Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

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CS:GO just isn't a fun game for me. Maybe there are cheaters, but sometimes its hard to tell. Instead, I prefer framing it in same vein as why Fortnite isn't fun anymore: People are just way too good nowadays. I like to think I'm generally good at video games, but the people who play CS:GO regularly have a laser focus on it. They're better than good, and that skill discrepancy ruins the game for other people. It takes one Insane Tier player on the enemy team to ruin the game for me, or one cheater, and the probability of running into that in an average game is just too high in the top-tier competitive games.

Skill-based Matchmaking doesn't help, flat out. People smurf. I used to think smurfing was this thing that you'd rarely run into, but then I found out that my roommate smurfs on Apex. At that point, another person in the room said "yeah, I've done that". In these games that are insanely cheap or free; its rampant. I legitimately think that smurfing should be a bannable offense, but I'm not aware of any companies that take it seriously (some have said that its against ToS, but do they apply the same detection heuristics to it they do for actual cheaters?)

I suppose "smurfing" means, you create a new account, to pretend that you are a new player and therefore get into matches with only newbs?

So the motivation is to feel good at winning against not experienced players?

Yes, that’s exactly right. They just want to feel like gods as they stomp the new players.

> So the motivation is to feel good at winning against not experienced players?

Contrast online matchmaking systems that take your assessed skill level into account. These are certainly... widespread. I don't understand why.

The design goal of such a system is that, no matter what your skill level is, you win or lose at a rate indistinguishable from chance. Are you getting better at the game? Doesn't matter; your win rate is constant. Are you getting worse under lack of pressure, since nothing you do affects your performance? Doesn't matter. Nothing you do can affect your performance. Your win rate is constant; the system will seamlessly swap in weaker players to play against you.

If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before. If I'm getting worse, I want to see worse results.

The problem is that the more skill you have, the more effort you need to put in while playing. So if you get too good you can't have a fun relaxed game anymore (without getting wrecked and losing rank). Smurfing (playing on lower rank) or cheating (playing effortlessly at your real rank) would be a solution for that... but they are obviously bad and unfair for others. The new scrimmage mode seems to be a promising solution for that though.

You appear to be describing a completely different problem than I am.

What else would you do in an MMO? The flip side is that with matchmaking, higher level matches are higher quality and more enjoyable too.

Do grandmasters play chess against beginners? I think most people want to be challenged, and playing with others of similar skill seems to be the norm in most games.

> Do grandmasters play chess against beginners?

All the time. They teach people to play; they do stunts like playing against 5 people at once; they sit in the park and take all comers.

If you want to prove you're good, go and fight someone who's known to be good. But that generates information for other people, not for you. If you want to determine how good you are, you need to fight a lot of different people.

Very good, I chose a poor example. You can see the point I'm making, though?

No, I can't. All three examples I gave correspond to arguments advanced in this thread as to why you might want to smurf.

They teach people to play -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393157

> If you play with a friend who has a low rank, it is much easier to create a free now account (that will start in a low skill group) than it is to obtain one for them which is already in a higher skill group.

They do stunts like playing against 5 people at once -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21394927

> you can essentially carry your entire team to victory because your skill level is so much higher than the enemy. You get to fuck up a bunch of newbs and win the game, while your team mates are drooling at spawn.

They sit in the park and take all comers -- I've been pushing this angle myself:

> If you want to determine how good you are, you need to fight a lot of different people.

I'm arguing that the idea of matchmaking according to assessed skill level is inherently flawed, and smurfing is a natural workaround to this self-inflicted problem.

> The design goal of such a system is that, no matter what your skill level is, you win or lose at a rate indistinguishable from chance.

Actually, if you are improving you will do better than even, if you are getting worse you will do worse—those are the signals for upward or downward movement. When you plateau it should be a coin flip.

> If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before.

While you are improving, you will. Roughly, your win rate reflects the derivative of skill.

> If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before. If I'm getting worse, I want to see worse results.

This is why games using those matchmaking system will give you either MMR (Match Making Rank) points based on you performance. When you win, you "earn" points, and will face stronger opponents (to keep you around 50% victory). And when you loose you will "spend" points to go back to 50% victory on average. The process is very similar to ELO in chess.

So you have a visual indication that you are on the right or wrong path and where you are in terms of skill level compared to other players.

