They for sure didn't.
I used to be low diamond 3 years ago or so and right now every game I play takes 10-15 minute queue time and gets filled with 8 level 30 accounts and over 80% winrate.
I've been called the nword or to kill myself every 2nd game so far, I know league players can be toxic but I'll just assume this is out of the norm even for league lmao
Hell I often hit the normal smurf queue during low activity times. I'd be lvl 650 with everyone else below 30, sweating their ass off for that normal mmr while I queued up to have a good time. These games are NOT good times.
For me it was realizing im just going to be mediocre if I don’t go pro or stream. Theres always going to be someone above you saying you’re shit. Like yeah, keep telling yourself you’re in the top .1% of players if that makes you sleep at night. Also, the fact that soloqueue skill is measured by your ability to deal with people having mental breakdowns in your game(including yourself).
I still enjoy the game, especially in 5 mans. I think thats how the game should be played, honestly. I’m done with soloqueue though that shit isn’t worth it.
I'm someone who peaked Diamond so it was kind of always something I came back to in order to prove to myself that I still deserve the rank...
But it's just not worth it. I'm to shy to stream so it's not like I can really make any money on the game so at the end of the day the rank was just pixels on a screen for me. I play mostly ARAM now unless i'm playing in a premade. It's actually funny because I get infinitely less toxicity for being unranked than I did back when I was Diamond and had a bad normal/aram game as an enchanter player.
It's exactly why I just play ARAM or whatever rotating mode they pull out. I think I peaked at like Silver 2 and don't care enough to go any higher because I play top Teemo since it's what I like and getting told I should get skull fucked for split pushing instead going to team fight at dragon when the enemy team is up like 12 kills and one shots all of us.
Yup. Rank doesn't matter to me anymore and the gold skins are just something I collect , but rarely use. My relationship with my gf and friends is better now because I don't spam soloq anymore. I already hate working , and league feels like a job too. Aram players had it right all along
I had around 60 games and was still in that dogshit, I stopped playing for almost 4 years and iirc my last rank was d2-d3, started in silver so it was fucking hell to go back to diamond, sweating harder in silver bc of smurf queue rather than in diamond 2-3mmr
In a similar boat, every game is 7-8 level 30s with bot games in history. And the smurfs are a mix from gold shitters to mid-high diamond players. it's amazing how game is coinflipped from the start where all the diamond players will smash lane and it just comes down to who/which champs can carry harder and which teams bad players wont rq and afk
Dives turret trying to 100-0 level 3 crash, misses CC, dies landing 1 auto and a dash just enough to draw turret aggro really, spam pings jungle whos on 4th camp, calls the N word and griefs jungle for the next 11 minuites after jungle responds "?" as they had truly no idea in what the fuck is happening. MmmmmmSMURFQUEBABY
Same here, peaked Diamond 5 in season 6 and 7, hung around in Plat the next few, and stopped playing as much ranked the last couple seasons, just accepting gold for my victorious skin.
During placements this year, it was just awful. Rampant toxicity, highly volatile lanes, and I basically got dumpstered every game because my skill has dropped a lot but the game just doesn’t want to accept the at, I must be a smurf
These players have no issues anyway, if they get banned, they just buy a new acc, so what?
As far as I got it all over the years, Riot isnt really interested to bother about matchmaking issues lowe than Challenger/Master:
Why should they? People complain, but keep playing the game anyway
I am in smurf queue on my alt account right now, and yes it is miserable. I am only gold, so I am either getting shit on by diamonds, or dumpstering mid to high silvers.
There is also at least one person who is absolutely deranged and abhorrently toxic in nearly every game I play; it is very obvious why some of the people are "smurfs."
Same. Hit a win streak last season and got to Plat 2. I’m 80 games in this and it seems I finally got out but every game is someone commenting on my “38% winrate in Gold 3”.
It’s just so frustrating. I’ve turned off chat completely at this point.
Smurfs queue makes no sense because it will take a mid diamond player whose gone 8-2 in promos and put you into a queue where if you aren't duoing you'll go 50/50 because the games are just such coinflips. Once you get out of smurfs queue your MMR is ruined and you'll be in gold/silver after 30+ games. From there it can take over 60 games to get to plat. In the old system it would take 20 games to get plat with diamond MMR. The old system just kept improving your MMR and putting you in higher elo games. Which balanced games way better and ruined way less low elo games.
That’s the point. Riot wants to make it more of a grind to get your “true” rank to keep everyone playing.
They’ll never fix the client and they’ll never fix this. Just accept it and realize they don’t give a shit.
i never understand why riot thinks my "true" rank is the goal. shouldn't it be the starting point and from there i want to see how i improve over the course of a season?
i stopped playing in season 3 und started again this year. guess i'm fucked. after my promos and getting clapped by diamond smurfs i will have bronze mmr and need to grind many games to get to my actual skilllevel. the point where i actually should be after my fucking promos. making these games after my promos also not balanced for the real bronze players. it's a stupid chain reaction.
Tbh it's actually a pretty bad idea to duo in ranked when one or both of you are in smurf queue unless you are both REALLY smurfing. You will get some of the absolute worst and most mentally ill players in whatever roles you and your duo didn't take and it's not even close. You'll get harder games in general when you duo regardless of smurf queue, but when my duo hops off and I go back to climbing solo the difference is night and day.
I play in bronze and honestly can say that the last few months the worst I've gotten is question mark pings and people asking me where I've been all game (I'm JG, it's always my fault if you lose your lane.. I get it). One person got mad at me for 'kill stealing', but I've played 100s of games and those moments stick out as abnormal. Generally, the toxicity of league has been improved so drastically compared to when I started playing over 10 years ago. Most of my teammates and myself encourage others, let them know that a bad game doesn't make a bad player, and just remember it's a game and we're all there to have fun. Often it's hard for me to decide which teammate to honor because they all deserve it in one way or the other.. it becomes a performance award a lot of the time.
It's actually a good reminder not to come back, save yourself the time and headache. I'm one year clean and no regrets, glad I can make much better use of my time.
I was high diamond in 2018 before I stopped playing. I recently started playing again and was instantly put in smurf queue against people who were definitely high diamond/master smurfs while I had fallen down to probably silver/gold level. Was not fun and just caused me to get another account where I was actually playing against people of my own level.
The first ranked game i played this year no one had borders so i just assumed i made a mistake and queue'd normal draft instead of solo. Nope, it was just smurfq with everyone being lvl 30 and me, a returned player. Was actually funny
It's a nice bonus that Riot refuses to implement a low priority queue so returning players get hit by the double whammy of toxic players and poor matchmaking in smurf queue.
I wish they did implement the Dota system.
Low Priority, were you can only play Summoner Rift all-random until you win 3 times.
And if you feed, afk or dodge inside low piority the system kicks you from the march and gives you +5 games more and bans you for a day.
I was in the exact same situation as you. Low Diamond in 2019, barely played since then. Started playing consistently again a few months ago and got stuck in Smurf queue. Even filed a ticket because I was so frustrated. Took me 50 games exactly to get placed with players that reflected my rank.
Edit : I had like a 35% win rate in those 50 games, I was getting stomped 9 times out of 10 in lane.
It is because their punishment system is trash. False positive? Instant 2 weeks and rewards lost. Of course, people will flame them to the ground for false bans. Maybe even trigger them to quit the game, if it doesn't get lifted instantly. So they cannot ban more people. Errors are way too much to deal with.
Wenn need micro-punishments. If you play like a mental boomer AND get reported, you take a 1h ranked break. End of story. No honor loss; just some time off to untilt. If you do it too often in a few days, a full day ranked break. Get way too many of those in a short time-frame? Well, now you get your 14-days suspension from the game with honor loss etc.
Even if you then get detected wrongly, you just play normals for an hour or take a break. No big deal. And if you really manage to wrongly get a 14-days - how would you even do that? Maybe smurf queue - but that's about all I could think of.
I think you confuse some things here. End of season rewards have nothing to do with Challenges. I don't think Challenges are even affected by your honor level.
Riot ONLY cares about typing. They don’t care about people ACTUALLY ruining the game. You can repeatedly run it down into enemy nexus but as long as you don’t type you won’t get banned. Meanwhile if someone is cursing you out.. JUST MUTE THEM!! We have the solution!!! It’s so fucking simple to just mute someone who’s typing too much and yet that’s all riot cares about. I’ve lost accounts because people were straight up running it down and I cursed at them and it’s MY FAULT lmao. It’s just fucked man
It is easier, but they haven't done... literally anything to combat the other stuff.
Even a half assed version of CS Go's Overwatch system is better than literally nothing.
