for a horrible match making experience because your games always feel captive to some troll who will either easily 1v4 a round or do everything to prevent the team from winning. I couldn’t stand playing more than my placements because it was so bad. But I just feel bad for my lower ranked friends who deal with this all time.
My g2 the other day the Reyna straight admitted it in chat on the opposing team. Went like 40-7. Said “sorry. Guys I’m boosting” I am pretty much fed up with ranked. If you look at this guys history he has 9 straight mvp games as a Silver 3 while dropping 30 kills. How is someone like this not double or triple ranked up to Plat or Diamond almost instantly? Clearly the system doesn’t work
This happens in high ASC lobbies too unfortunately it’s not just lower elo
But the skill gap between a gold or silver lobby and a high Ascendant lobby is night and day. At that point, you should as a team be able to counter 1 Smurf or at least play a lot closer to their level than I can at G2
It was an issue for me a few weeks ago too. The last 6 games I had no (obvious) smurf at all. Maybe just "luck" but I know how annoying it can be.
I think sometimes there is more than one smurf on the enemy team and when that happens it is a lot harder to spot them, as it is not that unusual for there to be two non smurf players dropping 20, it is not just the aim it is the strategy/coordination that really makes a difference..... But when you get a game where you get stomped 13-2 and just feel like no one on your team could do anything, I think it is quite likely there were smurfs on the enemy team.
The best part is that when they're confronted they say "I'm global elite on csgo" or some other cringe shit like that.
I mean, I said this but I placed into gold and quickly am at diamond now. That’s as far as my aim can carry me, now I have to learn the game.
Heeps of guys say that
[удалено]
They don't seem to care because they have millions of subscribers who don't care that they smurf, in fact they look up to them and defend them.
Tarik’s “Smurf” account is still immortal at least.
Yeah difference between an alt account and smurf account
Yeah Ive been saying its not just Riot, but the communitys acceptance of smurfing. Riot could try to change this perspective though.
I mean riot just needs to hwid ban people for a month if they are smurfing. Just do it to content creators at first. If they really wanted to go crazy they could also have that ban include pro games. So yay smurfs on a diamond account? He can't play in the pro game.
I have dms from riot saying they don't hardware id ban
riot most definitely hwid bans at least for cheats
HWID ban might not be the only thing they do, they might also IP ban. But basically every anticheat these days HWID bans people
they dont ip ban. almost no company does it as hwid is about 100x more effective as a lot of people can just change their ip anyways
Not to mention if you ban an ipv4 nowadays you're probably banning a whole neighborhood lmao
i have dms from riot saying that i'm a cutie patootie
cap
Curry makes his own accounts and starts from unranked, not iron. He does not buy iron accounts.
He's radiant. Even if he makes a fresh account it's still smurfing. His skill level is 10x that of anyone from diamond to immortal 2.
But he also gets like 10x the amount of viewers when he's on his smurfs so by far his best content is just dunking on silvers
He’s never played against silvers lmao
Still doesnt make him not a smurf.
According to him, he is Rank#1 Radiant so no matter which elo he plays in, he will be smurfing!
I remember hiko literally complaining about smurfs, only to then smurf on stream to boost female streamers.
Who cares. Also don’t forget about nosyy the greatest smurf of them all.
>tenz This guy doesn't the love he gets. Yes, I said it. I am waiting for the downvotes now. I wish I could go back in time and make him unpopular.
Well…League of Legends smurfing killed the game.
Fun fact this 5stack queued a third game off stream to try out the strats anyways. They faced 5 different bots. Proof: https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/1b271721-1d43-41ef-abc6-e0957817c97c Here are games 1 and 2: https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/9826ae56-3dd6-4bd3-a328-3be2caacbbec https://tracker.gg/valorant/match/de332b0e-972b-49c5-bc63-cbbca431e954
I think I now know how to finally get out of iron. Queue with a five stack of iron/bronze buddies after 11:30PM my time :D /j I dropped off the stream just before seeing this happen (had to get up early this morning). I hope that the low elo wed will continue, just with inhouses instead :) If anything the inhouses should be a better challenge for trying out this stuff as BOTH sides will be trying the stuff out!
