Yeah, it’s his fault, but shitting on him for it isn’t going to help the game or help him.

You can criticize without being toxic about it.

I disagree here. I check match histories and Dotabuff when I can (smurfs often don’t make their profile info public so that makes it a bit more difficult), but I don’t believe that to be the case.

I think that it’s very easy to tell when someone’s a smurf. My games are around Archon 2 to Legend 2. I’ve got 232 matches so far. I used to play back in 2012-2014, so I’m not entirely new but I have been having to basically relearn the entire game.

I find that it is very obvious when someone is a smurf because people that have 10 (or less) to 100-ish matches do not play like the people that I see smurfing. Pretty consistent last hitting, strong mechanics, good knowledge of itemization, etc. New players will almost NEVER play that way, if not actually never. Because… you’re a new player, developing those skills and learning those things takes time.

Even if you come from another MOBA, like League or something, few things are transferable. But even if they are, you’re still not going to perform as competently as these obvious smurfs are.

What really frustrates me, though, is that not necessarily me getting smurfed on. It sucks and makes it a bit harder to be willing to play and learn. But I can do it, because I signed up for that and I love MOBAs in general.

The thing that actually frustrates me is the people doing this to actual new players. People who have never played a game of Dota in their life. Decide to try it out, play a few games and get at least a couple of smurfs in those 5-10 games. It completely kills their desire to play (usually) which is horrible for the health of the game, nevermind that people shouldn’t be allowed to ruin new player experiences so easily.

As someone that’s returned from not playing for about a decade, most of my games have a smurf in them and it’s fucking unbearable.

If I play with either of my friends, one who is high Legend with 5k games, and another in Ancient with 4k games, every game has 1-2 smurfs. It’s fucking unbearable and absolutely ruins the new player experience.

I like that solo impact matters, but I think that’s terrible design for a team based game. You should need to actually work with your team rather than sitting in your lane for literally the entire match.

Also to make all of this worse, competent teams for mid often end up with getting rotations mid, constantly turning your wins into 2v1s that you lose so even when you win, you don’t win.

There’s also the RNG with runes. Even when you have a ward for rune and theoretically when you both have the same mobility, you can just get absolutely fucked on runes/bottle charges which can and does severely hamper your effectiveness.

Playing mid just sucks.