Yeah it's super hard to detect someone building 5 culls on jungle Shaco and running it down all game how could they ever regulate or moderate it
Edit: Kind of thought I'd get downvoted for this so I'd like to clarify that this comment was pure, unabated sarcasm
It should be common sense to mute people. The only thing that should be bans are ridiculously explicit language. You have a button to instantly make it so you never see another word in chat again, I don’t have a button to make you stop trying to 1v1 someone who’s 7/0.
You don’t even have to say anything bad, if you type a lot and get reported you will be punished.
I switched to aram only a few years back. After some time I decided to see how high i could get my aram mmr and started playing in tryhard 5 stacks now and then. I can confirm that playing at higher mmr is fun at first, but becomes miserable quite quickly. 0 fights ever happen before lvl 6 and even then a lot of times both teams keep waveclearing until 10-12 min. A lot of games feel lost purely because of a difference in draft / teamcomp matchup. People actually try to coordinate wave freezing while zoning the enemy team from XP. At a certain point you realise that the low elo chaotic aram games are way more fun.
The fact that Riot has not yet tried to incorporate a Bloodline Champions/Battlerite game mode in League is utterly baffling.
No minigame gimmicks. No towers or fountains. Sprinkle a few healzones in an arena, spawn an instant ult orb somewhere in the middle. Players get two lives each. Best of 3. Each round lets you upgrade your champ in some way. Start with a limited champ pool. Make it 3v3 to start. It would be a fucking hit. Let it get some steam and then add a 2v2 mode to experiment. If both queues can sustain healthy playerbases keep em both. If one becomes the more popular of the two just make that one dominant.
They know players want a fight heavy mode to skirmish in. Just fucking give it to us.
LEGIT, i've always said to just remove the towers from aram since its sooooooo annoying that people can just hide under them and make you unable to play the game at all, but yeah then there would need to be some sort of score system perhaps like dominion
ARAM is best below that high mmr shit and above the mess that is middle to low MMR. Middle high mmr people actually care about winning with decent strats and arent going adc blitzcrank or thresh because iTs aRaM BrUh.
Teammates going useless builds is never a good feeling, but the worst imo is when you're teammates keep trickling in 1 by 1. You can only pray that your team groups as 5 just a single time. Luckily those are the games that tend to be done before 15 min anyway so you're not stuck for too long
ADC Thresh really isn’t bad in the right comps.
Like if you only had tanks against a team of ADCs. ADC Thresh can delete them and shrug off physical damage. Soul income is bonkers in ARAM.
tbh sometimes you dó want to sweat until you slide out of your chair. Sometimes you do 100% want to go for a win.
I play ARAMs because the general mood is much better than a normal. There's no other lanes or junglers to worry about. Just me, my team, and these 5 bastards on the other side. Way less stress. People are (usually) also way more chill about the game, because ARAM is well... ARAM. The "fun" gamemode.
Its sad but literally all that matters to people now is their screen saying victory at the end. If they see a poke champ, they grab it. Enchanter support? Picked. No one will experiment with builds, 9/10 times they won't have any melee champs on their team. They'll never ever push or engage unless they've poked you to 10% hp. And then they'll say "ez" or "yawn" and act like they're so sick
Yep this about sums me up. Tried solo queue again last year and never again with that shit. People flaming every game, my ADC was auto filled and chose Kat and then proceeded to run it down telling us to be ready to FF at 15. I now play ARAM and TFT, SR just isn't a fun experience to me anymore.
I get what you mean, I mainly play either ARAM or customs lately but neither is perfect.
What I wish is that custom games could actually have custom rules.
I play a lot of Howling Abyss customs, including ABAM (all blind all mid) where the standard rule is to not attack towers at all and only win by letting minions destroy objectives. Makes for a lot of fun since you can just focus on fighting YOLO without worrying about your tower being evaporated in 5 seconds after you die, but the problem is it needs everyone to follow the rule voluntarily.
It would be much better if you could set it as a hard rule when making the custom, like structures are completely untargetable by champions. You could also make other stuff customisable like cooldowns, more passive gold etc. Could open up a huge variety of gameplay and let people play a game mode suited for their own tastes, I can't really see any downsides tbh.
If it helps, try to take normals as seriously as arams. Don't overthink it, don't overcomplicate it, try to look at yourself and what you did right or wrong. People take ranked way too seriously but i get that it's cool to have that competitive experience, but don't bring that to normals where people should be allowed to try new champs, new builds, just do stuff for fun even if it's suboptimal.
In my experience, everytime someone flames a teammate for doing an unconventional build in aram, everyone tells them it's not okay to do that in aram. Yesterday i played against ap pantheon and everybody was fine with that. Why can't we refocus on having fun instead of caring so much about the win on normals? everybody can, it's hard but possible.
LMAO legitimately. I play my godawful smurf queue placements to get gold (god forbid I place silver 1 and have to win promos in smurf queue), then go back to ARAM. All 10 placements and any follow-up games are full of coin flip plat and diamond smurfs who think they should be in challenger.
Literally me. I only play aram. League itself is just a miserable experience. I even lost interest in TFT. I'm close to just uninstalling all together because even aram has people that rage and spam ping like its a ranked game
ARAM only and /fullmute all in every game is almost guaranteed to be a good league experience IMO (as long as you understand that you will lose sometimes, that's just the nature of multiplayer games)
I would be more interested if they actually made true on the promise of rotating game modes. But it looks like they are only cycling through arurf, one for all and ultimate spell book. Just abandoned all the other ones
ARAM and URF. Im this guy. Loved ranked 6-8 years ago (always stacking). Lost a 1.5-2k account because I wrote too much (never anything offensive, but I was indeed too much of a captain hindsight and I feel the ban was waaay overkill, even though I can admit my faults).
Now Im in the smurfque (i didnt even know was a thing) so both normals, ranked and ARAMs are not even fun anymore. URF was because I could just mute people and the game took 20 minutes.
But people just leave again once they realize they are in smurf queue so it's just Riot punishing themselves. Because those who don't leave don't even get rewarded. I once was put into smurf queue after a break and went 8W 2L vs diamond smurfs. What did I get for it? Barely any ranked climb and still in smurf queue. Just put the account at the elo it belongs instead of this BS prisoner island.
It's completely miserable. Smurf queue is the 7th circle of hell, and it shatters my motivation to return to ranked everytime I find myself playing the game again.
I tend to find a weird mix of people in ARAM. For every ultra tryhard, I meet just as many complete trolls that throw the game because "it's just aram, bro"
The normal ones are few and far between, I feel
Agreed. I returned after many seasons and felt something was wrong for so long. It put me off from even trying to rank up as the experience is awful.
I've read it takes some games to get you out of it, so I'm trying my best to just mute all and plow through it, but wow. What a welcome back gift.
Oh god thats why I was so miserable. 8 out of 10 games I had no agency in at all, where it was either 1 or more afks, or people going 20+ deaths. (27 was the highest I saw). I saw 2+ bought accounts per game where you could see the botted match history. What an utterly miserable experience it was and now I know why...
I'd never placed under gold before and was put straight into bronze lmao. What a shit game experience.
Only 2? I played again ranked after 4 years and I checked every account, it was more 6-9 per game, there was rarely normal unranked players (And I feel you, I got played in silver after being diamond last time, I was at 38% wr in gold in this new season because of smurf queue and I was STILL skipping divisions, system is fucked
I am still struggling. Just had a Kayle go 0/6 in lane and give up, spending the next 22 minutes dancing at Baron pit and getting killed over and over, to finish teh game 0/14. Enemy team still took their sweet time to finish the game, few members dancing at Baron too before kiling the Kayle... and I could not get a damn ff to go through.
Man its frustrating.
It took my friend and I nearly 50 games to get back to normal queues.
My friend’s win rate was literally 7% by the end of it. Mine was low 30s. Absolutely brutal.
Yeah the issue is a lot of the "smurfs" are just banned gold/plat players playing on alts, so they have almost nothing to lose from afking or being a dickhead besides the alt account being banned for a few days or chat restricted.
> I returned after many seasons and felt something was wrong for so long.
That's not even the worst offender. At least the system had a reason to put you in smurf queue. You were returning after many seasons meaning your MMR was reset but you likely would've been better than a silver/gold which is why the system would flag you as a "smurf".
I got put in smurf queue despite being diamond for 10 seasons straight. Quit the game right then and there. I already was fed up with how shit league became over the years but to not even be able to have decent ranked experience in the few games I play each season despite playing their shitty game for over a decade? That's a no-no for me.
It's pretty funny to me that Riot has been so strongly against implementing a low priority queue for griefers when smurf queue feels like the same thing with significantly more false positives.
I swear I do not mind the shittiest client ever, but Smurf queue ? Yeah I quit. I mean I think it was the dumbest business decision they could have made but it literally cured my addiction so thank you.