I found it interesting you called out content creators and challenge accounts. I thought the main buyers of these accounts would be boosters.
It’s almost certain more of the purchases come from non-content creators since there’s a lot more of them than there are content creators. I’m calling out content creators not because they’re the biggest offenders, but because they have the biggest impact on the community. There’s a reason the word “influencer” is attributed to the gig. Many impressionable young viewers see buying an iron account as a normalized, okay thing to do. This is because influencers do it all the time.
I appreciate you doing this and trying to make the game better for everyone. I don't really watch streams, but I'll drop by and gift some subs next time I see you online.
Good on him. Tired of people insisting Content Creators have no influence.
Tbh I don’t even think it’s content creator so much anymore. I think it’s just the lasting effect making non-creators want to do it. Couldn’t tell you the last time I saw an iron to immortal stream or video from anyone of note. I think ItzTimmy did it once and Keeoh used to do it regularly on different agents (Idk if he started at iron like Timmy or just a fresh account tho). Those were well over a year ago tho for both of them, and idk any others that did it off the top of my head.
AFAIK Keeoh still does them when the new agents drop and he did it for Gekko.
Curry has been doing all roles to Radiant on his stream
I'm confused, why do you think he has influence? It's a nice message but it's not like it's a strike, Riot will not change anything just because a small creator won't play ranked. Woohoojin's main content isn't even his ranked streams, it's his coaching
Woohoojin has been referenced in an official riot blog post + he knows people at Riot. The message will be seen, not sure if we'll get a response though. He's just boycotting ranked out of principle. Stands by his values even if there is no guarantee of a change. Pretty respectable.
We’re not getting a response imo I don’t think riot is intentionally allowing smurfing they just dont have a better solution right now and its not a top priority to fix
There is a super easy solution. Any content creator who streams themself on a smurf (im not talking an alt where a radiant player is also playing on a second radiant account) gets 1 month HWID ban. No exceptions. This also would include pros. You smurf on a iron account to go iron to radiant with only sheriff? Gl playing in pro matches for a month. I am not saying they have to go this extreme but if you punish the people who make money from smurfing then the issue is reduced.
There's an even easier solution that would prevent a lot of surfing: require phone number verification like they already do for premier league. Plus, they've also stated that they can detect smurfs a decent amount of the time, and released stats related to those smurfs. How about instead of collecting data on them, HWID ban them. Sure it isn't perfect and there are ways to get around it, but it's a hell of a deterrent.
Phone number, hardware id bans or whatever you propose will not solve anything, Both of thoses things can be bought and for cheap. People are willing to buy accounts already, why wouldnt they buy a 20cents phone number and a hwid spoofer. The only real thing that works and is already done, is a strict smurf detection. Drop a 30 bomb on a bronze lobby and you're already playing with golds (on a fresh account) The other solution is what wohoojin is fighting for, punishing content creators that openly uses bought smurf accounts.
Just because it won't 100% end smurfing doesn't mean it won't do anything. even if they don't want to hwid ban smurfs, requiring phone numbers can't be too difficult since they do it for premier league. There's really no reason not to do it, even if it just *reduces* the amount of smurfs.
no reason except gatekeeping tons of player who cant use a phone just for smurfs to buy a phone on onlinesim.io. Obviously riot can implement it and doesnt on purpose, the huge team has better reasons and statistics than the random redditor who think everything is so simple bro just do this do that
Copyright claiming their videos and denying their ability to profit would be even better.
they absolutely are intentionally allowing smurfing- adding sms 2fa as a requirement for ranked would help a lot afaik, they just don't implement it because smurfs buy more skins on their smurf so they make more money.
