When a skilled player creates a second account to play against less experienced opponents, this is known as SMURFING. Smurfing always results in the Smurfs steamrolling their lower-level opponents, entertaining for the better player but bitter for the victims.
It’s like the Pepsi commercial in which Kyrie Irving dresses up as an elderly gentleman and joins a pickup basketball game. It’s amusing, and you get to meet an NBA player, but only after you’ve been dunked on for the fourth time. It appears as if you were duped or cheated.
Smurfing also goes against the basic premise of most online games, which is that players rank up and compete against opponents of similar skill levels, making it more difficult for less-skilled players to advance. Smurfing remains a grey area for many online games to this day. Fornite prohibits players from smurfing, but League of Legends famously defended smurfing as a way for players to experiment with new strategies.
The popularity of Twitch streamers like Turner “Tfue” Tenney and Félix “xQc” Lengyel, who smurf to entertain their audience, has given the term a whole new meaning outside of gaming.
Smurfing has become a catch-all phrase on the internet for a pro who pretends to be an amateur for a joke video. This video genre has been dubbed “IRL Smurfing” on Reddit as a parody of Celebrities Undercover’s reality TV show.
Nearly 96,000 Redditors have joined the IRL Smurfing subreddit. They post videos of musicians pretending to be bad at the guitar in a video chat room or veteran soccer players slamming newcomers.
This running gag is thanks to two gamers who decided to play a joke on their online opponents in 1996, long before online matchmaking for competitive games existed.
Where Does The Term Smurf Come?
In Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness real-time strategy game, Geoff “Shlongor” Frazier and Greg “Warp” Boyko were among the best players (1996). Because games didn’t have built-in online capabilities back then, ingenious gamers used a program called Kali to create multiplayer lobbies.
Players had to find lobbies with other gamers waiting to play to start a game instead of waiting for Warcraft 2 to match them with opponents. Frazier and Boyko, on the other hand, were so good that other players would refuse to play if they saw their usernames, fearing being pwned.
Frazier and Boyko came up with the idea of making fake accounts so that other players wouldn’t recognize them. PapaSmurf (Fraizer) and Smurfette were their chosen names (Boyko).
Because there was no way for players to record and save replays in Warcraft 2, diehard fans would take screenshots of their games’ results and blog about their favorite moments. Both Frazier and Boyko used this method to keep track of their smurfing exploits.
“At War2, Warp and I have a lot of fun making up names and playing people.” In an entry dated March 8, 1996, Fraizer wrote, “We make them think we’re really bad and then beat them up.” “However, the joke was on me because Zima played a prank on me.”
He played Spiderman, which made me think he was terrible. I’ve been defeated at my own game! So depressing. We have a lot of fun pretending to be smurfs.”
Early online gamers quickly picked up on the practice and gave it a name. Fraizer tells how he and Boyko joined a game with another smurf account called “Spiderman,” another skilled player in disguise in that duplicate entry. Frazier was taken off guard and lost early, but Boyko came out on top in the end.
Why Do Gamers Use Smurf Accounts?
Smurfing occurs for a variety of reasons. Finding matches at the highest levels takes a long time, which is one of the most common reasons people do it. Someone who is a Grandmaster in Overwatch, for example, might have to wait 30 minutes to find a game. They can play much faster if they create a smurf account in Gold, where there are many more players.
SMURFING BEYOND WARCRAFT 2
Smurfing exploded in popularity as the internet became more widely used. The release of Halo 2 in 2004 revolutionized online matchmaking, and that same year, Urban Dictionary added the first game-centric definition for “smurfing.”
The online ranking system in Halo 2 was a reasonably complex algorithm at the time, calculating how many points were awarded or lost based on the final result of a round and each player’s ranks. This system would serve as the foundation for how ranked systems in other games, such as Overwatch, work today and is a significant reason gamers get irritated when a smurf destroys them in-game.
When a player of a similar rank destroys a player, they usually lose many points.
Because of this issue, smurfing has become such a contentious topic in gaming history, prompting many game designers and developers to disagree on whether or not to address it or allow smurfing.
In 2019, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan downplayed a “huge” smurf problem, claiming that Blizzard’s matchmaking system would only let smurfs wreak havoc in low ranks for a few games before boosting them up to their actual position.
Even so, players who are just learning the ropes have a chance of being obliterated at any time, but smurfing is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Even Fortnite, one of the strictest anti-smurfing policies, relies on players reporting smurfs to ban the secondary accounts.
Conclusion
If we conclude the above article, we can say that knowing the smurfing terminology in gaming may overwhelm you. Anyway, as you progressed through the game, you must have developed the ability to recognize smurf accounts. The best thing you can do is report these smurf accounts so that their unfair behavior is punished.
