Despite smurfing and account boosting still being prevalent in Valorant, Riot Games revealed that measures against both have yielded positive results.
Riot Games is trying to make playing Valorant a more enjoyable experience, whether you're in Unrated or Competitive playlists, with multiple anti-smurfing and cheating systems in place.
Talking about the former, the developers released a lengthy post having an in-depth discussion about the effects their anti-smurfing measurements have had on the game, giving us a look at the way the situation has improved over the past few months.
Insights Manager Brian Chang stated the following:
Overall, smurf counts are down ~17% compared to earlier in the year, and newly created smurfs are getting to their “correct” MMR 2–3 times faster. More improvements and additions are planned in 2023!
While the news is good, with some nice infographics showcasing the fact that smurfing and the usage of alt accounts have been reduced due to things like the automated smurf detection and adjustments to five-stacking, more work still needs to be done.
Some of the changes coming include:
- More improvements/additions to Riot's smurf detection methodology, so we can find and act on smurfs even faster
- Continued efforts to detect and act against boosting, account sharing and account purchasing, which are both against our Terms of Services and often associated with secondary accounts. Again, we can’t share too much information here (since revealing how we detect this type of behavior would compromise the very detection systems), but we are looking into this.
- Additional ways for players of varying skill levels to play VALORANT competitively together. Recently, we announced the Alpha test of Premier, a high-stakes team-based competitive system in VALORANT. We hope that these systems will provide more avenues for players to play socially without feeling the need to create secondary accounts.
If you want an in-depth look at all the analytics we suggest you take a look at the full article, but in short, Riot will be working to continuously improve the new player experience in Valorant and we can't wait to see what they come up with next.
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