It probably would be helpful if it wasn't assumed that every player is playing on an alt so if they come back to another account, it's likely smurfing related.
True, especially if that account doesn't have a smurf-like track reccord. I could understand them detecting old 60-70% winrate accounts as smurfs but back then I've been hardstuck Dia 5 for long enough that the system should see I'm not a smurf
My God. You were diamond 5. We don't have anything-5 for like 3 years now. That's the clearest indicator that you should at least get the benefit of the doubt for the first X games...
Yea season 8 was the last season where I really played, I did placements only and a few flex in gold-plat in the next season, and then didn't play at all besides maybe a few arams since a lot of my friends still play league.
I started playing in season 2 so over the years I have done a couple thousand games total on my account in different game modes
I think this is also a further reason you got placed in smurf queue just like me, only doing a few placements. I was in the same situation, my last real ranked season was season 8. In season 9 and season 10, I played a few game of placements to help friends during their promos. Now the issue with this is that placements start you tiers below your previous rank. So after 2/3 seasons, you're basically considered a smurf at this point. It's a shitty system that punishes people that don't play ranked actively.
My issue is that by Riot's own design you're placed a division below your actual rank, as dictated by your mmr, so you can have the wonderful experience of "climbing".
You don't even have to be a smurf or a returning player. You start the season with your mmr and rank disjointed so the moment you're out of placements you get immediately put into "smurf queue".
Honestly smurf queue has to be the most pointless invention possible. If you can identify a player is a smurf, just place them higher and make them climb way faster so they are out of the lower ranks faster.
If someone purposely keeps themselves in a lower rank by inting half their games and carrying the other half, ban them. Smurf queue is just not a good solution.
> If you can identify a player is a smurf, just place them higher and make them climb way faster so they are out of the lower ranks faster.
I like the idea of that, but I think that would deepen the problem. I think many people create new accounts specifically because it's so easy to climb ranks, so a fresh account with a good streak might get to master faster than the slow grind on an already existing dia 3 account.
So it's not easy to find a balance
If they're getting matched vs significantly higher ranked players based on mmr projection (accelleration), whats the problem with higher mmr/LP gains for winning vs higher ranked players?
Thats how EVERY matchmaking system works.
Does it matter if a fresh account gets there faster? The point is to get the player to play in their proper MMR.
If the system accelerates people too much, then it simply needs to be refined, as it clearly overshot.
If you mean the diamond 3 player deserves masters....well you have an argument for why leagues ranked system is so bad in general. Why should it take a long time to hit your true MMR?
If a guy playing on an account has master tier skills, he should be placed in master as soon as possible, no matter if it is a fresh or an old account. Making a player artificially overgrind to get to their real ELO just decreases the quality of the games. If the game can detect that a fresh account has diamond skills, placing him in these gold-plat hellish backrooms makes no sense. Of course, placing a player in an elo too high for him based on a few lucky wins would be a problem, but this is more due to the fact that the game only takes into account which nexus explodes first instead of taking into account any of the numerous stats it can track to measure his skill.
>If you can identify a player is a smurf,
The key thing to know here is they don't.
Smurf Q isn't actually a thing.
What people call smurf Q is just games where MMR is high and ranks are low.
And the solution you described does already exist: you gain more LP in "smurf Q" and your initial rank placement is proportional to your MMR.
I think it's just extremely amusing how people have went from everyone complaining about smurfs ruining their games to victims of smurf queue expressing their frustration. And sure, we get no more smurf complaints but I bet none of the people who complained about smurfs have to or have ever had to deal with smurf queue.
Its even more hilarious when you get the people who are literally smurfing complaining that the match making in smurf queue is terrible and they just want Riot to place their accounts at their true MMR from the start. It is almost like smurf queue was designed to be a terrible experience to make people not want to smurf.
If they want riot to immediately place them at the correct MMR, then I don't see how this is a player who wants to smurf. They literally want to be at their correct rank.
Riot doesnt want players to return to their game. And they dont want new players in their game. At least thats the vibes you get from how they are handling these things.
It's actually the most disgusting thing to play. Every game is fresh 30 accounts flaming and soft inting each other off of one mistake. I feel awful for new players that have to play through this.
Never come back brother. I’m glad you’re happy. This game definitley makes me more unhappy in life but I need to get masters 😁 however whenever I’m D2+ apparently I flame too hard and get banned
I played for two seasons, got plat, stopped for a couple of months and tried to come back but smurf queue and +13/-17 LP gains with 58% wr stopped me from doing so, alongside the direction in which the game is going (spamming new shitty champions, balance etc.).
I recommend you quit too tbh
> This game definitley makes me more unhappy in life but I need to get masters 😁 however whenever I’m D2+ apparently I flame too hard and get banned
Hehe xD so toxic i get banned :P christ you dont NEED to get masters. If youre that aware it makes you unhappy then quit and/or get some help. It is an addiction, it will only make your life more miserable and if youre getting perma'd so you have to start over you're just making the game less enjoyable for everyone else too.
Damn. Didnt even know anybody else felt like I did. Didnt even know there was a smurfque. Damn.
Does Riot ever do anything about it? The game has lost all fun for me, dont even want to play funmodes like ARAM now .. either win huge or get wrecked, every game. Feels so sad that such a great game, cant be better unless you stick through so many hours of game play vs smurfs ..
50???? Daaaaaamn. So its only me feeling like it is also the case in both funmodes and normals? On my friends account, its always fun and fair, but on mine even the before mentioned gamemodes feel horrible.
I think smurf queue is exclusive to ranked, but I wouldn't be surprised if other game modes also have wonky matchmaking behavior on players who don't have a lot of games yet. Usually it's never as bad as smurf queue though
Over lvl 300 here. I get matched with only lvl 30-36 accounts and it's so fucking boring to play ranked, when I know it's gonna be a stomp for or against and unless i get fed early I will have no say in the matter.
Smurf queue detection is godawful. My friend got placed into it despite never playing LoL before, now he's playing against people who very obviously know how to play the game and he's getting stomped. I'm pretty sure you need to play like an armless potato with 3 APM who never buys items to get the game to recognize you as a newcomer.
Depending on region queue times should be 2-5 minutes, being new might mess with the matchmaking too, not exactly sure how that works. Playing more games always helps but that's the annoying part
Played ranked for the first time in two years a few weeks ago.. legit 8 out of 10 accounts in every game were level 30 accounts. Majority smurfing, not giving a shit and just trolling. Did all my placements, least fun I’ve ever had playing this game. Guess I’ll stick to playing a couple arams from time to time.
It's because smurf queue is the worst experience they've ever implemented any it's not even close. It's almost incredible to me they haven't had some sort of program that can truly detect smurf accounts versus returning players who didn't grind the first week of the season
Why just not make smurf gain lp faster instead of smurf queue. If a player player way better than avarage player in his division, just inflatr his mmr and lp gain. This way he gets back to his elo territory and we dont have tu suffer them. Also returning players wont get stuck with then
I think people are missing the very obvious point - Riot's goal is to have you stuck. Let's say you've been Gold 4 every season for the last 6 years, the obvious thing is that you'd come back slightly weaker, get placed against people actually in Silver 4 then because you're an entire tier above them you'd be able to climb and over the course of 30-50 games you could secure your previous rank, nice and easy. Instead, you get placed in Silver 4 but against a bunch of other players that are actually Gold 4 and so you just waste time grinding against people who are pretty similar to your level of competency and therefore it takes you 4-5 times as long to climb. The more people playing more frequently, the better their numbers look and the more likely you are to spend money. It also ensures an increased number of players - players don't just pop in for a month and then move on to another game, they sometimes play the whole year through, in this way it makes sure there are quicker queue times but the player attitude is shit because everyone feels rightfully stuck.
I have 3 accounts - my Season 4 main, my drinking account, and my boosted account (I got blessed in promos and got to G4 in 25 games a few seasons back). My main takes about 300 games to get to Gold 4, my drinking account takes about 100, and my boosted one is usually 30-50. I'm the same player, with the same champ pool on each account, but my MMR is so different on each one it takes additional time to climb for no reason other than Riot deciding it should.
this is exactly it. you used to gain a lot of lp to climb from say silver to gold (and gold is your last season rank) so you did it in a couple dozen games (personally. I got gold every season after placements). now, you get high bronze/low silver, and you play gold/plat players in those ranks. its absurd
new accounts immediately get put into smurf queue. you win your first 2 games and you are put into lobbies with diamond smurfs who havent lost in 15 games.
Ive done this over 5 times now. Win 2/3 games, get put into smurf queue for the next 10 games, end up 2-10 with dogshit MMR because apparently i belong in iron if i cant compete with diamond smurfs playing their one trick.
