Why Do People Accuse Others Of "Smurfing" or "De-Ranking"?
Idk, this feels weird to me. Ill click onto a video and see people say that the player is smurfing because they are facing bad opponents, but DBD's matchmaking is not insanely strict and has a lot of flaws with matchmaking quality since it prioritizes speed over quality… I feel like people put too much faith into the matchmaking system.
Plus since MMR is tied to dying or not getting kills, Ive seen people accuse others of "de-ranking" as well, which is also just odd to me, like good players just die sometimes or dont get kills, it just happens. Like anyone can lose at a game, it's just bound to happen, so why exactly does it even really matter?
I feel like some people are too quick to try and dismiss how skilled a person is at a game, or try to dismiss their character based on false assumptions with little to no evidence… this isnt something new, it's been in gaming for a long time. But at the same time, it seems like there has been a massive spike in this recently, since Ive been seeing it a lot more compared to before.
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While I don’t think nobody out there deranks, it’s usually touted as a “i lost because of x” thing.
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It's not even "I lost because of X thing" since most of the time it is used in situations in which the person is not actively involved in it (e.g. a random person accusing a content creator because their opponents were not good, said random person is not actively involved in any of the matches).
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I don’t think people Derank but smurfing absolutely. I seen a survivor holding still and the killer missed them 2 times and keep in mind the survivor has over 10,000 hours easy.
I’ve never ran into a player like that except when I was new and a few months ago when I made a video about smurfing. But I let all the survivors go in the end.
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don't get me wrong some people do smurf, but skill sees skill you can identify a smurf on rip. most people do it because of tru3 sadly, they are in his echo chamber. as for deranking, theres not enough time in the day for a streamer to derank. so thats just an accusation but frankly its been a "viable" insult since back when it was possible and popular to derank. i dont think deranking will ever not be an accusation now in this game, the damage is done.
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Smurfs were a lot more common with RBMM, it’s a lot harder to smurf now imo. I think people don’t realize how hard it is to actually derank in this game, though. It’d take days upon days and then some with constant losing to actually do so, because mmr drops so slow.
though, my favorite accusations is that people like tofu derank off stream. Like, have you ever actually heard tofu talk about how upset he is at matchmaking and how unfun and unfair it is to both sides? Also, tofu and otz and etc rest play dbd for a job, they really probably aren’t playing offline unless it’s for a video. It’s like if you just continued to worked after you got off.0 -
Deranking - I suspect this almost never happens. I'm sure some people have tried it, but that's likely more to farm shards.
Smurfing - People do start new accounts, but outside streamers its a rare thing. Like maybe someone who put 1000s of hours into the game will be willing to start from the beginning again to kind of relive the experience, but I doubt a normal person would ever do that more than once. Streamers do it for challenges (hardcore survivor), but there they are putting conditions to make it harder.
I could imagine a streamer wanting to do this to give themselves easier competition while keeping it secret, but I think Scott had a video on easy it would be to spot this from the audience.
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I see a lot "thinking and asuming" here, the truth is somewere in between.
From my exp alt accounts are very common in many online games, especially from ppl with a lot of hours.
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Because people's life depend on this kids game
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Why would you even need to smurf in DBD when the MMR system is literally a myth. MMR softcap is so low in this game that you reach it on a new account by winning like 20 games & then you're dumped into the meat grinder with the rest of the playerbase. People forget that content creators do this as a job or are looking to at trying to make it a job. If you're playing for 8 hours a day and make like 1-2 videos a week you would have 100+ games per week played. All you need to do is be selective and choose your best game of the week and use that as content. Because MMR is a joke you're going to be facing bad or new players in multiple games regardless of how high your hidden MMR is to keep queue times down. There's zero reason to smurf when you get feed bad or new players by the MMR system on a regular basis.
Like anyone with half a braincell that's played DBD for more than a year knows high MMR doesn't exist. It doesn't matter how good you're at DBD, you basically get to a cap and play everyone. That's why the queue times are consistently low across all skill levels. If there was this mythical high MMR bracket that only queued high MMR players against each other the queue times would be huge for that bracket. It's not just him a lot of content creators try to play the high MMR card to get views.
Post edited by EQWashu on5 -
I wonder how many of these people also attribute their wins to someone being busy deranking?
Not many I bet.
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most twitch streamers derank off the stream, you can tell by the survivors/killers they got in game
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totally bro most twitch streamers spend 8 hours streaming DBD and then spend 8 hours undoing the mmr progress they made and also never sleep or eat
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Because to some people the mere thought that their experience with the game might not be The One True Experience for any of the 1.2 million reasons that could actually be behind it is straight up terrifying.
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Because there are some Content Creators out there who think that they verse the most optimal opponents and are at highest MMR and whatsoever and that others dont face their opponents, despite them having the same amount of hours.