Most game also offer some vanity system, where your character is displayed differently according to the skill level you have reached (Eg: bottom 20% is bronze, 20%-40% is silver, 40-60% is gold, 60-80% is platinum, 80-95% diamond, top 5% is master, and top 1000 players overall are grand master). Players then fight to reach the next level, still with around 50% win-lose rate until they reach the very top or the very bottom).

> If I'm improving at something, I want to see better results than I was getting before. If I'm getting worse, I want to see worse results.

If you win you get a higher ranking.

This is pretty tough to solve in multiplayer games. I used to play BF2 and the sequel as well, and I noticed I had the most fun when the games were just released, before people figured out the maps and tactics. After that, the game became much more mechanical and repetitive, unfortunately.

The matchmaking system in CSGO almost makes a conscious effort to increase "smurfing". Back in 2013-2015, smurfing was actually a lot harder, because if you won every game, your rank would increase very quickly. This led to a situation where the rank distribution didn't look anything like a bell curve, because people with higher rank had proportionally many more accounts than people in lower ranks.

For some reason, Valve thought that this was a problem. And they modified the matchmaking system in a way that forces the MMR distribution to be a bell curve from the outside. It's not known what exactly they do, but from tracking sites it seems like the distribution starts to "deform" over the course of a week and then gets "squished down" again.

As a player, the effect this has is that 1. accounts at the upper ranks (Global Elite/SMFC) decay really hard, like if you have an account that is GE and you don't play on that account for 3-6 months, you'll be like MGE afterwards. My main account got actually re-ranked from GE to MG2 after they shifted the ranked distribution - after which I won, and this is not an exaggeration, 38 games in a row, and still kept like 75% win rate until the account was GE again. The other effect is that it takes way too long to rank up now, it used to be that if you won 6 games in a row you would very likely rank up, now it can take easily double that.

Put those two together, and you've got a million smurfs obviously. Because anyone who just bought 10 accs for $70 during a sale (and believe me, many, many people did that) can just rotate around accounts and let them decay again once they're too high to smurf on.

Add to that that there is nothing to do once you're GE, there is simply no higher rank, and yeah it's no surprise the game is full of smurfs.

To make things worse, now that Trust Factor exists you can't even compare experiences anymore. If a new player comes to me and says oh I only play against cheaters or smurfs, I can't even give him a way for it to get better. We have no idea how Trust Factor works, and if you're a new player with a bad Trust Factor... what are you gonna do? You have nothing to look forward to. Prime barely even means anything anymore (not that it ever did, but at least it was a small hurdle), and there's no given way for you to increase your Trust Factor.

Hang on, that's a lot of lingo to decode there.

Are you saying that people spend a lot of money to buy multiple Steam accounts (that have CS:GO on them), so that they can slowly rotate which account they use for playing, so that they avoid gaining ranks and being matched with players that are as good as them, so that they can keep dominating lesser skilled players every time they play?

Yes, that's exactly what people do. Although the spending money part is kind of optional now, since the game is free to play. And it's not really "a lot", it's like 1 AAA game, for most likely way more hours of entertainment.

This is also something that happens in pretty much every multiplayer game with skill based matchmaking that exists. However, other games are much better at mitigating this. In LoL for example, your MMR doesn't decay at all. It does get soft-reset once a year when the new season starts, but that reset is quite soft and you can't "stack" multiple years of resets on top of each other. If you had top 1% MMR in 2015, you still have top 1-2% MMR. All games could do more to prevent this, simply by changing how their matchmaking works, but CSGO really takes the cake in terms of requiring an absolute minimum amount of effort, plus actually "forcing" people to smurf unintentionally, just because they took a long break from the game. It's comical at this point.

Wow, how unbelievably insecure do you have to be to do that? In CS1.6, I was always appreciative of the chance to play against higher skilled players, becuase that's how you get better and better.

The alternative to that decay system was having smurfs that lost on purpose when their rank got too high.

Maybe something like a hidden quick ranking would help. I.e. something trivial like average kill/death ratio, numbers of headshots, ...things that make smurfs annoying. And then match you still according to the real rank, but put people with the same hidden rank in the enemy team.

>having smurfs that lost on purpose when their rank got too high

Those still exist, but they are a tiny minority compared to smurfs who just decay. The simple problem is this: Losing on purpose is extremely boring and very time consuming. Having to spend 50% of your time on an account intentionally losing just so you can win a few easy matches is more annoying than just playing on a higher ranked account.