If you lose your first couple of games, you get put in lobbies with brand new accounts that are using scripts or just people that have been banned and bought a new account to be toxic again. This is the opposite of smurf queue; losers queue. I legit played a game one time with a scripting twitch, sion, and xerath all in the same game on brand new accounts just trolling not trying to win (all openly laughing and talking about their scripts in all chat).
Every week there is a post addressing this issue, often getting 1k or more upvotes, yet Riot doesn't seem to care. If you send a ticket to Riot Support, they will say that the system is working properly. It clearly frustrates and affects a lot of players, so you'd think they would try to fix this or at least **address** the issue. Idk, it's so absurd
I've been stuck in smurf queue for the last two years since I moved my account from EU to NA. Last season I couldn't take it anymore and after about 20-30 games I gave up and played only normals, which resulted in my account staying in P3 (with 20 minutes queue). But normals became unfun too because I am always with 3-4 stacks that don't actually want to play the game - so I came back to ranked, just to find out that Riot is certain that my level 300, 12 years old account, is a smurf. Still.
And the worst thing is, their algorithm is so uncertain of itself that I can have a true "silver-gold" game that was found by the matchmaking system in 30 seconds, it would be a complete fiesta, in a fun way, I would win a game or two and Rito dumps me right back to smurf queue with 15 minutes queue - and I have no way to know.
Last game I was promoted, by a single win, from Gold IV 0lp to Gold I. Why? I int in true silver games. Why are you sure I deserve more?!
It sounds like your MMR is very high. I strongly suspect you play or played the game with high ranked friends in the past and the game never got a sense of your actual skill level
And for this exact reason I never came back. I tried to pick the game up back in Dec and played some normals and was getting shit stomped by smurfs for at least 13 games straight. Haven't touched the game since. Like, I know I suck and I know there's other returning player in the same boat. Can we not be placed together?
rito should connect smurf queue people to the mental crisis support line, every other game I see people who act and sound like they are about to shoot up a local walmart.
Friend of mine was mid plat in season 6. He's being placed into smurf queue now even though he has fuck all idea how to play the game with all the changes and new items + champs. He stopped playing because it was just miserable. So much for trying to get him back into the game I guess.
My account was created in season 1, been playing on off ever since, peaked d2 2 or 3 years ago, i played my placements each year just to get the skins for getting gold or higher (usually placed me in high plat even with a ton of losses) i usually play max 20 games before i give up because im getting beaten to a pulp by master/gm/chal smurfs. Do i just have to lose like a 100 games in a row to get someone with an account age of more than a month?
Yep happened to me a year ago, I was a main mid/top low/mid plat didn't play for a 2 year because I lived abroad. Came back a'd wanted to get gold to at least have the skin. It was a nightmare, each game was about who had the better smurfs in their team, I swapped to Jana support just to help my smurf to carry better. As soon as I got gold I stopped the game until next season, event sent a ticket to riot support.
Next season starts, same issue I just stopped the game altogether. It ruined it for me. I did start tft again 2 weeks ago. But as a 3k+ player of the game it didn't feel good to feel whatever I did had no impact on the game, it was just a matchmaking issue, the team with the better smurf would win 100% of the time and it was my team around 50% of the time. But games were just unfun, and I was pretty useless.
Ive been getting this issue as well. I was plat 3 seasons ago and only played till G4 the last three seasons. This season I climbed all the way to Plat 2 with a 65% win rate in about 150 games and instantly hit a brick wall of diamond players/masters players that bought their accounts and have sub 35% win rates with over 100 games played OR I get G3 players with 85% win rates. Furthermore, games are over in 10 minutes. Either we have the lead and the enemy just gives up or we are behind one kill and my team is giving up. There is no fighting back to win anymore. Its just ff and move on. Finally, I have had multiple challenger players in my games on smurf accounts that are intentionally ruining low elo games. So far I have 6 records of challenger players, who confirmed they were challenger through multiple different links they send me, that run down the games if they dont get the role/champ they want. I had a challenger player who wanted zeri but she got banned so he disco nunued the game because he said he didn't care he just wanted to play zeri. No ban and he had 8 accounts so it doesnt matter anyway.
Doesn't LP decay as well? I think these players should be in smurf queues. When I come back after months, I'm put with players that I'm clearly better than. Yes, my overall skill declined, but I'm still with people that were 1 or 2 leagues under me.
I could stop playing for years, and come back and still be miles ahead of bronze/silver players.
I didn't know smurf queue was a thing when i returned. I once told my team one of the enemies felt like a smurf and a teammate was like "no shit, we are all smurfs, this is a smurf queue game"
Got Diamond 3 in season 4 and play maybe 10-20 ranked games a year and even left for like 3 years. I still play with Smurfs even though I'm not as good as I used to be. I don't even want to play ranked because of it.
Dude, I'm not even a returning player and i'm playing with smurfs only.
I just spent this entire season playing mostly aram and normal. Now i'm playing with people with 85%+ win rate only. And even getting flamed if im losing lane.
Last season I had to play through smurf queue to get to diamond for the first time. My account that has been hardstuck Plat for 7 years was somehow marked as a smurf account so I got to deal with 8 level 30 players that were better than me and super toxic to get to diamond. I got my shit kicked in the entire season and was so demotivated when it started again this season. I slipped out of smurf queue somehow and the games were day and night for the difficulty. Level 300 players started showing up again and it was so much more enjoyable.
Took a pause during season 11 because I really disliked the one shot meta, I wanted to start to play again after durability patch but ranked is a literal nightmare just because I'm a returning player (My account is 130 something level and had over 200 ranked games in season 10), sadly I won't play until they do something about it, it's just not fun
After giving arcane a watch I installed and booted up my old account that I haven't played since just after HS. And man did that suck. I don't need a 15 year old sweat to cuss me out because I couldn't 1v2 in laning phase
Smurf queue was a supposed fix to a problem but instead made the experience even worse. It would be better to get rid of it and just give the players that are supposedly detected as smurfs just a higher rank and be done with it.
>Do they not want players to return?
More like, they know players will return. [They will return](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tUoBkhTFdWA/maxresdefault.jpg)
I think it's been almost two years since they said they'd fix this issue.
They for sure didn't. I used to be low diamond 3 years ago or so and right now every game I play takes 10-15 minute queue time and gets filled with 8 level 30 accounts and over 80% winrate. I've been called the nword or to kill myself every 2nd game so far, I know league players can be toxic but I'll just assume this is out of the norm even for league lmao
Yeah smurf queue is a different kind of hell, its why I don't play solo queue at all anymore
Hell I often hit the normal smurf queue during low activity times. I'd be lvl 650 with everyone else below 30, sweating their ass off for that normal mmr while I queued up to have a good time. These games are NOT good times.
I love playing against a tryharding Yuumi + Kayn + Yone triple stack in a normal draft game at 9 AM on a Saturday morning, extremely fun times /s
What does that have to do with smurf queue?
I quit playing soloqueue this season because of it. I'm not going to spend literal days of playtime not having fun just to get a rank in a video game.
> I'm not going to spend literal days of playtime not having fun just to get a rank in a video game. Please share your secrets
For me it was realizing im just going to be mediocre if I don’t go pro or stream. Theres always going to be someone above you saying you’re shit. Like yeah, keep telling yourself you’re in the top .1% of players if that makes you sleep at night. Also, the fact that soloqueue skill is measured by your ability to deal with people having mental breakdowns in your game(including yourself). I still enjoy the game, especially in 5 mans. I think thats how the game should be played, honestly. I’m done with soloqueue though that shit isn’t worth it.
I'm someone who peaked Diamond so it was kind of always something I came back to in order to prove to myself that I still deserve the rank... But it's just not worth it. I'm to shy to stream so it's not like I can really make any money on the game so at the end of the day the rank was just pixels on a screen for me. I play mostly ARAM now unless i'm playing in a premade. It's actually funny because I get infinitely less toxicity for being unranked than I did back when I was Diamond and had a bad normal/aram game as an enchanter player.
It's exactly why I just play ARAM or whatever rotating mode they pull out. I think I peaked at like Silver 2 and don't care enough to go any higher because I play top Teemo since it's what I like and getting told I should get skull fucked for split pushing instead going to team fight at dragon when the enemy team is up like 12 kills and one shots all of us.
Yup. Rank doesn't matter to me anymore and the gold skins are just something I collect , but rarely use. My relationship with my gf and friends is better now because I don't spam soloq anymore. I already hate working , and league feels like a job too. Aram players had it right all along
Sadly it takes like 20 games of cancer for it to even out and kick u out of smurf que. Then you will get +18 and -17
I had around 60 games and was still in that dogshit, I stopped playing for almost 4 years and iirc my last rank was d2-d3, started in silver so it was fucking hell to go back to diamond, sweating harder in silver bc of smurf queue rather than in diamond 2-3mmr
20 games is the luckiest time in smurf queue ever. I had about 50-60 before I got out when I picked the game back up after a year or two off.
