VALORANT Devs Are Investigating How To Combat Smurfs
Smurfs have been a big part of competitive gaming culture for some time now. They pack out games and bring a serious imbalance to online games, especially for low-rank players, who have no chance against Masters-grade infiltrators in their attempts to climb the ranked ladder. But now, one of the leading competitive shooters is taking action against the smurfers, and a huge crackdown could be coming very soon.
What Is Smurfing?
Smurfing is when a high-level player in any given game creates a new account to play with in lower-level games, often steamrolling players. The tactic is a lot of fun for the high-level players, but causes a lot of bitterness in ranked categories due to its unfairness, and it severely rattles the progress of lower-ranked players.
Smurfs aren’t entirely common, but when they crop up, they cause a lot of problems.
Click to enlargeVALORANT’s Anti-Smurf Measures
Developers at Riot Games have taken note of VALORANT’s major smurfing problem, and are now taking a deeper look into what they can do to bring the dishonest players to justice. In their latest “Ask VALORANT” blog post, the team have spoken on their intentions to put smurfing to rest. They state “Smurfs and Smurfettes, while relatively small in number, are absolutely real and are frustrating to play against. We’ve been collecting and incorporating feedback from all our channels, and have since spun up an investigation into the current state of smurfing in VALORANT.”
It’s some positive reinforcement that smurfs could soon be a thing of the past in the VALORANT and that finally a balance of fairness can be found. Hopefully, some other game developers catch onto this way of thinking, and our comp games can be just a little bit fairer.
Images via Riot Games
