Why ‘Valorant Smurfing’ Problem Is Seriously Pissing Me Off

Valorant is one of those games that you can’t stop playing because of its competitive approach. Once you start playing Riot’s first-person shooter, you get addicted to it in no time.

But after a while, things get hectic in Valorant, especially in Competitive matches. Just one small mistake, and your teammates can make your soul cry bombarding you with their toxic comments. Despite that, most players constantly work on their game sense to climb ranks in Valorant.

Keeping all good things aside, I sometimes feel like quitting the game. The reason why I am disappointed with Valorant is, of course, Smurfing.

Valorant Is The First FPS I Held Onto, Just To Get Stomped By Smurfs

Many players, getting into first-person shooter for the first time with Valorant, and I, fall into the same category.

Of course, I’ve played other FPS titles such as Apex Legends, PUBG, Warzone, etc. However, I never stuck to those games for long, maybe because not many of my friends play those titles; and starting with Multiplayer games without friends gets boring too often.

On the other hand, several of my friends play Valorant. That’s because Riot’s FPS title runs efficiently on systems with low specifications, well, mostly.

So, I have been playing the game since the day it was released globally. No doubt, grinding in Valorant to improve your skills in something you can’t compare with anything else.

Besides working on your aim and crosshair placement, you have to be creative with your agent’s skills. Overall, you have to work on a lot of factors to be good at Valorant.

Also, the best thing about Valorant is that if, at some point, the game feels boring, you can move on to a different agent. That way, you’ll feel like you’re playing the same game, but with a different set of eyes.

However, all these good things about Valorant stands to nothing when an Iron player has to go against a Diamond level payer. Why? Because several players feel the need to stomp on new players by making a bunch of smurf accounts.

What Is Smurfing In Valorant?

In Multiplayer games such as Valorant, several players intentionally aim for lower ranks on their secondary accounts. Then, despite being higher rank players, they get to play at low ranks, which is called smurfing.

The situation gets even worse and humiliating when all the five players in the opponent team are smurfs. These smurfs often boast about their skills in the chat and ask the other team to surrender.

For instance, in my case, these smurfs asked us to surrender because, according to them, “We were wasting their time by playing against them.”

Now, it’s true that there’s skill-based matchmaking in Valorant. So, smurfs get opponents based on their previous matches’ performance. However, from my personal experience, matchmaking is rarely accurate. Thinking that in Valorant, both teams will have an equal number of smurfs with similar skill levels is as crazy as thinking that the Earth is flat.

Not All Valorant Smurfs Play To Win

Just imagine, you log into Valorant in hopes of having a good Ranked match. But unfortunately, one player in your team doesn’t care about winning. Well, let me explain this kind of situation with an example.

A few days back on Reddit, a player told that one of his teammates was smurfing at Diamond rank. Strangely enough, unlike other smurfs, this particular player wasn’t playing to win. Instead, the player sabotaged the entire Ranked match by giving away his teammates’ location on chat.

Now, you might be thinking why this player doesn’t care about winning. Well, he confirmed that he bought the Diamond account through a website for less than $100. So, his intention after buying the smurf account was to ruin other players’ experience.

When I read about this on Reddit, I considered myself lucky for not getting these kinds of teammates. Well, guess what, that feeling didn’t last long. That’s because last week, one of my teammates, who was playing with Skye, sabotaged our full Ranked Valorant match.

In every round, this player was intentionally blinding us whenever we confronted the enemy team. Moreover, he was giving away our location by randomly shooting at walls. When that wasn’t enough, he informed the enemy team of our health and location through text chat.

My teammates, along with all the opponent players, reported that smurf. But guess what, even several warnings didn’t stop him from ruining our experience. His exact response was, “LOL people have been reporting me from the last 4 matches, nothing happens, chill.”

Halfway through the match, we tried quitting the game by initiating the ‘Surrender’ vote. Well, it should come as no surprise, but the player didn’t even let us surrender by voting ‘no.’ In short, that 30-40 minutes Valorant match made us hate smurfs even more.

Smurfing: A Good Content For Valorant Steamers?

Unfortunately, several streamers on YouTube are part of this whole Valorant smurfing problem. Apparently, titles like ‘Solo queue from Iron 1 to Immortal 1’ guarantees more viewers. Mostly, when you watch their streams, you’ll find them scoring Ace against new Iron players and calling them “noobs.”

Once these streamers reach Radiant rank, they don’t play with that account because the thought of getting ranked down scares them. So, they create a smurf account and aim for the lowest ‘Iron 1’ rank.

To be honest, I don’t think that they play all 20 Unranked matches themselves either. Instead, they can ask their subscribers or moderators to give them ‘Competitive ready’ smurf accounts for a shoutout or a small compensation.

Well, for these YouTubers, it’s “content,” but imagine a new Valorant Iron 1 player going against these streamers in their initial Ranked matches. I am sure most of the new players get demotivated in their very first match, thinking that “Valorant is not for them.” In short, these smurfs rob new players of an honest Valorant gameplay experience.

To be clear, not all Valorant streamers support smurfing. For instance, Hiko, a professional Valorant player, addressed the Valorant smurfing issue. According to him, smurfs are basically “ruining the competitive experience.”

Several players smurf because they want to queue with their friends at lower ranks. However, as Hiko said, if you want to do that, then play Unrated. If you want to teach your friends how to play the game, then ‘Unrated’ is the perfect game mode. As for competitive, instead of pushing your friends’ rank by smurfing, ask them to queue Solo. That’s the only way they will truly improve their skills.

Of course, Riot won’t do anything about smurfing; they would have already introduced 2FA if they wanted to control this behavior. So, the players who love this game will have to discourage smurfing to create a healthy competition in Valorant.

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