Here is my post almost a year ago predicting the exact situation we are now in, people constantly complaining about smurfs.
I swear 99% of the complainers didn’t even know what smurf queue was, it became some kind of scapegoat for any game feeling bad. Like seriously, most of the time when you asked for the op.gg of someone blaming smurf queue they just… were not in smurf queue. It was always easy to identify the games full of level 30-35 accounts but people just didn’t understand what smurf queue was.
It did actually do its job by the way of keeping smurfs out of your games, like 9 out of 10 people in each of these games at least was a real smurf with the occasional late joiner to ranked thrown in. It made smurfing a LOT less fun, now its just an easy way to style on bad players again lol.
Now these smurfs are going to be back lowering the quality of a much larger number of games, and the complainers will only really have themselves to blame.
People don’t want to hear it but that was the best solution, late joiners are
1 - much rarer than smurfs, lowering their game quality temporarily is a good trade off for saving the majority of players from unbalanced games with smurfs
2 - actually legitimately smurfs of a kind themselves often, they still have a lowered rank from the reset Vs their real skill level. Similarly a “returning player” that is just someone’s alt account is also a smurf.
How have you still not understood that the problem with smurf queue was not conceptual but how it was implemented.
Riot axed it because it made returning players have a shit experience in their first games. If you come back after a break and your first 10 games are toxic cesspool games, then you are likely to just quit altogether.