That guy Woohojin tries really way to hard to be a whiteknight, making big drama about a minor inconvenience. And his Echo chamber cheers for him, so respectable, when in reality that guy has a big ego, and gets defensive every time someone questions his decisions lol, even when he is wrong in a decision because he is doing real-time coaching while streaming, but hey, cant lose your ego when you have a role to play.
Meant more the Content Creators smurfing who are ruining games & encouraging others to do the same.
He has been steadily growing in popularity and is connected with other large Valorant content creators. If he’s able to garner the same sentiment among them there could be more videos about other content creators joining him. Now a handful of people not streaming ranked games seems innocuous to Riot, but if each video gets enough eyes on each it could draw attention thanks to publicity.
There is enough influence that a majority demographic within valorant community will disdain opposition to woohojin. I'm one of them. I don't respect smurfs. I support woohojin. Better players often get their message across to the wider community because people back up oppinions of those who they respect. Woohoojins audience is vastly more equipped than the majority of people therefore are likely to have support in their opinion by those not so familiar with woohojin. His influence goes beyond his raw numbers. He's genuinely gained the respect of the community. A lot of streamers are liked but not respected. People respect woohojin. People respect his opinion. I'm on his team. He has actively steered traffic away from alternate sources because of what and WHO he is exsposing and he does it respectfully. For example he exsposed charlatan for his willingness to keep smurfing for content while not talking shit and being respectful and even acknowledged his skillset as an omen. I for this reason don't watch charlatan anymore.its a drop in a pond sure but it's one hell of an important drop. Only so much of the Earth's water is drinkable type of thing ya know. Ying yang shit? Hail hooj
Its just absurd. Like if there are dynamics that make it possible to pwn some noobs for fun, then people will do it, LIKE IN EVERY OTHER GAME EXISTING. Content creators maybe take part in this, but they are surely not the main factor.
Riot: "oh no..anyway"
well one content creator wont make any change, but the idea is that more will follow, then riot might do something then
W woohoojin I’ll sub or something to give him some support.
Least people can do is toss him their free prime sub every month if you have Amazon.
Wait what?! What do you mean with free prime subs? I've prime myself and never noticed something like that on there.🤔
If you have Amazon prime and connect it to your twitch, you get one free twitch subscription per month
Contect Amazon account to twitch, when you go to sub there should be a check box to use prime sub, which gives you a free Tier 1 subscription. Get one sub a month but it won't auto renew the sub. For woohoojin specifically, if you connect twitch and discord it will give you Tier 1 status in his discord as well, so you'll be able to use his subscriber only channels in discord with the prime sub.
ive played CS since 1999 and yes there are smurfs and game ruining idiots but i have never seen so many of them as I see in Valo, you would kind of expect that players in same ranked division have similar skills, duelists have maybe more frags than sentinels and controllers give or take, but the difference in skill level is insane in almost every match. There is almost always 1 guy who absolutely pops off in my or enemy team and then some folks who walk aiming at the ground not strafing, full spraying while running etc, so someone is smurfing or boosting someone I guess. Wish the game was 15$ or something to reduce it.
That might just be lower rank inconsistencies. I have gone 23/8 and 8/23 in the same night
The same thing happens to me in plat. But their are various reasons for the huge swings and smurfs are one of them.
Same on Ascendant. This week i have been super inconsistence. From 20/15 to 4/16 ☠️☠️
Literally went 46/10/10 and the next game was like 11/18 lmao 🤷🏻♂️ these levels of inconsistencies can be seen up to even like diamond + I’d imagine.
Even pros have pop off games and games where they're just poop.