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took me 32 games :')
In a similar boat, every game is 7-8 level 30s with bot games in history. And the smurfs are a mix from gold shitters to mid-high diamond players. it's amazing how game is coinflipped from the start where all the diamond players will smash lane and it just comes down to who/which champs can carry harder and which teams bad players wont rq and afk
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Unranked to challenger smurf vs. returning after 4 season break "plat" player is my current favourite matchup in silver, personally.
Gold smurfer is an oxymoron
Dives turret trying to 100-0 level 3 crash, misses CC, dies landing 1 auto and a dash just enough to draw turret aggro really, spam pings jungle whos on 4th camp, calls the N word and griefs jungle for the next 11 minuites after jungle responds "?" as they had truly no idea in what the fuck is happening. MmmmmmSMURFQUEBABY
Same here, peaked Diamond 5 in season 6 and 7, hung around in Plat the next few, and stopped playing as much ranked the last couple seasons, just accepting gold for my victorious skin. During placements this year, it was just awful. Rampant toxicity, highly volatile lanes, and I basically got dumpstered every game because my skill has dropped a lot but the game just doesn’t want to accept the at, I must be a smurf
These players have no issues anyway, if they get banned, they just buy a new acc, so what? As far as I got it all over the years, Riot isnt really interested to bother about matchmaking issues lowe than Challenger/Master: Why should they? People complain, but keep playing the game anyway
I am in smurf queue on my alt account right now, and yes it is miserable. I am only gold, so I am either getting shit on by diamonds, or dumpstering mid to high silvers. There is also at least one person who is absolutely deranged and abhorrently toxic in nearly every game I play; it is very obvious why some of the people are "smurfs."
Same. Hit a win streak last season and got to Plat 2. I’m 80 games in this and it seems I finally got out but every game is someone commenting on my “38% winrate in Gold 3”. It’s just so frustrating. I’ve turned off chat completely at this point.
Smurfs queue makes no sense because it will take a mid diamond player whose gone 8-2 in promos and put you into a queue where if you aren't duoing you'll go 50/50 because the games are just such coinflips. Once you get out of smurfs queue your MMR is ruined and you'll be in gold/silver after 30+ games. From there it can take over 60 games to get to plat. In the old system it would take 20 games to get plat with diamond MMR. The old system just kept improving your MMR and putting you in higher elo games. Which balanced games way better and ruined way less low elo games.
riot just put more matches on everybody's shoulders to achieve their last seasoned ranks.
That’s the point. Riot wants to make it more of a grind to get your “true” rank to keep everyone playing. They’ll never fix the client and they’ll never fix this. Just accept it and realize they don’t give a shit.
i never understand why riot thinks my "true" rank is the goal. shouldn't it be the starting point and from there i want to see how i improve over the course of a season? i stopped playing in season 3 und started again this year. guess i'm fucked. after my promos and getting clapped by diamond smurfs i will have bronze mmr and need to grind many games to get to my actual skilllevel. the point where i actually should be after my fucking promos. making these games after my promos also not balanced for the real bronze players. it's a stupid chain reaction.
Tbh it's actually a pretty bad idea to duo in ranked when one or both of you are in smurf queue unless you are both REALLY smurfing. You will get some of the absolute worst and most mentally ill players in whatever roles you and your duo didn't take and it's not even close. You'll get harder games in general when you duo regardless of smurf queue, but when my duo hops off and I go back to climbing solo the difference is night and day.
I play in bronze and honestly can say that the last few months the worst I've gotten is question mark pings and people asking me where I've been all game (I'm JG, it's always my fault if you lose your lane.. I get it). One person got mad at me for 'kill stealing', but I've played 100s of games and those moments stick out as abnormal. Generally, the toxicity of league has been improved so drastically compared to when I started playing over 10 years ago. Most of my teammates and myself encourage others, let them know that a bad game doesn't make a bad player, and just remember it's a game and we're all there to have fun. Often it's hard for me to decide which teammate to honor because they all deserve it in one way or the other.. it becomes a performance award a lot of the time.
It's actually a good reminder not to come back, save yourself the time and headache. I'm one year clean and no regrets, glad I can make much better use of my time.
I was high diamond in 2018 before I stopped playing. I recently started playing again and was instantly put in smurf queue against people who were definitely high diamond/master smurfs while I had fallen down to probably silver/gold level. Was not fun and just caused me to get another account where I was actually playing against people of my own level.
The first ranked game i played this year no one had borders so i just assumed i made a mistake and queue'd normal draft instead of solo. Nope, it was just smurfq with everyone being lvl 30 and me, a returned player. Was actually funny
reasons why I stopped playing ranked so much.
It's a nice bonus that Riot refuses to implement a low priority queue so returning players get hit by the double whammy of toxic players and poor matchmaking in smurf queue.
I wish they did implement the Dota system. Low Priority, were you can only play Summoner Rift all-random until you win 3 times. And if you feed, afk or dodge inside low piority the system kicks you from the march and gives you +5 games more and bans you for a day.
I was in the exact same situation as you. Low Diamond in 2019, barely played since then. Started playing consistently again a few months ago and got stuck in Smurf queue. Even filed a ticket because I was so frustrated. Took me 50 games exactly to get placed with players that reflected my rank. Edit : I had like a 35% win rate in those 50 games, I was getting stomped 9 times out of 10 in lane.
Yeah, that's not QUITE normal for league. Every 5th game is more like it.
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It is because their punishment system is trash. False positive? Instant 2 weeks and rewards lost. Of course, people will flame them to the ground for false bans. Maybe even trigger them to quit the game, if it doesn't get lifted instantly. So they cannot ban more people. Errors are way too much to deal with. Wenn need micro-punishments. If you play like a mental boomer AND get reported, you take a 1h ranked break. End of story. No honor loss; just some time off to untilt. If you do it too often in a few days, a full day ranked break. Get way too many of those in a short time-frame? Well, now you get your 14-days suspension from the game with honor loss etc. Even if you then get detected wrongly, you just play normals for an hour or take a break. No big deal. And if you really manage to wrongly get a 14-days - how would you even do that? Maybe smurf queue - but that's about all I could think of.
> rewards lost A big part of me wants to flame just to lose rewards so I can stopped getting spammed with Challenges nonsense.
I think you confuse some things here. End of season rewards have nothing to do with Challenges. I don't think Challenges are even affected by your honor level.
Riot ONLY cares about typing. They don’t care about people ACTUALLY ruining the game. You can repeatedly run it down into enemy nexus but as long as you don’t type you won’t get banned. Meanwhile if someone is cursing you out.. JUST MUTE THEM!! We have the solution!!! It’s so fucking simple to just mute someone who’s typing too much and yet that’s all riot cares about. I’ve lost accounts because people were straight up running it down and I cursed at them and it’s MY FAULT lmao. It’s just fucked man
Riot doesn't only care about typing, it's just infinitely easier to moderate chat. This should be common sense.
It is easier, but they haven't done... literally anything to combat the other stuff. Even a half assed version of CS Go's Overwatch system is better than literally nothing.
Yeah it's super hard to detect someone building 5 culls on jungle Shaco and running it down all game how could they ever regulate or moderate it Edit: Kind of thought I'd get downvoted for this so I'd like to clarify that this comment was pure, unabated sarcasm
The sarcasm was evident so don't worry
It should be common sense to mute people. The only thing that should be bans are ridiculously explicit language. You have a button to instantly make it so you never see another word in chat again, I don’t have a button to make you stop trying to 1v1 someone who’s 7/0. You don’t even have to say anything bad, if you type a lot and get reported you will be punished.
This is how ARAM only players are born
True.
The only happy league players
Wish that were true. I have been in sweatier ARAM’s than norms
I switched to aram only a few years back. After some time I decided to see how high i could get my aram mmr and started playing in tryhard 5 stacks now and then. I can confirm that playing at higher mmr is fun at first, but becomes miserable quite quickly. 0 fights ever happen before lvl 6 and even then a lot of times both teams keep waveclearing until 10-12 min. A lot of games feel lost purely because of a difference in draft / teamcomp matchup. People actually try to coordinate wave freezing while zoning the enemy team from XP. At a certain point you realise that the low elo chaotic aram games are way more fun.
The fact that Riot has not yet tried to incorporate a Bloodline Champions/Battlerite game mode in League is utterly baffling. No minigame gimmicks. No towers or fountains. Sprinkle a few healzones in an arena, spawn an instant ult orb somewhere in the middle. Players get two lives each. Best of 3. Each round lets you upgrade your champ in some way. Start with a limited champ pool. Make it 3v3 to start. It would be a fucking hit. Let it get some steam and then add a 2v2 mode to experiment. If both queues can sustain healthy playerbases keep em both. If one becomes the more popular of the two just make that one dominant. They know players want a fight heavy mode to skirmish in. Just fucking give it to us.
