Valorant players still complain about smurfing problem, how long is Riot Games going to take to address the issue?

For those unaware, a smurf is essentially a high-ranked player who intentionally plays in low-ranked matches to compete against less experienced gamers. This can be done either by deliberately dropping ranks or by creating a new account.

Riot Games had acknowledged smurfing issues on Valorant with their Ask Valorant session from May saying that they had been collecting and incorporating feedback from all channels in order to delve deep into the issue and fix it.

An actionable plan was not made available at the time but Riot did show its willingness to address the problem by cryptically saying that it’ll be putting its foot down on smurfs with bad intent, but after they kill the incentive for smurfs with no malicious intent.

However, the game developer did sort of downplay the spread of the smurfing problem on Valorant saying that “it isn’t actually as prevalent as some of the community might have you believe.”

Now, of course, we aren’t going to sniff around fact-checking to confirm the reasonableness of the statement, but we can actually highlight what the community itself has to say and let you be the judge of that.

Lower elo games suck because every other game has a troll / throw. How has riot not taken better steps to handle this yet? They have a great anti cheat but can’t IP ban players who smurf and ruin the game for people trying to get into it.
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the only thing these account levels did is making me realize how many smurfs we actually have…anyone else feel that way? every game some new reyna/raze with a level 2 accocunt lmao now you can actually see its new accounts and its sad how many of them are in almost every ranked game.
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As clear from the above reports, and many more [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] across social media, the smurfing problem plaguing Valorant indeed is (allegedly) bad. Players have complained that they bump into it game after game which simply ruins the overall experience.

Some smurfs also just love the attention and make their presence felt to all by announcing that they’re a smurf and winning or losing doesn’t matter to them, which is quite toxic. Such behavior has become quite common lately.

But there are always two sides to every story and the entirety of the smurfing ordeal is no exception. You see, Riot was actually right to some degree when they said that the issue isn’t as prevalent as you think.

There are also several cases of players that are actually good at the game yet are labeled by other paranoid players as being smurfs, if they happen to bag a higher than usual kill score.

Such players may play as skillfully as possible but are pulled down by their average joe teammates due to which they are unable to reach the ranks they deserve and are instead matched with those with lesser experience.

So yeah, clearly, not every skilled gamer is a smurf. But still, there is no denying that Riot has done little to address the problem to date.

The issue has been going on since forever and while its spread is debatable, a clampdown on actual malicious smurfs no matter what their numbers, has now become more necessary than ever before, lest the situation grows even worse.

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