A year after its launch, Valorant community still indecisive about its stand on smurfing

Valorant continues to grow into one of the most popular and competitive tactical first-person shooter games available today. The community is extremely active on forums, discussing various topics that could help improve the overall gaming experience for its player base. One of the most popular among those topics has been smurfing.

"Smurfing" is when a player of a higher skill level creates a new account to trick the system into thinking it’s a new player. By doing so, the player gets placed into games with others of a lower skill level and has an unfair advantage over them.

Aside from Valorant, the topic has also been discussed frequently by communities of various other titles, as it negatively impacts the gaming experience across the board.

The Valorant community, however, is divided on the matter as it presents two different arguments towards smurfing: one supporting it and the other against it.

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Valorant community discusses smurfing and gives multiple perspectives

While Valorant might be an extremely competitive game, it also caters to casual players who don’t like to sweat as much as the ones who do in competitive games. The community was having a discussion about Nosyy, a popular YouTuber who smurfed while playing the game.

A Redditor who goes by the username u/Superior0422 found it surprising that none of Nosyy's followers or viewers questioned his actions, which could negatively impact the gaming experience for other players. Initiating a discussion about smurfing, the Redditor said:

"Recently, a big Youtuber, Nosyy, has started a series where he tries to climb from iron to radiant, with no handicap whatsoever, and using duelist in every match. But when I scroll through the comments on his videos, no one is flaming or accusing him or smudging [smurfing] and ruining the playing experience of others whatsoever. The Valorant player base normally despises smurfs, so why is it ok for big Youtubers to do so? Isn’t it just promoting the idea that smudging [smurfing] is ‘fun’?"

One side of the Valorant community is thoroughly against smurfing. One Redditor in favor of this argument believed that people hate facing smurfs but enjoy watching them kill players of a lower skill level.

Smurfing can certainly be annoying for players who are trying to go up against others of the same skill level. The very purpose of creating a game mode like Ranked is to allow Valorant players to have a level playing field. Smurfing will only cause hindrance to those attempting to play on equal footing.

The other side of the Valorant community, however, feels that players do not have any option other than to create a smurf account. When a high elo player wants to play Unrated games with their friends who are on a lower elo, they are matched up against high elo enemies, which ends up ruining the game. Therefore, high elo Valorant players create a smurf account to play with lower elo teammates in Unrated games.

This side of the community also believes that smurfing in Unrated is acceptable since it doesn’t affect rankings or elo. They believe that Valorant has two separate game modes for this reason, and that it is okay to smurf in Unrated.

While the community poses two different arguments regarding smurfing, both sides have compelling reasons to justify their stand. That being said, the Valorant community will no doubt be waiting for a response from Riot Games regarding the issue.