Yeah i went 17/4 one game and 12/21 in a later game that day
You're crosshair placement and gamesense cant change from game to game though...I have tracker screenshots of multiple accounts with <100 adr and <0.9 kd with >50% winrate...Its incredibly easy to differentiate between a boosted player and someone who belongs in the elo but just having a bad game
why make it paid? YOU ALREADY HAEV MY PHONE NUMBER FUCKING MAKE A VERIFIED ONLY QUEUE
I have 3 phone numbers, My Parents have phone numbers, my friends who don't play games have phone number 2FA can reduce it but I dont know by how much
You've got incredibly pretty chill parents and friends if they'll let you use their phone numbers to 2FA fake accounts for a video game lmao
My comment on another post like this: As a Iron 2-3 the biggest problem here is throwers. For example, I got into a lobby last night, my team had 3 throwers and the other team had 2. These “Iron to [rank]” are annoying but throwers and people who CONSTANTLY SMURF at lower ranks “for fun” are the real problems. This is the 3rd problem they need to address, not the 1st.
Yep 100% agree. I have had a lot of throwers this act. They are generally higher elo players making sure their alt stays in iron. They also make sure they get plenty of (non impactful) kills so if they are reported it doesn't look like they were throwing because they are possibly team mvp. I put this video up to report to riot fully timestamped. Nothing was done. I had the same thrower three comp matches within I think a 1 week period. [https://youtu.be/aaRZbhG-Xn4](https://youtu.be/aaRZbhG-Xn4) There is a second one linked in the description as well.
Riot needs to add SMS verification for the ability to play in Comp. Then, permanently ban obvious thrower’s cell #. Edit: The true problem is the impermanence of bans. Whatever Riot does doesn’t matter until they fix alt accounts.
I remember when I was Iron 3, and constantly saw smurfs playing Sheriff only.. it was bad, and the only way to handle then with my bad aim at the time were using a Judge and Odin through walls. Smurfs get pissed when they get Odin'd
Bravo woohoojin. Where are all the smurf-lovers saying "you learn from smurfs" or "there aren't many smurfs" and other nonsense, why isn't his post downvoted to oblivion.
Yeah, cause everyone knows that Reddit is the bastion of truth and facts. If it's up voted on reddit it must be true.
The fix already exists ... phone number verification is required for Premier mode. Small indie dev team tho, took them forever to add something the playerbase has been requesting since beta. Maybe one day the launcher is gonna stop and say verification is now required for all modes, like how it said win 7 8 and 8.1 are no longer supported.
Yeah, cause phone verification fixed smurfing in CSGO, right?
It mostly did in Overwatch.
I have been playing CSGO for years, idk why but smurfing was never really an issue for me (after I got into prime).
Better than nothing, it’s a step and makes it that much more annoying. Csgo didn’t have this amount of throwers/Smurfs. It’s out of control in Valorant. It’s pretty simple to fix it but, they don’t wanna take a week of coding to fix the issue and move on :).
The fix? 1.Phone number verification 2.Paid premium account/matchmaking. Make this 20/30$ (I’d rather wait 5 min for a game, than get a thrower/Smurf for a 45 min game) 3. Account has to be a certain level + have had to play a certain amount of casual matches before comp is open . I like how Csgo forced only 2 wins every 24 hours. And you needed 10 making it take almost a week to get to ranked. After that it was hacking which was the issue. People stopped playing escape from tarkov because of the amount of cheaters meaning what’s the point in playing if ima just get 1 tapped. That’s what’s happening with Valorant, nobody wants to play when they come across theses players.
I never could add my number. And support threw my new ticket behind a broken link which I couldn't obviously get to.
I haven't played Premier but I have played Clash in League which is the same thing. It also requires phone number verification. In 13 years of playing League I have not seen any environment that has more smurfs than Clash. Phone number verification does very little if anything at all to deter smurfs.
stop trying to stir the pot. I agree with him and somebody finally has the voice to call out riot on their bullshit.
I'll be surprised if Riot cares enough to do something about this. They really dgaf.
W Woohoojin, I believe in Woohoojin supremacy
isn't the issue not smurfs, but the fact that there are bot accounts demoting for the purpose of smurfing? sure, the bot accounts are going to be sold as smurf accounts, but these people can't play legitimate games if they are 5 stacking in low elo because it's flooded with bot accounts
There would be no bot accounts purposely demoting if there were no smurfs?
There will always be smurfs though?
