How does one even smurf a high elo game?
LoL Smurfs Ruining Even High Elo Games
Smurfing in League of Legends is when high elo players play on new accounts, with players of lower rank, thus ruining their games with their vastly better skills.
Season 13, however, has seen a marked increase in smurf accounts due to the change in MMR practices Riot implemented by removing the so-called "smurf queue". On top of the rampaging issue of bought and boosted accounts that is.
LoL Smurfs Ruining Low and High Elo Games
From the start of season 13, Riot were aware of the issue of players encountering smurfs in their games more often. However, they deemed it a necessary risk, to implement the new way of calculating MMR.
However, with the start of the second split of season 13, the smurfing issue is no longer restricted to low elo only. Now, even Master+ players are complaining about smurf accounts ruining their games.
This is due to the fact that these are all low-level accounts, bought from websites that level accounts via botting. Due to that , high elo games have become coinflip games, where the smurfs either coinflip and solo win games, or do the same and solo lose since the losses are not impacting their main accounts.
Especially since the new way of calculating MMR has started placing these level 40 accounts in high elo games this far into the season, due to their high win rates in low elo.
The purpose of this is obvious to any LoL fans that watch most of the rising League content creators. A lot of said content creators are actively partnered with sites that sell boosted accounts, and even use them themselves for content that involves climbing to high elo from a low start.
- If you want to climb to high elo, get a Blueprint that will get you there
This issue is something that plagues most online games, and is not exclusive to League of Legends, but due to the nature of the game, you can have a low elo player on your team that bought their account recently, or vice versa, ruin half an hour of your time.
It doesn't even have to be a low elo player, as some fans have pointed out. It could be a high elo one that doesn't care about said account, as Diamond ranked accounts go for less than 5 dollars these days.
Credit where credit is due, Riot Games have recently implemented a new way of detecting botted accounts, and are actively fighting this issue, with their reports showing around a million banned accounts due to these practices. The only question that remains is, is it enough?