I wonder if others also have this feeling that during evenings smurfs are more prominent.

I’m silver 3 for some time and when I play during lunchtime I win all the games. Not super easily but I win them. Then I go up in ranking and in the evening when I play again I see a drastic increase of skill in my opponents. Which makes me barely win or loose and then I go down again few slots.

I have to say it’s quite annoying and I consider not playing competitive any more during late hours to finally be able to jump to gold.

  • SurpriZe@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The game’s essentially dead. No new players. It’s just nerds and tryhards left. They themselves don’t even enjoy the game anymore. It’s obvious.

  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    More players means more smurfs. Playing at a time when lots of people are on makes it more likely you’ll run into someone who lowered their rank on purpose just to stomp lower level lobbies.

    DotA2 recently banned 90,000 smurf accounts. They have about 400,000 players per day. That’s nearly 25% of players smurfing!

    Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t remember games being like this. The amount of crybabies in Rocket League is insane. People leaving the lobby less than a minute in because of a goal (or even just sometimes a bad play) happens all the time. It wouldn’t shock me if people smurf because they hate losing so much. If you follow the pros they’re not any different. They’ll cry on social media after every loss blaming everyone but themselves. It’s sad really. It’s a game! It’s okay to lose!

    • PenguinTD@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      some one run a statistic using some criteira(number of games won vs hours played) around end of season you will run into a smurf every 3 games in average for 2s, so 30% chance one of the player is a smurf. BUT, while running those, it also found that smurf party also only won ~50% of the time for their collected data. (note this mean some people run smurf to help their friend BUT lost because they can’t win against people in the same rank. Or, they simply run into another smurf party.)

      But yeah, it sucks for us regular solo queuer cause the swings in match quality is quite huge. (also counting the boosted account that performs really badly at your rank after they are boosted.)

  • PenguinTD@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    As an old guy that usually can only play late night(around 10pm-1am west coast), I think the night matches are okay until the player count shrinks. Once the pool shrinks, the difficulty spikes up a lot. For west cost is about 12~12:30, and match quality suffers as wider range of mmrs are put together. Depending on your time zone, it might be easier to check the steam player count chart and find a time where player count is higher. For lower rank it’s important since there are less lower rank player than higher rank player. (middle point is around Gold3/Plat1, so if you are silver 3 it means you roughly have the same amount of same rank player as D3~C2 depending on your queue.)

    • sznowicki@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I’ll have to check that. Maybe indeed it’s not really smurfs but better players in the same division. Although my instinct tells me there are more players in the evenings than lunch time.

      Could also be that during lunch time only one who plays are old pricks like me because kids are still at school.

      • PenguinTD@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I am assuming NA, for east coast, night time have more player cause west coast is 3 hours later. so after 6pm west coast would be 3pm and player count would keep climbing, then slowly taper out and drop quickly after 12pm-1am east coast. So if you are like me queuing both region, you will find that during weekend afternoon, you get more NAE servers matches, but late night you mostly get NAW servers as east coast player goes to sleep. Different region have different peak timing, I think for US central probably best in terms of ping(cause many servers seems to be hosted in central region) and population when you play. Also, there are a lot more NAE players compare to NAW players.(I think there was a old poll to see which region player from, but that was pre f2p so I don’t know how much different it is now. )

        • sznowicki@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Nah I’m in EU so basically everyone who can play with some normal ping would be ± 1 hour time zone.