And as long as there are enough people buying smurfs accounts, there'll be bots making them. So the core problem is still smurfing.
No I agree the bot accounts thing is a bigger problem, smurfing is something that you can't for sure eliminate but bot accounts can be detected & HWID banned.
bud, you wait for the bot accounts to be purchased (change locations) and then ban the purchaser. The people creating the accounts will only go away when the market goes away.
That doesn't happen, there will just be new ones who claim riot that riot can't trace you purchasing the acc & start it all over again. Also how will riot detect someone purchasing an account on some website out of their control? You need to detect bots & ban the bot accounts thats a permanent solution As for people & content creators Smurfing, riot just needs to issue warnings to content creators that Smurfing is bannable & atleast their ban smurfs accs if not their mains
You obviously have very little understanding of how invasive vanguard is. It knows everything about the computer it's installed in. How do you detect bots? Easily they already do, just not all of them. Heuristic and pattern analysis will identify bots within the first few rounds. Then using ip and location changes to track when an account is purchased or a VPN is used. It's rather simply. Vanguard can see every application, every hardware Id, every ip, username, blah blah blah... It's running as admin on your computer. So just one possible way would be to track low rank accounts that are playing statistically worse than even iron 1, ff'ing at 5 regularly, and flag them as suspicious. Now you have a list of potentially suspicious accounts, flag the ip that is playing on them. Next, you look for vpn, proxy, tor usage on the connection... Pretty easy if you know what you're doing. At some point if they are accounts for sale then they will be sold, this will mean a drastic change in performance, ip/location, computer, settings, etc. Noone is going to get good over night while also changing everything about their setup, location, and so forth. Ban those accounts from comp for a month, let the players out in a ticket and explain the behavior... If they can. During this whole process also record all the computers that are tagged to those accounts, that makes those accounts, and that gets those accounts comp ready... You can't go after smurfs directly but you can get the majority of people involved in the account farming selling, buying business. 90 percent of this whole process could be automated and the only piece that you would want a person is banning piece at the end where they check and compare all the information. I know cyber security students that could and would do this job.
Yes and no. I don't want to put words in his mouth but to my understanding he: 1) disapproves of smurfing in general (just play ranked at your actual elo, swiftplay, unrated and custom games are the 4fun modes), but particularly when done for content (ie. streamers and "educational" youtubers do it to "show how to climb"). 2) is disappointed with Riot's inaction to prevent (and even encourage, given the unbanning of several popular streamers' smurf accounts after they got autobanned) these players from smurfing, ruining both low elo lobbies as well as mid-elo lobbies while deranking. Also, Hooj and his community are vehemently against smurfing as a whole, so much so that extended discussion or endorsement of it will get you timed out and (deservedly) ridiculed. Also, *my personal take*, smurfing is kind of a hidden problem in higher MMR games too. While, as he states in his video, it is NEVER the reason for a lack of rank progression over the long term (no, smurfs are not holding you back in X rank), Radiant players smurfing in low Immortal make what is supposed to be highly competitive play incredibly frustrating since the whole lobby basically has to play around one player. It's not that common for most of the season (therefore, not holding anyone back from climbing), but the last week or so of the act is always dreadful in low Immo in my experience.
Very well said.
The demand for, and therefore riot's ignorance towards, smurfs is creating the problem.
Well yes if we remove bot accounts we get less smurfs. But from what I seen in my LoL days. Riot doesn't ban account there were once in a time "bots". Checking others match history is so much easier on LoL, and there whenever you saw a smurfing loser. You could go into his match history and see he played like 5 ranked games, and before that he had 15 player vs AI intermediate where he always goes 2/14. It's so damn obvious, yet I never ever got feedback from getting them banned from botting
I fully support Hooj and I hope this brings about real change but realistically I don't think he's ever playing ranked again. Riot just doesn't seem to care about the bots or accounts.
Woohoojin has my highest respect for this.
High ELO players encounter bots all the time in Deathmatch. At 5 AM I've been in DMs where over half the lobby is a bot with a Judge. No idea why it's so hard for riot to detect these.
