Redditors Discuss the Smurfing “Issue” in Valorant and How Riot Still Overlooks It

Valorant is one of the most popular competitive free-to-play tactical shooter games in the world, with over 15 million active users. Naturally, it is infested with smurf players, account trading, AimBots and rank boosting mods.

What is a smurf?

A smurf player is basically a higher ranked player who plays and dominates the game by using a different account with a lower rankings. This not only ruins the competitive integrity of the game but also stops players from improving their rank and ruins their learning curve. Smurfing almost always leads to the stomping of their lesser-skilled rivals by the smurf, which might be all fun and games to the better-skilled player, but generally ruins the fun and experience of playing the game.

Valorant has a decently high skill ceiling which gets higher only after the player reaches the Immortal rank or beyond that. Therefore, most Valorant smurfs tend to originate from Platinum to Diamond ranks, these folks who are mostly unable to cross over or reach that barrier and then create fresh accounts, trying to look for a fresh start.

In most competitive games, smurfing is done by players to test out their mettle against lower-tier players and build a false sense of accomplishment. In Valorant, most smurfs tend to show off their skills from the beginning to increase their ranking.

Redditors have always been worried about how smurf accounts have gotten bolder and actually flaunt their un-sportsman-like behavior.

Lower ranked players aren’t exactly learning anything when they are constantly being insta-killed. The mechanical skill gap between these smurfs and new players are too large, obviously.

Earlier last year, Riot had updated its terms of service in order to counter smurfs and make competitiveness better as a whole. These actions against smurfs have been appreciated throughout the player base at the time. However, players are still running into smurfs, no matter the rank. This issue seemed to multiply, where smurfs are reportedly buying accounts that pass Riot’s smurf detection system.

Through with one of the new updates, Riot altered their Co-op rules and made it so that players will have to be Level 20 in order to play Competitive, reaching this level actually takes some grinding and will help low Ranking players (from Ranks Iron to Gold) avoid most smurfs.