I want to touch on smurfing first. While I do believe the problem exists, I think it may be over played a bit. I used to play with a friend who when he would do well near the start of a game (in CSGO), he would say "GE smurf btw" and the other team would fume and lose their minds. You can definitely tell when people are trying and when they've already accepted defeat. Just because someone on the other team says they're a smurf, doesn't mean they are. Furthermore, being quick to believe they are a smurf will cement a bad mindset of "The only reason I'm stuck in gold is because of smurfs" and not because of bad movement/positioning/aim/attitude. I've dropped 30 bombs in diamond and been accused of a smurf and also bottom fragged hard and been accused of being boosted. Sometimes in back to back games.

So what do you do when there is a genuine smurf? I find a lot of the smurfs I've run into play Jett/Reyna, love to ego peek and love to awp. You MUST adapt to the smurf and play around them. When you're on attack, gather information and if they are playing on B site, instantly rotate to the other side of the map. Smurfs will over rotate because they want kills, you can easily trap them or cut them off. Also you MUST play in at least pairs as you will not win 1v1 straight up duels with them. Dry peeking them and getting picked off 1 by 1 by an awp is just freelo for the other team. Go where they aren't, and force them to play unfavourable retakes. On defence it is a bit harder as the enemy team will probably just follow the smurf into whatever site they say to hit. Since they're likely to entry, just try to trade as best as you can. If you can set up a crossfire with your teammate, they (usually) won't be able to kill both of you. Use your utility to stall and call for fast rotates. If you're smurfing and winning every gun duel, you don't really need other strategies. Obviously this is highly dependant on your team/who you're vsing, but if you can win at least 1 out of say 5 smurf games, that's better than not. Plus it feels sick.

Onto toxicity. I reckon I can say that in all my games, I've only seen/experienced toxicity in under 10 games, definitely under 20, so at time of writing this (~450 games) is about 2-4%. Am I just really lucky? Maybe... but I think it also has to do with my attitude, and how I talk to people. I always say hello at the beginning of games (more to see if anyone has mics) and more often than not people will respond. Sometimes I get radio silence but I found if I keep talking in a positive tone, sometimes people warm up and will give call outs/start to talk more. I make it my goal to be the first to say "unlucky, nice try" at round loss or "good shit/great work team" if we win. If they pull off a nice clutch I hit them with the "you're just better" or if I clutch/do something great, I without fail, will say something to the effect of "thanks guys, but team game team game, you guys set me up". The quicker you can get people to believe they're on a team/their contributions are being noticed and in a safe environment, the quicker they're likely to work together/feel safer to speak. I personally don't mind deflecting praise aimed at me onto my team. I just want the dub. This all goes to say you can't be toxic yourself.

What about when the toxicity isn't being aimed at you, but another teammate? I'm quick to jump in at the first sign of it to defuse the situation. "don't worry about it bro we'll easily win this/ all good all good, we got this next round no problems/they'll fire up soon and go huge, just watch" or make sweeping statements like "I think we're better than them/have a better team comp, so let's just play as a team and move on. We got this guys" I've personally found that if you leave the toxicity unchecked, it will snowball, and there is nothing the recipient can do/say, someone that isn't receiving it HAS to step in and squash it fast. You'd be surprised at how often it works. If not, I'll attempt to rally the other teammates into to the situation to either defuse, or pile on the toxic player. You can win with 4 united people and 1 toxic player, it's very hard with 1 toxic player, 1 victim and 3 people feeling bad/awkward. Not that I condone toxicity, but at the end of the day, if someone has to be sad/abused, it should be the toxic prick and no-one else.

You have to find what works best for you in how you approach the game. If you have to DM for 30 minutes before you play or aimlab for an hour then so be it. Personally I don't have an abundance of spare time these days so as soon as I log in, I just jump into ranked, do a few screen centering exercises in between rounds and I find I'm good to go (more or less). I will preface this by saying I did play a lot of counterstrike 1.5/1.6/source/GO - reaching SMFC. I started playing in E3:A1 and originally placed in silver with some friends. I ranked to gold pretty fast as I became more familiar with the agents/maps. Probably around mid gold I was predominately solo Q. I mained controller (really liked Omen and then Astra) so I mainly filled, but went through a little phase of the instalock Jett lyfe, as I really wanted to awp.

Finally, I want to say that you are where you deserve to be. You will fail and you will fail often, but as long as you're willing to accept that you're not as good as you think you are, you will find yourself improving and the rank ups will come. Just keep aiming to get better and stop blaming external factors that you cannot control.

Sorry for the long post, i tried to keep it succinct. If you have any questions let me know and I can flesh things out a bit more. My tracker for reference

https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/kilk%23OCE/overview