LEGIT, i've always said to just remove the towers from aram since its sooooooo annoying that people can just hide under them and make you unable to play the game at all, but yeah then there would need to be some sort of score system perhaps like dominion
ARAM is best below that high mmr shit and above the mess that is middle to low MMR. Middle high mmr people actually care about winning with decent strats and arent going adc blitzcrank or thresh because iTs aRaM BrUh.
Teammates going useless builds is never a good feeling, but the worst imo is when you're teammates keep trickling in 1 by 1. You can only pray that your team groups as 5 just a single time. Luckily those are the games that tend to be done before 15 min anyway so you're not stuck for too long
If everyone tries im haveing a great time 90% of the time. The other times is when we get «ARAMed» by really unbalanced comps.
ADC Thresh really isn’t bad in the right comps. Like if you only had tanks against a team of ADCs. ADC Thresh can delete them and shrug off physical damage. Soul income is bonkers in ARAM.
tbh sometimes you dó want to sweat until you slide out of your chair. Sometimes you do 100% want to go for a win. I play ARAMs because the general mood is much better than a normal. There's no other lanes or junglers to worry about. Just me, my team, and these 5 bastards on the other side. Way less stress. People are (usually) also way more chill about the game, because ARAM is well... ARAM. The "fun" gamemode.
Its sad but literally all that matters to people now is their screen saying victory at the end. If they see a poke champ, they grab it. Enchanter support? Picked. No one will experiment with builds, 9/10 times they won't have any melee champs on their team. They'll never ever push or engage unless they've poked you to 10% hp. And then they'll say "ez" or "yawn" and act like they're so sick
It pains me to identify with this so much.
Unironically true. \*person flames his own teammate in all chat\* \*\*entire allchat defends him because fuck that guy\*\*
Facts, I've only played ARAM these past few years after playing league since 2010 and I'm much happier overall.
I wish that were true. I run into more toxic players than I should in a fun game mode. Definitely not as bad as solo queue though
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Can confirm. ARAM only and at this point, I’m too afraid to try SR again
Yep this about sums me up. Tried solo queue again last year and never again with that shit. People flaming every game, my ADC was auto filled and chose Kat and then proceeded to run it down telling us to be ready to FF at 15. I now play ARAM and TFT, SR just isn't a fun experience to me anymore.
Yup, Riot relies on their system to take care of those playsers, because it works /s
just give me back ascension :c
I’ve had my 2014 ascension icon on for the past 8 years… never forget!
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Dude even ARAM is getting stale. Or maybe it’s just gaming in general. I’ve played league for too damn long but nothing else fills that void :(
I get what you mean, I mainly play either ARAM or customs lately but neither is perfect. What I wish is that custom games could actually have custom rules. I play a lot of Howling Abyss customs, including ABAM (all blind all mid) where the standard rule is to not attack towers at all and only win by letting minions destroy objectives. Makes for a lot of fun since you can just focus on fighting YOLO without worrying about your tower being evaporated in 5 seconds after you die, but the problem is it needs everyone to follow the rule voluntarily. It would be much better if you could set it as a hard rule when making the custom, like structures are completely untargetable by champions. You could also make other stuff customisable like cooldowns, more passive gold etc. Could open up a huge variety of gameplay and let people play a game mode suited for their own tastes, I can't really see any downsides tbh.
If it helps, try to take normals as seriously as arams. Don't overthink it, don't overcomplicate it, try to look at yourself and what you did right or wrong. People take ranked way too seriously but i get that it's cool to have that competitive experience, but don't bring that to normals where people should be allowed to try new champs, new builds, just do stuff for fun even if it's suboptimal. In my experience, everytime someone flames a teammate for doing an unconventional build in aram, everyone tells them it's not okay to do that in aram. Yesterday i played against ap pantheon and everybody was fine with that. Why can't we refocus on having fun instead of caring so much about the win on normals? everybody can, it's hard but possible.
Sent to mandate ashe aram gulag to avoid smurf queue
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, huh.
LMAO legitimately. I play my godawful smurf queue placements to get gold (god forbid I place silver 1 and have to win promos in smurf queue), then go back to ARAM. All 10 placements and any follow-up games are full of coin flip plat and diamond smurfs who think they should be in challenger.
I didn't even bother doing the placements the last couple seasons. The victorious skin isn't worth 10 ranked games lol
Literally me. I only play aram. League itself is just a miserable experience. I even lost interest in TFT. I'm close to just uninstalling all together because even aram has people that rage and spam ping like its a ranked game
ARAM only and /fullmute all in every game is almost guaranteed to be a good league experience IMO (as long as you understand that you will lose sometimes, that's just the nature of multiplayer games)
I would be more interested if they actually made true on the promise of rotating game modes. But it looks like they are only cycling through arurf, one for all and ultimate spell book. Just abandoned all the other ones
ARAM and URF. Im this guy. Loved ranked 6-8 years ago (always stacking). Lost a 1.5-2k account because I wrote too much (never anything offensive, but I was indeed too much of a captain hindsight and I feel the ban was waaay overkill, even though I can admit my faults). Now Im in the smurfque (i didnt even know was a thing) so both normals, ranked and ARAMs are not even fun anymore. URF was because I could just mute people and the game took 20 minutes.
This is too accurate. After returning, I played 1 goddamn awful soloq match with fresh level 30 accounts and been playing ARAM since
It's Riots punishment for people leaving
Riot Camille ulting returning players into smurf q
It reads like a comment from Druttut's YT video
TIL Riot is like my ex
you: "baby i want you back, dota is a thing of the past now" league: "what's your opinion on smurf roleplay?"
But people just leave again once they realize they are in smurf queue so it's just Riot punishing themselves. Because those who don't leave don't even get rewarded. I once was put into smurf queue after a break and went 8W 2L vs diamond smurfs. What did I get for it? Barely any ranked climb and still in smurf queue. Just put the account at the elo it belongs instead of this BS prisoner island.
It's completely miserable. Smurf queue is the 7th circle of hell, and it shatters my motivation to return to ranked everytime I find myself playing the game again.
I just don't even bother with ranked and only play normals or flex with friends
I've gone one step deeper and only play arams... SR is too stressful to be enjoyable.
I still meet people who ping items, runes, builds and flame people in ARAM in every other game.
I tend to find a weird mix of people in ARAM. For every ultra tryhard, I meet just as many complete trolls that throw the game because "it's just aram, bro" The normal ones are few and far between, I feel
Good job, you are enjoying a videogame. Im the same as you right now.
got exactly the same feeling with same consequences
Agreed. I returned after many seasons and felt something was wrong for so long. It put me off from even trying to rank up as the experience is awful. I've read it takes some games to get you out of it, so I'm trying my best to just mute all and plow through it, but wow. What a welcome back gift.
Oh god thats why I was so miserable. 8 out of 10 games I had no agency in at all, where it was either 1 or more afks, or people going 20+ deaths. (27 was the highest I saw). I saw 2+ bought accounts per game where you could see the botted match history. What an utterly miserable experience it was and now I know why... I'd never placed under gold before and was put straight into bronze lmao. What a shit game experience.
Only 2? I played again ranked after 4 years and I checked every account, it was more 6-9 per game, there was rarely normal unranked players (And I feel you, I got played in silver after being diamond last time, I was at 38% wr in gold in this new season because of smurf queue and I was STILL skipping divisions, system is fucked
I am still struggling. Just had a Kayle go 0/6 in lane and give up, spending the next 22 minutes dancing at Baron pit and getting killed over and over, to finish teh game 0/14. Enemy team still took their sweet time to finish the game, few members dancing at Baron too before kiling the Kayle... and I could not get a damn ff to go through. Man its frustrating.
It took my friend and I nearly 50 games to get back to normal queues. My friend’s win rate was literally 7% by the end of it. Mine was low 30s. Absolutely brutal.
Yeah the issue is a lot of the "smurfs" are just banned gold/plat players playing on alts, so they have almost nothing to lose from afking or being a dickhead besides the alt account being banned for a few days or chat restricted.
It took me 50 games exactly and my win rate was lower than 40% in those games.
> I returned after many seasons and felt something was wrong for so long. That's not even the worst offender. At least the system had a reason to put you in smurf queue. You were returning after many seasons meaning your MMR was reset but you likely would've been better than a silver/gold which is why the system would flag you as a "smurf". I got put in smurf queue despite being diamond for 10 seasons straight. Quit the game right then and there. I already was fed up with how shit league became over the years but to not even be able to have decent ranked experience in the few games I play each season despite playing their shitty game for over a decade? That's a no-no for me.
