I've seen tons of people complaining about the huge problem that smurfing is in Iron. So i decided to spend 2 days watching my Iron friend play comp. You know what I found?

First of all, I found huge inconsistency in their match history. Everyone that she told me was smurfing I asked her to add them, we saw basically people doing 30/5 in one game and in another they were 10/20.

Confidence is one of the biggest problems in this elo. If she thought that someone was smurfing, right in that moment she wouldnt be able to kill them and even when they made huge mistakes they wouldnt get punished because people were already accepting defeat and complaining in the /all about the guy being smurfing. That only boost that player confidence to play even better.

One good play was enough, even in the pistol round, for people to start complaining about the guy being smurfing and accepting the loss, even though there were no true evidence of that.

Ps: I was actually impressed by the number of headshots I saw they landing in this elo, people may think that people can't aim in Iron and thats not true, the biggest problem here is game sense.

Second of all, most of these inconsistent players were actually people who deranked during this rank shift that riot put in place. They belonged to gold or silver during act 1 or 2 and were put in the same rank as people that were already there. What this means is basically that people with some game sense and usually with half-decent aim are now playing against people that are just getting to know the game and learning fps. And this is insanely important to understand why so many people are complaining about smurfing. They aren't actually smurfing, the fact is that the skill gap between players that are in the same rank is huge, thats the problem when you move the average player from gold to iron. The players that are still learning the game don't have the chance to slowly improve, they are thrown to the wolves and expected to learn something, and this only generates frustration with the game.

Third of all, I did find some smurfs, but not that many that made it an epidemic. Throughout 2 days i found 2 people who were actually smurfing to elo boost their friends. She add them and we start to see their match history, they bump up ranks really fast and usually played 4 or 5 matchs in Iron before getting promoted to bronze. These 5 matches obviously were destroyed for all players involved, thats enough to frustrate tons of people.

A tip for all the people out there. Your mental state is of the utmost importance when you play the game. When you give up from the game because you see someone allegedly smurfing you've already lost, no matter if it is an actual smurf or not. Now, you cant be everyone psychologist and try to bump your team confidence, but when you are not part of the problem anymore, im sure you will start to win more games than before.

Another tip. The toxicity level on low elo is huge, so start using the 1 strike rule. Someone started complaining about someone being a smurf or is being an a-hole, just mute them and respectfully ask for your team to do so and not listen to them. This will not only make your game experience better, but you wont be affected by all this negativity and will focus more in your game, and this is what really counts towards winning more games in this elo.

I hope you guys can get something of value from this.