Valve recently revealed their plans for combatting smurf accounts in their popular MOBA Dota2 and many League of Legends players and personalities wonder whether something like this could work in League of Legends as well.
Valve, the developers of the biggest League of Legends competitor, Dota, have recently revealed how they are going forward with their policy of 'no smurfs allowed' in the game to help create a better environment for all players of all elos.
Now, some League of Legends players picked up on this and with how prominent smurfs have been lately, some players wish that Riot would also go forth and make some changes to how they deal with smurf accounts in LoL. Will anything ever change though?
LoL Players Wish Riot Would Also Ban Smurfs
On September 1, 2023 Valve released a statement regarding the rampant issue of smurfs in their game Dota2. In it they revealed that 90,000 smurf accounts have been banned. Not only have the accounts been banned, but the developers also managed to trace the accounts back to the original main accounts as well, taking it a step further.
In the blog post the Dota2 devs reveal that any accounts, going forward, that create smurf accounts will face severe punishments on their main accounts.
Going forward, a main account found associated with a smurf account could result in a wide range of punishments, from temporary adjustments to behavior scores to permanent account bans.
In recent times, smurfing has become more and more of an issue in League of Legends as well, with players using these accounts to play either in higher or lower elos, ruining the game experience for everyone involved. Since these smurf accounts are not connected to their main accounts, players also don't care for behavior strikes, thus being the most toxic players out there.
There have been hundreds of Reddit threads throughout the last few months, calling on Riot to try and make some changes, whether it's just adding a phone number to an account or to connect someone's smurf to their main account, so they can be held accountable for their behavior, but none of that has happened.
Very interesting, I wonder how much something like this would affect the balance sheet of League of Legends, I do believe it would make the game better. Might be tough since people have had smurfs for potentially as long as 13 years. pic.twitter.com/6eEpNxVD1H
— YamatoCannon (@YamatoMebdi) September 5, 2023
Even League of Legends content creators have chimed in with, Jakob "YamatoCannon" Mebdi asking whether Riot could also implement some changes similar to Valve for League.
Other Twitter users chimed in, stating that Riot would lose too much money and therefore aren't looking to make any changes to the current smurf situation in the game.
Of course, Riot does have some behind-the-scenes mechanics in place to try and combat smurfs, by simply shooting them up into their respective elo after playing, and stomping, a few games, but it seems that this hasn't worked out too well, with how many players are still being affected by smurfs currently in the game.