Valorant Adds Better Smurf Account Detection; Former G2 Esports CEO Carlos Rodríguez Still Supports Andrew Tate

Riot Games is looking to reduce the amount of “smurfs” in Valorant. Smurfs are experienced players who create new, lower ranked accounts to match against lesser skilled opponents or to play with their lower ranked friends.

In a recent blog post for the Valorant Systems Health Series, insights manager Brian Chang talked about this issue. While there is nothing wrong with experienced players making new accounts to play with their lower ranked friends, it is the playing against lesser skilled opponents that is the issue.

Even then, Chang says, creating new accounts to play with friends is not ideal. There can be malicious intentions behind smurfing, such as sharing Valorant accounts or reducing an account’s Matchmaking Rating (MMR) intentionally. These are often associated with behaviors that violate the game’s terms of service and can get you banned.

Chang also highlighted the fact that smurfs can result in unfair matchmaking and be disruptive to the game. Players most frequently mention smurfs as an issue in surveys. To curb the number of smurfs in Valorant, the data ops team conducted a test in the North America region using Automated Smurf Detection.

“Stomp” refers to a situation where a team wins a game by a huge margin, say, with eight or more rounds. The blog post states that before making any changes to the Smurf Detection, about 1 in 3 games ended in a stomp. The goal of the changes was to reduce the percentage of games with smurfs that ended in a stomp. It is worth noting that it’s impossible to remove stomp situations from the game altogether. A stomp can include scenarios where one team is significantly more skilled than the other, or one player has a particularly good or bad game.

As a result of the test, 50% of detected smurfs whose MMR was adjusted were within 1% of the target stomp rate. All of this means that these accounts were not outperforming their opponents in a significant way. The rest of the 50% of detected smurfs were still stomping in 25% of their matches. Based on these results, Riot conducted additional tests and experiments throughout the year and found that smurfs were landing in their correct MMR in as few as four matches. The 2nd version of the Smurf Detection System will go live next year.

Carlos Ocelote ‘heavily supports’ Andrew Tate

Carlos “Ocelote” Rodríguez, the founder and former CEO of G2 Esports, has doubled down on his support for Andrew Tate. Tate is known for promoting violence towards women and toxic behaviour. Rodríguez’s admiration for Tate previously led to backlash and his departure from G2 Esports.

Back in September 2022, Rodríguez posted a video of himself partying with Tate. This led to G2 Esports and Rodríguez issuing an apology, which he later deleted. The incident also resulted in G2 losing a partnership spot in the upcoming Valorant Champions Tour 2023 season.

In addition, Rodríguez was also suspended from the Riot esports ecosystem. Riot required Rodríguez to complete sensitivity and executive training by February 11, 2023, to return to the ecosystem. But his recent comments do not show that he is keen to do that.

cant cancel me twice bitch

ill say it again louder for the people in the back@Cobratate is the fucking man https://t.co/EShv3RKxtm

— ???? CarlosR ocelote ???? (@CarlosR) December 21, 2022