Without realizing or at least admitting that they also get easy opponents and others also get hard opponents. And the playerbase who are fans of those streamers believe everything they say - if the Streamer just compliments every basic play as "perfect Dead Hard" or whatever, they believe it and think that their streamer must face the top of the top and if other streamers face rather inexperienced opponents (which can happen, since MMR is not strict at all), they must be smurfing.
If someone just spends a few seconds to think about it, it is completely unreasonable to think that people smurf or derank off-stream when they already stream for 8+ hours every day.
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Does this happen? I thought since we all agreed that matchmaking in this game has been broken for several years now that it's essentially random who you go against.
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.... there's MMR loss prevention baked into the system. It's genuinely not possible once you're over the soft cap. There wouldn't be enough hours in the day
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because that is a thing that happens in basically every game with a rank based matchmaking.
people smurf and people de-rank.
not necessarily maliciously, but those happen aswell.
statisticaly speaking there is probably a streamer or more that do it so they get easier matches and can post some easy content…
but you are correct, the matchmaking is not really reliable at all. so you might aswell just play normally.
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Mmr losses are adjusted to match length and short matches lose you less MMR than long matches, presumably in part to minimize the effectiveness of exactly what you're theorizing about
Post edited by EQWashu on0 -
Pretty sure there is a bunch of smurfers though, I won't match against any real "bully squad" nowadays while playing killer, yet my newbie friends ALWAYS match against those kind of bad survivors
You can believe Dbd matchmaking is not strict or whatsoever, but bad players are real, do exists and can harm you if you are new
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Let's please remember to keep the discussion civil and on topic, and remember that attacking others, including content creators, is not permitted on this platform whatsoever.
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Its hard to smurf in high mmr, and its very much a fool's endeavor to do so because of loss protection. As once you reach 1600 rating, you get diminishing returns in point loss for losses. But if you never reach 1600, you never activate the loss protection.
Which leads us to: Low MMR Smurfing
Low MMR Smurfing is actually something that can occur and is much easier to do by comparison.
Lets say your on a fresh account. By the games own rules, you are 650 skill bracket, aka testing bracket for new players. You play some matches, you lose or win, intentionally or not. Depending on how many escapes/kills you get influences your new mmr, with players that focus on kills/escapes being put at 900-1000 bracket aka "low bracket".
How does one lose as Survivor? Well its just simply: "Did you die as survivor? Yes or no? If yes, lose mmr. If no, gain mmr."
As any activity you did during the whole match does not matter, you could have gotten max in every single category, and then died at the end due to endgame collapse.
While as killer its similar to survivor, just based on kill count. 0-1 kills = loss. 2 = draw. 3-4 win.
In both cases, survivor and killer, the game does not care how the death occurred, just that it did occur.
The number of points that factors your mmr is partially based on match length, max of +20(win) or -20(loss). Yet also based on the caveat of who has a higher/lower mmr for gains/losses. Lets say as killer you get 1 kill but 3 survivors escape, this is considered a loss for you, but this might result in diminished returns because your opponents also had low mmr, while if they had higher mmr, this results in a bigger loss.
This is how you get, for example, doctors that largely just use their power and afk in a corner. As they intentionally sink their mmr and get 0 kills. And the only way to encounter them is to intentionally lower your own mmr. As the only way for their mmr to increase is if 3 survivors intentionally die due to endgame collapse.
So lets say a survivor does low elo smurfing in solo-que and wants to avoid getting reported. They still focus on making sure their teammates escape, to intentionally increase their teammate's mmr, by doing everything a good survivor is supposed to do like objectives, evading the killer in chases, healing, etc. Yet they intentionally die to hook, bleed out, mori, or endgame collapse. Since the grade system for categories was disconnected from MMR, the game views the survivor as a loss, and lowers their mmr even though they are clearly not meant to be there.
And if this low mmr survivor beelines for a specific build of perks through the bloodweb, they technically only need to get, at most, 4 characters to prestige 1. Less than 4 if some of the perks are general perks and/or were perks they obtain through the shrine of secrets. As such a player would still earn player experience and therefore shards, as shards are based on match length and what grades the gotten.3 -
Some streamers do clearly smurf for content reasons when they create new accounts for challenges or experiments.
Obviously not fair to mention names, but I'm sure many of you know what challenges I'm talking about here. And though I do like some of these streamers, I'm not particularly fond of this kind of content. They might be open about it on their streams and YT channels, but it's still technically smurfing imho (at least at the beginning of the challenge, anyway). The Killers they go up against have no idea what's going on and are probably not having the greatest time Versing a Survivor team that in reality has over 40K hours combined.
I do wonder if some of this content inspires at least a few fans to try similar challenges for themselves. Not too many maybe, but there's got to be some.
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There are actually a small chunk of people who do that but generally they target specific groups of people.
I would understand the frustration but I feel it's mostly a lack of understanding (And info) on how MMR and matchmaking works in this game. All the information we have about it was datamined by the community.
I knew a person (Blocked now) who used to smurf to target people of color that were new to the game. They would camp them on hook with Bubba because they were being a stupid edgelord. They did this mostly through steam sharing.
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