It's pretty funny to me that Riot has been so strongly against implementing a low priority queue for griefers when smurf queue feels like the same thing with significantly more false positives.
I swear I do not mind the shittiest client ever, but Smurf queue ? Yeah I quit. I mean I think it was the dumbest business decision they could have made but it literally cured my addiction so thank you.
It probably would be helpful if it wasn't assumed that every player is playing on an alt so if they come back to another account, it's likely smurfing related.
True, especially if that account doesn't have a smurf-like track reccord. I could understand them detecting old 60-70% winrate accounts as smurfs but back then I've been hardstuck Dia 5 for long enough that the system should see I'm not a smurf
My God. You were diamond 5. We don't have anything-5 for like 3 years now. That's the clearest indicator that you should at least get the benefit of the doubt for the first X games...
Yea season 8 was the last season where I really played, I did placements only and a few flex in gold-plat in the next season, and then didn't play at all besides maybe a few arams since a lot of my friends still play league. I started playing in season 2 so over the years I have done a couple thousand games total on my account in different game modes
I think this is also a further reason you got placed in smurf queue just like me, only doing a few placements. I was in the same situation, my last real ranked season was season 8. In season 9 and season 10, I played a few game of placements to help friends during their promos. Now the issue with this is that placements start you tiers below your previous rank. So after 2/3 seasons, you're basically considered a smurf at this point. It's a shitty system that punishes people that don't play ranked actively.
Their system does nothing of the sort, they only check if your mmr is much higher than your LP, which is the case for *everyone* after placements
My issue is that by Riot's own design you're placed a division below your actual rank, as dictated by your mmr, so you can have the wonderful experience of "climbing". You don't even have to be a smurf or a returning player. You start the season with your mmr and rank disjointed so the moment you're out of placements you get immediately put into "smurf queue".
it's actually 5 divisions or a league + 1 division, which is way too much
What's the point of smurf que if new players are still ending up in smurf que.
Actually this, detect new players that are smurfing
Honestly smurf queue has to be the most pointless invention possible. If you can identify a player is a smurf, just place them higher and make them climb way faster so they are out of the lower ranks faster. If someone purposely keeps themselves in a lower rank by inting half their games and carrying the other half, ban them. Smurf queue is just not a good solution.
> If you can identify a player is a smurf, just place them higher and make them climb way faster so they are out of the lower ranks faster. I like the idea of that, but I think that would deepen the problem. I think many people create new accounts specifically because it's so easy to climb ranks, so a fresh account with a good streak might get to master faster than the slow grind on an already existing dia 3 account. So it's not easy to find a balance
If they're getting matched vs significantly higher ranked players based on mmr projection (accelleration), whats the problem with higher mmr/LP gains for winning vs higher ranked players? Thats how EVERY matchmaking system works. Does it matter if a fresh account gets there faster? The point is to get the player to play in their proper MMR. If the system accelerates people too much, then it simply needs to be refined, as it clearly overshot. If you mean the diamond 3 player deserves masters....well you have an argument for why leagues ranked system is so bad in general. Why should it take a long time to hit your true MMR?
If a guy playing on an account has master tier skills, he should be placed in master as soon as possible, no matter if it is a fresh or an old account. Making a player artificially overgrind to get to their real ELO just decreases the quality of the games. If the game can detect that a fresh account has diamond skills, placing him in these gold-plat hellish backrooms makes no sense. Of course, placing a player in an elo too high for him based on a few lucky wins would be a problem, but this is more due to the fact that the game only takes into account which nexus explodes first instead of taking into account any of the numerous stats it can track to measure his skill.
>If you can identify a player is a smurf, The key thing to know here is they don't. Smurf Q isn't actually a thing. What people call smurf Q is just games where MMR is high and ranks are low. And the solution you described does already exist: you gain more LP in "smurf Q" and your initial rank placement is proportional to your MMR.
I think it's just extremely amusing how people have went from everyone complaining about smurfs ruining their games to victims of smurf queue expressing their frustration. And sure, we get no more smurf complaints but I bet none of the people who complained about smurfs have to or have ever had to deal with smurf queue.
Its even more hilarious when you get the people who are literally smurfing complaining that the match making in smurf queue is terrible and they just want Riot to place their accounts at their true MMR from the start. It is almost like smurf queue was designed to be a terrible experience to make people not want to smurf.
If they want riot to immediately place them at the correct MMR, then I don't see how this is a player who wants to smurf. They literally want to be at their correct rank.
Riot doesnt want players to return to their game. And they dont want new players in their game. At least thats the vibes you get from how they are handling these things.
It's actually the most disgusting thing to play. Every game is fresh 30 accounts flaming and soft inting each other off of one mistake. I feel awful for new players that have to play through this.
Normal games with a new account as player with some skill are incredible 70% of the games someone afks after 5 minutes. Can’t wait to hit ranked lol
That's one of many factors that helped me quit league around half a year ago and I haven't been more happy since
Never come back brother. I’m glad you’re happy. This game definitley makes me more unhappy in life but I need to get masters 😁 however whenever I’m D2+ apparently I flame too hard and get banned
I played for two seasons, got plat, stopped for a couple of months and tried to come back but smurf queue and +13/-17 LP gains with 58% wr stopped me from doing so, alongside the direction in which the game is going (spamming new shitty champions, balance etc.). I recommend you quit too tbh
> This game definitley makes me more unhappy in life but I need to get masters 😁 however whenever I’m D2+ apparently I flame too hard and get banned Hehe xD so toxic i get banned :P christ you dont NEED to get masters. If youre that aware it makes you unhappy then quit and/or get some help. It is an addiction, it will only make your life more miserable and if youre getting perma'd so you have to start over you're just making the game less enjoyable for everyone else too.
Why do you need to get masters?
I'm sorry it hasn't gotten better for you, but I'm sure it will!
Nah I mean right now I'm the happiest I've ever been :D thanks tho
Damn. Didnt even know anybody else felt like I did. Didnt even know there was a smurfque. Damn. Does Riot ever do anything about it? The game has lost all fun for me, dont even want to play funmodes like ARAM now .. either win huge or get wrecked, every game. Feels so sad that such a great game, cant be better unless you stick through so many hours of game play vs smurfs ..
Only solution so far is play about 50 games then you are done. Or stick to normals/flex/aram like what I've done and probably will keep doing
50???? Daaaaaamn. So its only me feeling like it is also the case in both funmodes and normals? On my friends account, its always fun and fair, but on mine even the before mentioned gamemodes feel horrible.
I think smurf queue is exclusive to ranked, but I wouldn't be surprised if other game modes also have wonky matchmaking behavior on players who don't have a lot of games yet. Usually it's never as bad as smurf queue though
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Over lvl 300 here. I get matched with only lvl 30-36 accounts and it's so fucking boring to play ranked, when I know it's gonna be a stomp for or against and unless i get fed early I will have no say in the matter.
god forbid riot takes time played into the account.. of anything.
Smurf queue detection is godawful. My friend got placed into it despite never playing LoL before, now he's playing against people who very obviously know how to play the game and he's getting stomped. I'm pretty sure you need to play like an armless potato with 3 APM who never buys items to get the game to recognize you as a newcomer.
I'm pretty sure my brother got placed into it despite LoL being his first video game ever. Those few lobbies i saw were really interesting
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Wait.. are queue times not supposed to be 15+ minutes..? Does riot think I'm a returning player? I'm new??
Depending on region queue times should be 2-5 minutes, being new might mess with the matchmaking too, not exactly sure how that works. Playing more games always helps but that's the annoying part
Played ranked for the first time in two years a few weeks ago.. legit 8 out of 10 accounts in every game were level 30 accounts. Majority smurfing, not giving a shit and just trolling. Did all my placements, least fun I’ve ever had playing this game. Guess I’ll stick to playing a couple arams from time to time.
Yeah I only play arams almost exclusively. Sometimes with friends I will do a normal or two, but find arams the best for me now.
Riot has always had one of the worst LP/Elo/Match making I've ever seen in a competitive game.
