Why are people smurfing in League of Legends?

Let's set the scene: you’re only a couple minutes into the game, and your team is already calling you out for feeding the lane. You check your score – zero kills, four deaths and three creeps. Complete panic! You try calling the jungler for help, but every plead is drowned out in a seemingly never-ending flood of slurs from your teammates. What’s happening? You’re usually dominating Teemo!

Slowly, you begin questioning every move, every decision and every ability until you find yourself afraid of even returning to your lane – what’s going on? The answer is simple: you just had your first run in with a smurf.

In case you didn’t know, smurf accounts usually are used by players with high Match Making Ratio/Rating who want to play with lower MMR. This means less competitiveness, less queue time, less pressure, and to some, more fun. We’ve put together a list of reasons why some feel the need to have a smurf account, and why you could benefit from having one.

Less pressure, more fun

One of the main reasons why some players choose to get a smurf account is to get rid of ranked pressure. At higher ranks, games tend to have a fair share of competitiveness, making the fun of playing League of Legends less obvious. For some, the only way to play casually means getting a new account with a lower MMR. This also allows them to play with friends who have lower Match Making Ratings.

Faster matchmaking

The better you get at League of Legends, the less you’re likely to find opponents as skilled as you. Seems nice, right? Well, not really. Playing at the highest ranks means spending more time in matchmaking – some even report having to wait more than thirty minutes trying to find a game. Since most players only have a few hours to play a day, the last thing they want to do is spend valuable playing time waiting for a game to start. This is where having a smurf account comes in handy, as they’ll be matched against a much bigger player pool than they would on their main account.

On the other hand, it can be argued that these queue times would be much shorter, if high ranked players weren’t playing on smurfs to begin with.

Practice

While you could argue that normal games should be the place where players could try out new champions, builds and strategies without worrying too much about the game and the score, that’s just not the case. No one likes to lose and trying out a new champion and winning at the same time is a lot more fun than spending thirty minutes struggling to stay alive. Can we really blame anyone for wanting to win?

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