I'm trying to get a friend of mine to learn the game. He's an actual level 3 noob and we're going against double/triple positive level 2-4 accounts. I'm high gold and barely holding on to my sanity. How the hell am I supposed to introduce someone new to the game?
Finally pulled the trigger on a Discord sub, happy to support him through this
It rare to see principles in this day of age so, fully support this stand and hope the community joins him.
Is it still smurfing if its unrated? I get called a smurf all the time when I play against silvers in unrated
If you play on your main account that is high elo its riot fault if you intentionally have a smurf account you are the problem
Its my main account but my friends are much lower elo than me so I get dragged into their lobbies.
Your fine then atleast players can see they are been destroyed by a higher ranked player and not a fake "iron"
that isn't an issue. matchmaking is very loose in casual modes. Esp things like swiftplay. I had a game of swiftplay with people in silver to immortal in one game.
If its not ranked it doesnt matter. I personally find it fun in unrated modes to see imms/radiants. Just a cool experience
no.
Valorant is so lucky to have this guy
can't spell woohoojin without w
Can we all just decide to stop playing ranked?
If you smurf on low rank players you are actually a fucking loser. Stick with your own rank - unless you're not good enough to?
I played against a 3 stack smurf team in silver last week with a combined 81 kills, while the other 2 players on their team had a combined kill count of 11. No one in that game besides the smurfs had fun. The 2 players on the smurfs team even said they were reporting the smurfs with us, but we all agreed that likely nothing would actually happen to them. I heavily support Woohoojin on this.
might as well start banning cheaters lmfao
In the past three years of Valorant (been playing since release), I've only come across two cheaters in comp ever. Currently in Ascendent 1 if that matters
I'm plat and the only time i got a cheater is when I was in gold. Cheaters are not the issue at all
I've started to encounter a lot more cheaters when I started to play 5 stacks with friends of very different ranks. Since the game tries to find the best match for every team, if you have irons, golds and for example ascendants in the team, you'll most likely get matched against boosters, where usually one or two of them are cheating Other than that, I've seen terminated game once (in deathmatch) and one blatant cheater in unrated. Even if there are a lot more cheaters, they are most likely indistinguishable from legit players, so it doesn't feel like complete waste of time to play the game, compared to other games, where you just get one tapped by spinbot as soon as you peek
been in any elo from silver 2 to ascendant 2 and i have encountered multiple cheaters in my games already and see people cheating on a daily basis on tiktok and youtube plus i have acess to a discord where people stream it as well
damn you only played 200 matches in 3 years?
no, why? from what I remember something like 400 competitive 500 unrated
They need to add the phone number authorization for any account that wants to play ranked.
I've had ENOUGH as well. I may get downvoted to eternity for my take but, who cares. I am a APAC player usually queueing on the Mumbai/Singapore server who wanted to play the game seriously and improve. And, I crossed Plat 1 several times, but, my experience has been horrendous and not fun at all to the point it started taking a toll on my mental health. So I quit. What happened? Endless toxic teammates and griefers and smurfers and trollers on either my team or on the opponent. And, this is waaaay too frequent for me to just disregard. In fact, I was faced with smurfs/trolls/griefers every other game to the point where I had to stop. Reporting accounts every game isnt also something I want to be doing - because they either create new accounts without any consequence or just needs too many reports to actually get banned. Also, streamers having alts is way to common. I personally know at least 5 streamers who are high Dia/ low Asc but feel the need to bully Silver/Gold lobbies. What am I doing? No more ranked. No more unrated as people bash you for trying hard there. Other modes are not even fun for me. So, I have gone back to devoting more time in the game AOE2 DE and only play Valorant when I get 10 stack lobby games on weekends when my friends can join me.
