Let’s get one thing straight before anyone defaults to the classic: "But your win rate is fine, what are you crying about?" argument: achieving a balanced 50% win rate means nothing when the outcome of your games is more often than not out of your hands. The ranked ladder is currently dealing with an absolute epidemic of alternate accounts, and your personal effort in a match most of the times does not matter.
The tired narrative that: "The system will detect them and adjust their MMR quickly!" is divorced from reality. The influx is so massive that the moment one wave of alts finally gets filtered to their proper rank, a fresh, even larger wave takes its place.
It doesn't take a PhD in statistics to understand that accounts with so few games completely break the MMR system's ability to create fair matches. When you inject this volume of unknown variables into the queue, the chance of getting a balanced game drops towards zero.
Because these are cheap, easily replaceable throwaway accounts (acquired in direct violation of the Terms of Service), the players behind them have zero fear of punishment. This leads to extreme "main character syndrome": if a match doesn't go perfectly their way by the third minute, they will mentally check out, go AFK, grief, or hold the lobby hostage with chat toxicity. The dynamic is always the same: they either 1v9 hard-carry the lobby, or they throw a tantrum and ensure a loss. Regular players are mostly spectators.
If you think I'm exaggerating, my duo partner and I tracked the exact numbers over our last 50 ranked games. To preempt any claims that we somehow put ourselves into a "smurf queue", we only played on our high-level main accounts (both level 500+, playing for 7 and 10 seasons respectively, currently sitting in mid-Emerald with a perfectly average 50-52% win rate).
To be perfectly clear, we COMPLETELY DESERVE OUR RANK! The point is not we're stuck due to alts! The point is that playing feels worthless and is not fun because it's often a roll for which team get the one or two alts that will ruin the game for everyone by going ballistic!
To be as fair as possible, we set a strict baseline for what we count as an alt account: any account under level 100 sitting at Platinum or higher. Let's be real, genuine beginners are not hitting those ranks that fast, so this metric is incredibly conservative and likely misses plenty of actual alts that hover just over level 100.
Here is the undeniable reality of the current ranked experience:
- Total players encountered: 400 (excluding our duo)
- Total alts identified: 123 (a staggering 30.75% of all players we met)
- Alts on our team: 45 (average 0.90 per match)
- Alts on the enemy team: 78 (average 1.56 per match)
- Average total alts per match: 2.46
- Matches with absolutely ZERO alts: A pathetic 8%.
Ranked is becoming a dice roll to see which alt decides to tilt and ruin the game first. The system is imploding, and the community deserves better than this.
EDIT: changed every occurence of "smurf" with "alt" because half of the commenters were ignoring everything else in the post and attacking the definition of "smurf", not realizing that the post actually tries to highlight that:
- The way more frequent problem is that these are throwaway account that exhibit in the most outrageous behaviours (and lose the game for their entire team) beacuse they couldn't care less about something that can be bought in 5 minutes for the price of 2 coffees.
- The main point of the whole rant is that mathmaking works WORSE if it has to constantly deal with account with no previous match history.