>Maybe something like a hidden quick ranking would help.

If I'm being cynical, Trust Factor is exactly this kind of hidden rank system. Which is probably why they're seeing decent results from it. The problem however is how do you distinguish between a talented player and a smurf? Someone who simply played a lot of 1.6 or Quake will have exactly the same indicators as a smurf or even a cheater.

Doing this results in very fair matches if we simply define fair as "both teams have a decent chance of winning", but it completely kills any meaning of ranked progression. If someone is "DMG", that has a completely different meaning combined with a very high hidden rank or a very low hidden rank. It's literally worlds apart. And that's exactly what we're seeing with Trust Factor of course, low trust factor matches are worlds apart in skill (whether that's actual skill or cheats) from high trust factor matches.

What would really help is simply abandoning the idea that the ranked distribution has to look like a bell curve, removing MMR decay, and showing some sort of ranked points after reaching GE. That would get rid of 80% of smurfs easily. Even better would be a ranked system more like LoLs system, so you can decay people's rank without decaying their MMR. Plus ideally some sort of way to recognize when players perform way above or below their expected skill level, and quickly adjusting their MMR. (For situations where people buy accounts or buy boosting services. Some people think that boosting should be detected and then the adjustment should be extra slow - but that's just stupid really. It's not going to stop anyone from boosting, it just means the booster is going to destroy more games. Detect boosting, and rank them up really quickly, and then detect when someone is playing really badly, and rank them down really quickly. That keeps the amount of destroyed games at a minimum.)

there are games that solve the issue by adding physical limitation to movement so that there's a cap to the coordination skill ceiling, nothing can fix esp (enemy highlights trough wall and scenery) of course but there are ways to constrain players so that the field is level, so for example both in war thunder and arma 2 your turn rate and aiming speed is controlled by the type and equipment you're using. even an aimbot or godlike reflexes won't save an enemy if you manage to get the drop on them and using terrain cleverly can negate most of the skilled/cheater advantages.

You should try the new scrimmage mode. The matchmaking there surprisingly works much better than on ranked matches.

I.e. most of the times there are 2 good guys, 2 mediocre guys, and 1 beginner in each team. I've had a lot of actually fun 15:15 games there.

What is the motivation to smurf other than just destroying a bunch of new players? Surely that must get boring after a while?

If you play with a friend who has a low rank, it is much easier to create a free now account (that will start in a low skill group) than it is to obtain one for them which is already in a higher skill group. Not saying it is a good thing to do, but it is another reason why you'd find better players in lower skill matches.

And yet plenty of people will do it constantly. Apparently there are some gaming communities (I've heard this of China) where using cheats in multiplayer games is routine. The goal is to win, it doesn't matter how.

Can't really tell for CS:GO but in League of Legends, good players create smurfs all the time and the motivation is usually to prove yourself and/or other people (e.g. Twitch viewers, Reddit) that you can keep a very high winrate and reach the top 1% in a few weeks. Sometimes it comes with an extra challenge like playing only the same champion.

> just destroying a bunch of new players? Surely that must get boring after a while?

Smurfs never play more than 4 or 5 games versus new players. The matchmaking system doesn't match a guy who has 100% winrate over his 20 first games with a guy who has only 30-50%.

Two options:

A) You can play a game at your actual skill level, which requires your team to communicate effectively and play together. This requires someone to take the lead and coordinate the other players. That just doesn't happen in drop in games. It is incredibly not-fun and frustrating to be playing decently yourself, but be anchored by incompetent team members. You get guys who want to play their own way, or just aren't interested in "taking orders". Plenty of arrogant dudes that won't listen to someone that is a lower rank.

B) Play at a level where you can essentially carry your entire team to victory because your skill level is so much higher than the enemy. You get to fuck up a bunch of newbs and win the game, while your team mates are drooling at spawn.

B is definitely more fun. Especially when the people smurfing can get their fix of A in an organised match with an organised team, outside of match making.

It's more relaxing than having to focus 100% to play on your maximum skill... Also you can play with your friends that are on a lower level. And when I do it I try to keep a 1:1 kill/death ratio so it doesn't get completely unfair for the enemy team.

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