Gamers say ‘smurfing’ is generally wrong and toxic, but 69% admit they do it at least sometimes. They also say that some reasons for smurfing make it less blameworthy. Relative to themselves, study participants thought that other gamers were more likely to be toxic when they smurfed.
19 Comments
Maybe I’m getting old: WTF is Smurfing? I’m sure it has nothing to do with the little blue dudes from the cartoon.
Well, gamers have a love-hate relationship with smurfing. It’s like a guilty pleasure – they know it’s not cool, but they still do it.
If you use the term smurfing, I’ve been there and done it with LoL back in the day. Anyways IF YOU USE THIS TERM YOU ARE PLAYING WAY TOO MUCH. Go outside,read books, or actually interact with a woman.
I like how the base sample of 350 or so players is enough for a survey… but non gamers have probably felt that mismatch to hate it. “I want to play with friends…” They have a casual bracket for that, so use it?
Can’t Smurf from bronze 5
Smurfing is for losers. Play the game’s unrated mode.
This headline sounds insane if you don’t play competitive games.
328 people is not a good sample size
Smurfing can be fun until you run into another smurf and then things go Goblin mode.
I have no idea what smurfing is, but gaming being “toxic” is a lot of shit. Most people are not “toxic” and “racist” and “sexist” and “homophobic”. Some are, but the majority are just having a laugh bantering. Did anyone every actually believe that the 12 year they no scoped really had sex with their mum? Of course not.
Have a laugh, chat some shit and dont take it so seriously. And if you see/hear actual bigotry, report it.
I usually just associate smurfing with cheating. Sure, there could be “legitimate” reasons, but generally someone is banned permanently or temporarily for suspicious game play. Like in Call of Duty, if you’re level 23 out 650 and you have master level skins unlocked that usually require major grinding or you finish a map with 85 kills and 5 deaths, yeah, I’m reporting you. Enjoy making another smurf/alt account!
Noobstumping is always fun.
That’s called seal clubbing.
I know people like this, always complaining about smurfs while every single one of them has a smurf account, and then complain that newer players are bad cause they can’t learn to play against smurfs xd
Can’t Smurf if you suck at the game 😭
I did tried a new account in Overwatch “2” out of morbid curiosity, maybe that could improve the matchmaking? And indeed, after 15, 20 matches or so, the algorithm started to adjust. But after a while (it took a long time, 20+ hours because that’s +- the amount of time you needed to unlock all the characters before Blizzard made some desperate changes to keep this game relevant), the matchmaking issues happened again, exactly like my “main” account. So really, for me at least, it was a pointless endeavor.
I guess the smurfs enjoy killing the novice players, win 15 games in a roll, etc.. I was bored, players at lower elos can’t barely react to stuff, they are still learning, what is the point of slaughter them? The matchmaking is horrendous, Overwatch itself is pointless because the game only have “competitive” modes, but you can’t really “compete” because the skill level among players are all messed up. Hence why I abandoned this abomination, it seems obvious these free to play games struggles with matchmaking because people can spam accounts
Part of the problem in my experience is that many true casual play lists have been eliminated. Now everything has hidden MMR so as long as you play well you end up playing against extremely try hard type people.
I’ll be honest, I used to do this back in the H3 days. We would use 1 month free trials to make a new account and see how fast we could get 50s in all the main playlists. Along the way we’d have a blast winning games 50-3, getting 2 flag caps and then endlessly slaying. We honestly didn’t think anything of it but that might have just been my 17 year old brain.
“It’s ok when I do it, but if other people smurf? Degenerates like them belong on the cross”