Do Smurfs Affect the Difficulty of the 1v1 Ladder?
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I don’t understand.
I haven’t noticed any decline in my skills.
But the competition on the ladder appears to be getting tougher and tougher.
It’s like the players I was easily defeating 6 months ago are now beating me with ease.
I’m still practicing and playing the same way as before when I was +150 ELO.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Recently, I’ve lost 10 games in a row.
What could be causing this?
I find that sometimes my strat works perfectly for ages, then someone beats it and seems to tell the next 10 players what to do
It’s a natural ebb and flow of skill.
Most players have about a 200 elo range between their good days and their bad days.
Somedays it’ll feel like everyone is crushing you and other days it’ll feel the opposite.
This is even ignoring the specific ups and downs of learning which further compound this effect (brown bear wrote a great blog post about that: https://illiteracyhasdownsides.com/2020/06/13/how-to-get-worse-at-starcraft-ii/)
But all in all you are likely doing something differently but you just don’t notice it.
For me personally when I am in my slumps its usually because I’m playing safer (read: passive) because I don’t want to lose and that’s causing me to lose more even though it doesn’t feel too different at first glance.
I think people are just getting better. 1K and 1100s of today are significantly better than they were a year ago.
I also think that “smurfs” are sometimes just players who had a bad streak or are trying new strategies.
Last time I came back to play, I ended up trying a new civilization and ended up dropping from mid-1K to low 900s before climbing to 1100.
I wasn’t smurfing, but it took a few losses to figure out the new civ/ strategy.
On top of that, I had some weird crashes that dropped me down a bit further.
I really think people are mostly just getting better.
big losing streaks just happen sometimes
Would you mind sharing your ELO?
The influx of Xbox players are really messing with the 1000 ELO range right now.
It could be shifting people around the ladder.
Honestly the ladder is just getting harder.
With more content creators and tournaments more players are beginning aware of the /right/ things to do.
This means the average skill is just getting better.
It’s tough out here xD
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