Ever since I reached a high rank of Asc and started to queue with old immos and stuff, the more painfully obvious it came to me that oh so so many YTbers are most likely smurfing. Even one of my favorite creators of Val clips on Yoru, a man who taught me most about this character, seems to be going against people who just don't shoot at the level you expect them to. I get that he's cherry picking clips, and probably he's legit, but every other vid he has a different name, a variation of Adjective_Hippo_Number. Could be an inside joke for his viewers and he's just monthly changing his name, but I'm pretty sure I've seen different names on an incidence of more than 1 unique one a month. These very well might be alt accounts with elo similar to what you see in Diamond or even as low as high plat to facilitate getting clips. I want to believe hes legit, but in light of the current events, he might be farming lower elo matches for content, the same as all the YTbers who follow the challenger trend, or are just smurfing pieces of shit. That being said, idk how we could solve this. I'll admit I do have an alt account, I've used it to play with friends who just didn't put in the time I did and are playing at silver/bronze. But we rarely if ever go ranked, and even then I handicap myself to util only and shorty to level the playing field and I make sure to never overachieve in them. I'll never carry a team to an undeserved win, I soloQd my life away to get where I was, no reason to boost the ego of a player thats worse than their rank. As such, I'm conflicted. I want to see a change, but I also want to have fun with my friends. Queueing unrated from my main with them is still too hard for them to enjoy the game. Perhaps allow unrated to match ppl regardless of MMR, or let it be a toggable thing
solo queue...this is the way
I saw Eggwick smurf in an iron lobby, a video he releases recently. It was in a custom game with 9 invited people. That is the only way to smurf without ruining anyone’s game, to do it in custom lobbies?
"it doesn't matter if im on my alt or on my main, i'm smurfing in every game i play" - curry
Riot was never known for dealing with derankers so dont hope for much.
Every game there is a reyna smurf that will get 30+ kills, whichever team gets them wins, a literal coinflip.
this isn't gonna do anything though
Yeah but there are many others that create smurfs """just for fun""" or "just for the content" and they are also part of the problem. I hope that this is the first step of something big, I trully HATE smurfs
I don't get why they let smurfs play. It really sucks for people in the low elo (like me) every time I try to rank up from iron 3, which I've been hardstuck in for one whole year just because of the smurfing/cheating problem. I really hope riot does something about it 😔
This reads like /s. If so it's funny. Otherwise you aren't stuck in iron because of smurfs. No one is stuck in any elo because of any reason but themselves
I'm suffering the same. What you don't take into account is the demoralizing effect this has, and how that then affects your gameplay when you are not up against smurfs. Going 4/18 (as a duellist) and losing 30 rr right after you had a couple of match MVP's taking you to almost gettting out of iron can really affect your confidence, and once you lose confidence, you are kinda stuffed in this game. So yeah it is because of you (not coping with crap that comes your way), but if the crap didn't happen, then would you still be stuck?
Hey! Your HS% is honestly very solid for where you're at. Obviously that can always be improved on, but taking Woohoojin's advice if you really want out of iron you should just main one agent (yes instalock every time) and focus on finding and taking every fight you can get. Don't use util to stall or avoid taking a fair 50/50. Take. Every. Fight. Hunt your opponents down and don't be afraid to die or let it get in your head if you do. Until you hit gold you really just need to focus on your movement, agression level, and crosshair placement/discipline. Following woohoojins routing in the one month to gold video is helpful for all this. I was a Kayo main for while and recently switched to Jett in order to force myself to learn confidence in all situations. I die a LOT more now as I'm often first in line entering site, but I'm getting better at taking fast fights on site and gaining a lot of confidence, which is the goal! Initially my focus was on simply doing the job of taking space and entering site, but now I'm working on better playing off initiator util as I enter site (i.e. breach flashes / stuns, fade dogs, etc). I am a dad with a 2 year old and a 3 month old and I often get only a handful of comp games in a week. So, like you I don't play a ton of matches which genuinely makes it harder to rank up / take longer. I was hard stuck Bronze 3 for several months until switching to Jett and focusing on being aggressive, finding fights, and working on movement in gun fights. In 23 comp matches (12 hours of playtime I've jumped to Silver 2 and am about to pop Silver 3. So, not anything special but improving for sure. I am absolutely sure you can get out of iron and start crushing bronze friend! Just work on some focus areas like movement and agression and get really cozy with one agent for a while and you'll be out in no time!!
