If you play regularly, you should probably be familiar with the concept of smurfing which we will define right away. Concretely, these are gamers who decide to cheat in a multiplayer game by creating new accounts with the idea of facing less skilled opponents.
Acceptable smurfing?
This phenomenon was precisely the subject of a study recently carried out by Charles Monge, doctoral student in communications at Ohio State University. The latter was assisted by Nicholas Matthews, assistant professor of communications at Ohio University. Their work was published in the journal New Media & Society.
To get a better idea, the authors surveyed 328 people from subreddits specializing in video games and from a video game club in their state. These respondents had to play games more than 24 hours per week on average.
Overall, participants believe that smurfs are more likely to be toxic than average, particularly by trolling and/or bullying other players considered weaker.
But, more surprisingly, 69% of those surveyed said they smurf from time to time, and 94% are convinced that other gamers smurf from time to time, which gives an idea of the extent of this practice. .
In a second research, still carried out on Reddit, respondents explained the reasons why they smurf. The most legitimate reason given was that they needed it so they could play a game with a less experienced friend. Others, far more reprehensible, claimed that they simply wanted to crush other players online for fun. to win.
The war on smurfing is declared
Regardless, smurfing is increasingly being singled out. Moreover, Valve, the publisher of the Steam platform, recently banned 90,000 smurf accounts on its game DOTA2. The idea is to send a clear message to those who would like to use this criticized tactic.
At the start of the year, League of Legends developers announced the deployment of improved tools to combat smurfing, a practice that can sometimes spoil the player experience.
One of them emphasized:
If you are a player who wants to create a new account and play normally, we don't think there is anything wrong with that.
However, he specified: “On the other hand, if you are a player who wants to create a new account to bring it down in several games in order to lower your MMR (MatchMaking Rating) and crush low MMR players, we want to detect and ban your account.”
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