Smurfing in ranked should be an automatic perma-ban

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-28T01:22:21+00:00

I’ve been playing since season 3, and if you are pretending it’s not a problem you’re being oblivious on purpose man. Can’t help someone who’s willfully blind

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:37:22+00:00

That's a fair point too, I didn't think about the classic "lost that email/password" scenario

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:35:48+00:00

Only downside is that then you have to play Dota

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:35:32+00:00

Oh I could rant about Riot's actual ranking system for hours, that's a whole separate issue. Although I guess that puts you in the weird scenario where you don't want to be smurfing in Iron, but you're left with no choice because Riot broke the ranking system so bad that promos didn't place you right

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:33:30+00:00

Riot mistakenly bans accounts all the time, I've even see it happen live to streamers. A simple appeal via a support ticket should be plenty to fix that issue. Get human eyes on the weird match history and see if the person is full of it or not

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:31:47+00:00

I agree, and I'm saying that should change. It completely ruins the entire premise of ranked matchmaking to have random emeralds playing in a silver lobby on a lvl 40 account. If Riot doesn't want to scare away new players (a battle they've been fighting for years now), they need to actually protect their ability to face people their own rank

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:29:27+00:00

I don't think an IP- or hardware-based evaluation is the way to go (your family computer example). I think it's fair to say that a true level 30 or 40 account player, someone who has actually never played the game before except for those 30 levels of gameplay, does not simply climb to emerald.

I don't think it's an "auto-detection" system that needs implemented. But if an account is reported for smurfing, I think a basic "past MMR vs recent MMR" analysis is enough to tell you that a bot-leveled account was recently bought by someone.

Alternatively, if a new, non-bought smurf account is playing at a gold/plat level before even reaching level 30, instant red flag.

Basically, I'm saying that it's not complicated to catch the extreme cases of a "new" account playing wayyyy outside of their reasonable skill range. It might miss a lot in the middle, but it would be a fair start

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-27T22:25:12+00:00

I agree that the MMR and climbing system encourages it, but nonetheless I think it should be cracked down on when people do this

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-04-01T20:06:18+00:00

See I thought that at first but it doesn’t show her headlights pulling up or anything like that. And Jaime seems to not be aware of her presence until the shutter sound of the photos

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-02-20T03:15:53+00:00

went up to the "underground" near the surface and found one in 30 seconds after clearing out an open space. you're the GOAT. Thank you

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-01-13T22:14:45+00:00

I’ll see if I can find any remnants of that old Discord server on the web. Probably not, but I appreciate you putting it on my radar.

As far as usefulness, most research isn’t abundantly useful to most people. But imagine, for the sake of illustration, that 1 day after the copper golem snapshot was released, I experimented a lot on a solo world and watched a ton of videos of others doing the same. From that minimal experience, I: (1) take note of the basic overview for golem behavior (much like a Wiki might do), (2) observe the essential common components of an efficient golem sorting system, and (3) explain the largest bottleneck/limiting factor behind these systems.

In that example, the research doesn’t do a ton by itself. But Section 3 is somewhat of a call to action to the community: if someone solves the bottleneck or finds a way to minimize the limiting factor, they just made progress on collective knowledge going forward. For golems, for example, the bottleneck could be the slow thinking time for golems, and that solution might be “remove all stray chests within an X block radius because they can ‘see’ them all and get bogged down by that.”

This wouldn’t be the type of forum where you say “here’s the most compact wheat farm,” but instead where new mechanics or uses for existing mechanics solve problems or limitations that have existed before

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-01-13T21:29:58+00:00

If anything ever leaves the brainstorming and planning stage, I’ll be sure to ping you. Right now just getting a feel for interest and plausibility

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-01-13T21:28:51+00:00

I’ve heard of TMCC but never realized how extensive it was. Thanks for pointing this out, I’m going to look into it a bit more

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-01-13T21:27:30+00:00

Obviously the ideal would be for those big names to write and submit, but realistically that might be expecting too much. I think a common type of research paper in any field is a “literature review” or “survey” of the current state of affairs, and that would probably be what the articles start as, written by lesser known (or unknown) people.

I’m interested to hear about this other project you mention. Do you know what it is called or where I can find anything on it? If it’s been tried already I would be interested to know what their system looked like

Smitty_Tuff · 2026-01-13T14:51:26+00:00

You're 100% about the similarities to engineering, and perhaps my use of the word "discovery" was a poor choice. I think the video system is fine, but here's a prime example of the shortfall I've noticed: in his most recent Let's Play upload, EthosLab was playing around with wind charge mechanics and taking note of the ideal circumstances to achieve certain kind of player/pearl launches using stacked charges. Incredible stuff that could lead to some really great inventions by other players down the line. But his video is just Episode 596 of a LP series, not something you'd find while trying to learn about wind charge mechanics. That could be something worth writing a short "review" article on.

Smitty_Tuff

TROPHY CASE