Riot Games is continuing to crack down on alternate accounts, or "smurfs," in Valorant. A lengthy dev post details the smurf detection updates and future steps for the first-person shooter.

This isn't the first time Riot Games has tried to improve matchmaking by reducing smurf account usage in its games. Last year, a State of Gameplay post described the developer's progress with removing smurfs in League of Legends. The post mentions issues with accurately identifying smurfs and properly tagging the skill level of players.

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Insights Manager Brian Chang walks players through Valorant's Systems Health series report, beginning with an explanation of the developer's view of the smurf accounts. "On Valorant, we think about alternate accounts as a symptom of multiple motivations," Chang states. Reasons for creating a smurf account range from wanting to play with friends of a lower rank to wanting to stomp less experienced players. By understanding and addressing these motivations, Riot Games hopes to reduce the likelihood of a player using a smurf account.

In July, the Valorant Data Ops team introduced a test for Automated Smurf Detection in North America with Patch 5.01. The team aimed to use machine learning and data to place smurf accounts in the right matchmaking rating (MMR), which would lead to fewer unfair matches. Through the test, Data Ops found that 50% of detected smurfs with adjusted MMRs nearly hit the team's "target stomp rate." Meanwhile, 50% of detected smurfs without adjusted MMRs stomped in 25% of their matches. After a final test run in August, Valorant launched smurf detection globally in September.

Riot Games has also tried to address one of smurfing's main reasons, wanting to play with lower-ranked friends, by introducing 5-stack changes. Last November, Patch 3.10 allowed players of any rank to 5-stack in Competitive Queue, with adjustments to Rank Rating impact. Post-implementation statistics show that there was an increase in high-discrepancy 5-stacks, yet did not result in a change in match fairness. On the contrary, current data reveals that, compared to all other matches in Competitive, 5-stack matches are the closest.

In short, with these efforts, Valorant has been successful in reducing alternative account usage. Since the start of the year, smurf counts have fallen 17%. Moreover, newly created smurfs are placed in the correct MMR two to three times faster. Chang concludes the dev post with Valorant's ongoing and future initiatives for smurf crackdown: making improvements to Automated Smurf Detection, acting against account sharing, purchasing, and boosting, and introducing new ways for differently skilled players to play together.

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