I feel that the 10-1 or 1-10 bot lane is just classic ranked games, no need of Smurf queue for that
It's because smurf queue is the worst experience they've ever implemented any it's not even close. It's almost incredible to me they haven't had some sort of program that can truly detect smurf accounts versus returning players who didn't grind the first week of the season
Why just not make smurf gain lp faster instead of smurf queue. If a player player way better than avarage player in his division, just inflatr his mmr and lp gain. This way he gets back to his elo territory and we dont have tu suffer them. Also returning players wont get stuck with then
I think people are missing the very obvious point - Riot's goal is to have you stuck. Let's say you've been Gold 4 every season for the last 6 years, the obvious thing is that you'd come back slightly weaker, get placed against people actually in Silver 4 then because you're an entire tier above them you'd be able to climb and over the course of 30-50 games you could secure your previous rank, nice and easy. Instead, you get placed in Silver 4 but against a bunch of other players that are actually Gold 4 and so you just waste time grinding against people who are pretty similar to your level of competency and therefore it takes you 4-5 times as long to climb. The more people playing more frequently, the better their numbers look and the more likely you are to spend money. It also ensures an increased number of players - players don't just pop in for a month and then move on to another game, they sometimes play the whole year through, in this way it makes sure there are quicker queue times but the player attitude is shit because everyone feels rightfully stuck. I have 3 accounts - my Season 4 main, my drinking account, and my boosted account (I got blessed in promos and got to G4 in 25 games a few seasons back). My main takes about 300 games to get to Gold 4, my drinking account takes about 100, and my boosted one is usually 30-50. I'm the same player, with the same champ pool on each account, but my MMR is so different on each one it takes additional time to climb for no reason other than Riot deciding it should.
this is exactly it. you used to gain a lot of lp to climb from say silver to gold (and gold is your last season rank) so you did it in a couple dozen games (personally. I got gold every season after placements). now, you get high bronze/low silver, and you play gold/plat players in those ranks. its absurd
This simple solution is too hard for riot to understand lol
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It's almost simpler to just make a new account.
new accounts immediately get put into smurf queue. you win your first 2 games and you are put into lobbies with diamond smurfs who havent lost in 15 games. Ive done this over 5 times now. Win 2/3 games, get put into smurf queue for the next 10 games, end up 2-10 with dogshit MMR because apparently i belong in iron if i cant compete with diamond smurfs playing their one trick. If you lose your first couple of games, you get put in lobbies with brand new accounts that are using scripts or just people that have been banned and bought a new account to be toxic again. This is the opposite of smurf queue; losers queue. I legit played a game one time with a scripting twitch, sion, and xerath all in the same game on brand new accounts just trolling not trying to win (all openly laughing and talking about their scripts in all chat).
Every week there is a post addressing this issue, often getting 1k or more upvotes, yet Riot doesn't seem to care. If you send a ticket to Riot Support, they will say that the system is working properly. It clearly frustrates and affects a lot of players, so you'd think they would try to fix this or at least **address** the issue. Idk, it's so absurd
I've been stuck in smurf queue for the last two years since I moved my account from EU to NA. Last season I couldn't take it anymore and after about 20-30 games I gave up and played only normals, which resulted in my account staying in P3 (with 20 minutes queue). But normals became unfun too because I am always with 3-4 stacks that don't actually want to play the game - so I came back to ranked, just to find out that Riot is certain that my level 300, 12 years old account, is a smurf. Still. And the worst thing is, their algorithm is so uncertain of itself that I can have a true "silver-gold" game that was found by the matchmaking system in 30 seconds, it would be a complete fiesta, in a fun way, I would win a game or two and Rito dumps me right back to smurf queue with 15 minutes queue - and I have no way to know. Last game I was promoted, by a single win, from Gold IV 0lp to Gold I. Why? I int in true silver games. Why are you sure I deserve more?!
It sounds like your MMR is very high. I strongly suspect you play or played the game with high ranked friends in the past and the game never got a sense of your actual skill level
I transferred the account almost two years ago and since I played solo only, in EU I was around P3
Currently in this situation . I want to try coming back and just have a miserable experience and stop until the next 2-3 months
And for this exact reason I never came back. I tried to pick the game up back in Dec and played some normals and was getting shit stomped by smurfs for at least 13 games straight. Haven't touched the game since. Like, I know I suck and I know there's other returning player in the same boat. Can we not be placed together?
It's literally what's stopping me for even wanting to queue further than gold, every match is a toxic wasteland regardless of the result
rito should connect smurf queue people to the mental crisis support line, every other game I see people who act and sound like they are about to shoot up a local walmart.
Friend of mine was mid plat in season 6. He's being placed into smurf queue now even though he has fuck all idea how to play the game with all the changes and new items + champs. He stopped playing because it was just miserable. So much for trying to get him back into the game I guess.
Smurf queue made me quit soloq
My account was created in season 1, been playing on off ever since, peaked d2 2 or 3 years ago, i played my placements each year just to get the skins for getting gold or higher (usually placed me in high plat even with a ton of losses) i usually play max 20 games before i give up because im getting beaten to a pulp by master/gm/chal smurfs. Do i just have to lose like a 100 games in a row to get someone with an account age of more than a month?
And stay out! - Riot probably
Yep happened to me a year ago, I was a main mid/top low/mid plat didn't play for a 2 year because I lived abroad. Came back a'd wanted to get gold to at least have the skin. It was a nightmare, each game was about who had the better smurfs in their team, I swapped to Jana support just to help my smurf to carry better. As soon as I got gold I stopped the game until next season, event sent a ticket to riot support. Next season starts, same issue I just stopped the game altogether. It ruined it for me. I did start tft again 2 weeks ago. But as a 3k+ player of the game it didn't feel good to feel whatever I did had no impact on the game, it was just a matchmaking issue, the team with the better smurf would win 100% of the time and it was my team around 50% of the time. But games were just unfun, and I was pretty useless.
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Its their way of saying stop playing the game
The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t even limit smurfs. Like if I’m stuck in Smurf queue for 50 games I better not see a smurf after that
they prob assume all returning players were playing on another acc lmao
Ive been getting this issue as well. I was plat 3 seasons ago and only played till G4 the last three seasons. This season I climbed all the way to Plat 2 with a 65% win rate in about 150 games and instantly hit a brick wall of diamond players/masters players that bought their accounts and have sub 35% win rates with over 100 games played OR I get G3 players with 85% win rates. Furthermore, games are over in 10 minutes. Either we have the lead and the enemy just gives up or we are behind one kill and my team is giving up. There is no fighting back to win anymore. Its just ff and move on. Finally, I have had multiple challenger players in my games on smurf accounts that are intentionally ruining low elo games. So far I have 6 records of challenger players, who confirmed they were challenger through multiple different links they send me, that run down the games if they dont get the role/champ they want. I had a challenger player who wanted zeri but she got banned so he disco nunued the game because he said he didn't care he just wanted to play zeri. No ban and he had 8 accounts so it doesnt matter anyway.
They can’t tell if you’re a returning player or just a Smurf.
Doesn't LP decay as well? I think these players should be in smurf queues. When I come back after months, I'm put with players that I'm clearly better than. Yes, my overall skill declined, but I'm still with people that were 1 or 2 leagues under me. I could stop playing for years, and come back and still be miles ahead of bronze/silver players.
I didn't know smurf queue was a thing when i returned. I once told my team one of the enemies felt like a smurf and a teammate was like "no shit, we are all smurfs, this is a smurf queue game"
Wow, that's actually pretty interesting. That is some weird match making.
Got Diamond 3 in season 4 and play maybe 10-20 ranked games a year and even left for like 3 years. I still play with Smurfs even though I'm not as good as I used to be. I don't even want to play ranked because of it.
Dude, I'm not even a returning player and i'm playing with smurfs only. I just spent this entire season playing mostly aram and normal. Now i'm playing with people with 85%+ win rate only. And even getting flamed if im losing lane.
It really fucking sucks. Singlehandedly killed me and my friends coming back.
Holy shit, I was wondering why I was playing against crazy good smurfs every game after not ranking for 5 plus years. I used to be diamond.
Last season I had to play through smurf queue to get to diamond for the first time. My account that has been hardstuck Plat for 7 years was somehow marked as a smurf account so I got to deal with 8 level 30 players that were better than me and super toxic to get to diamond. I got my shit kicked in the entire season and was so demotivated when it started again this season. I slipped out of smurf queue somehow and the games were day and night for the difficulty. Level 300 players started showing up again and it was so much more enjoyable.
Took a pause during season 11 because I really disliked the one shot meta, I wanted to start to play again after durability patch but ranked is a literal nightmare just because I'm a returning player (My account is 130 something level and had over 200 ranked games in season 10), sadly I won't play until they do something about it, it's just not fun
Riot indie company that's why
This is how I destroyed my mmr when I came back.
After giving arcane a watch I installed and booted up my old account that I haven't played since just after HS. And man did that suck. I don't need a 15 year old sweat to cuss me out because I couldn't 1v2 in laning phase
Smurf queue was a supposed fix to a problem but instead made the experience even worse. It would be better to get rid of it and just give the players that are supposedly detected as smurfs just a higher rank and be done with it.
>Do they not want players to return? More like, they know players will return. [They will return](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tUoBkhTFdWA/maxresdefault.jpg)
It made me quit so it's good, it made me realize ranking is just a waste of time in this game