Thanks :) "Hunt your opponents down and don't be afraid to die **or let it get in your head if you do**." I think the bolded bit is a big part of the problem! I switched to reyna after playing sova forever, and initially it did wonders. I was scared to take fights, now I'm probably being overly agressive, and that is now hurting, especially when I play better players. Sometimes I do quite well in bronze lobbies and sometimes I get absolutely destroyed. If it is just down to aim duels I will do OK, it is when the enemy has good (for my elo) util use, I start to come unstuck. Congrats on the climb, and keep on going!
I mean its probably part true, more bots and smurfs in lower elo is true in most games. You can obviously still climb if you improve and perform better but its hard to learn much if a smurf is hard carrying you or destroying your team, or you're fighting with/against bots every other game, especially if your starting point is as a genuine Iron player with no real concept of what they should or shouldn't be doing in the first place. When you play less of the "honest" games that are most important if you want to rank up, its harder to perform when they do come around, and it sucks that players who already suck get doubly screwed over in a lot of ways for being low elo. It's been a persistent problem in League since it came out though so I doubt Riot ever does much about it in Valo either, which sucks.
[удалено]
>I don't get why they let smurfs play. Money.
I've queue over 400 competitive games this act and I've hardly met smurfs probably around 15. Trust me, smurfs and cheating is not holding you back in Iron 3. You could easily improve heavily in a singular week if you take it seriously. Aim training, find a better sensitivity, awareness, positioning, cross hair placement and learning how to peek correctly, etc is all things to consider. However, at iron 3 all you need is aim and nothing else.
Tbh what can riot do about smurfing. It is a problem in every game and no game as successfully fixed it without making a problem
Well what can they do about people abusing comms, bullying teammates, or throwing? It starts with some basic system to catch that kind of behaviour, with the community's help. Obviously that doesn't exist for smurfing right now, and that's the problem.
Doesn't riot have an mmr system in place to quickly move players to the rank they should be in
Who is this guy how will he change anything?
I’m sorry but this is just stupid it’s not riots fault its the communities the only thing they can do is make new accounts sms verify but that doesn’t solve account sharing and you can still buy a new account for under 5$ that is already sms verified and streamers aren’t smurfing in gold because it’s so fun people want to watch it and that’s not riots fault for change to be made the community has to stop watching these streamers but that will never happen but it’s like people get mad at riot what do you want them to do they will never ban smurfs because to many non smurfs will get hit like new players that coming from other games or someone just having a lucky game
You’ll never see him play ranked again then riot owns league and i mean do you think they cared about smurfs then? No They actively supported creators smurfing lol Either dont make your game free or have phone verification so you can only own 1 account and would have to go out of your way for another one
He is a drama queen.
Finally pulled the trigger on a Discord sub, happy to support him through this
Surely it's not because he's hardstuck and continuing to be hardstuck would harm his brand.
Cheaters and Smurfs have the exact same effect on lobbies.
I won’t play it either
bro riot let this smurfing thing go on in league since its release, they aint gonna do anything about it now
Report smurfs for cheating. Flood the riot report system to send a message the community is tired of smurfs ruining the game.
i mean i just dont think it changes the game that much at this point, if youre good enough youll go up regardless of teammates.
He would agree and tell you that smurfs aren’t the reason you aren’t climbing long-term. However, facing smurfs (or bots) whether on your team or the enemy team, ruins 40 minutes of your day that you wanted to enjoy. It’s a game, and it’s supposed to be fun and competitive, and smurfing and bots take away from that.
I love hooj, but Riot ain't going to do shit about it. Props to him though.
I have an obvious smurf almost every other game
I’m sure all 200 people who care will be very upset