Riot Reveals Plans to Stop Smurfs in Valorant

Riot Games has announced its plans to stop smurfs in Valorant and what it's doing to prevent high skilled players from playing against lower-ranked opponents.

Since Valorant was released back in June, smurfing, the act of a high-level player battling in a lower ranked account to get easier games with less skilled players has been a major issue in Riot's tactical first-person shooter game. SinceValorant is a free-to-play game, players can easily create new accounts just by having a new email address, and players have been complaining that smurfs are ruining their game experience because of how smurfs can easily dominate a match if the skill difference is significant enough.

Credit: Riot Games

In today's Ask Valorant blog post, Riot revealed how it plans to stop smurfs, and teased how they are developing other systems to keep matches smurf-free.

"Smurfing always sucks, especially when you have rank on the line," said Ian Fielding, Valorant Senior Producer. "While it's hard to stop smurfing entirely in a free-to-play game, we are taking action to combat it. Right now we have a behind-the-scenes system for Unrated as well as one that applies to Iron through Diamond ranked players. The latter tracks an individual's performance and notices when a player makes a highly disproportionate impact in a game. We then quickly boost them to harder matches and higher ranks in Competitive. We stop leveraging this system for Immortal+ players because there isn't a ton of room to smurf or play down when you are already near the top ranks."

Riot does a good job listening to the community, and I'm glad that they're doing something to stop the smurfing problem since it's especially frustrating to newer players who ended up being matched with higher-level opponents. While smurfing will probably still an issue in the game in the upcoming months, we can expect improvements in their anti-smurf system soon.

"Longer term, we're also looking at ways to further accelerate placing smurfs into appropriately skilled matches," Fielding added. "But right now we are prioritizing some improvements to our core rank system and leaderboards ahead of that."

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