The matchmaking system in CSGO almost makes a conscious effort to increase "smurfing". Back in 2013-2015, smurfing was actually a lot harder, because if you won every game, your rank would increase very quickly. This led to a situation where the rank distribution didn't look anything like a bell curve, because people with higher rank had proportionally many more accounts than people in lower ranks.
For some reason, Valve thought that this was a problem. And they modified the matchmaking system in a way that forces the MMR distribution to be a bell curve from the outside. It's not known what exactly they do, but from tracking sites it seems like the distribution starts to "deform" over the course of a week and then gets "squished down" again.
As a player, the effect this has is that 1. accounts at the upper ranks (Global Elite/SMFC) decay really hard, like if you have an account that is GE and you don't play on that account for 3-6 months, you'll be like MGE afterwards. My main account got actually re-ranked from GE to MG2 after they shifted the ranked distribution - after which I won, and this is not an exaggeration, 38 games in a row, and still kept like 75% win rate until the account was GE again. The other effect is that it takes way too long to rank up now, it used to be that if you won 6 games in a row you would very likely rank up, now it can take easily double that.
Put those two together, and you've got a million smurfs obviously. Because anyone who just bought 10 accs for $70 during a sale (and believe me, many, many people did that) can just rotate around accounts and let them decay again once they're too high to smurf on.
Add to that that there is nothing to do once you're GE, there is simply no higher rank, and yeah it's no surprise the game is full of smurfs.
To make things worse, now that Trust Factor exists you can't even compare experiences anymore. If a new player comes to me and says oh I only play against cheaters or smurfs, I can't even give him a way for it to get better. We have no idea how Trust Factor works, and if you're a new player with a bad Trust Factor... what are you gonna do? You have nothing to look forward to. Prime barely even means anything anymore (not that it ever did, but at least it was a small hurdle), and there's no given way for you to increase your Trust Factor.
Are you saying that people spend a lot of money to buy multiple Steam accounts (that have CS:GO on them), so that they can slowly rotate which account they use for playing, so that they avoid gaining ranks and being matched with players that are as good as them, so that they can keep dominating lesser skilled players every time they play?
Yes, that's exactly what people do. Although the spending money part is kind of optional now, since the game is free to play. And it's not really "a lot", it's like 1 AAA game, for most likely way more hours of entertainment.
This is also something that happens in pretty much every multiplayer game with skill based matchmaking that exists. However, other games are much better at mitigating this. In LoL for example, your MMR doesn't decay at all. It does get soft-reset once a year when the new season starts, but that reset is quite soft and you can't "stack" multiple years of resets on top of each other. If you had top 1% MMR in 2015, you still have top 1-2% MMR. All games could do more to prevent this, simply by changing how their matchmaking works, but CSGO really takes the cake in terms of requiring an absolute minimum amount of effort, plus actually "forcing" people to smurf unintentionally, just because they took a long break from the game. It's comical at this point.
Wow, how unbelievably insecure do you have to be to do that? In CS1.6, I was always appreciative of the chance to play against higher skilled players, becuase that's how you get better and better.
The alternative to that decay system was having smurfs that lost on purpose when their rank got too high.
Maybe something like a hidden quick ranking would help. I.e. something trivial like average kill/death ratio, numbers of headshots, ...things that make smurfs annoying. And then match you still according to the real rank, but put people with the same hidden rank in the enemy team.
>having smurfs that lost on purpose when their rank got too high
Those still exist, but they are a tiny minority compared to smurfs who just decay. The simple problem is this: Losing on purpose is extremely boring and very time consuming. Having to spend 50% of your time on an account intentionally losing just so you can win a few easy matches is more annoying than just playing on a higher ranked account.
>Maybe something like a hidden quick ranking would help.
If I'm being cynical, Trust Factor is exactly this kind of hidden rank system. Which is probably why they're seeing decent results from it. The problem however is how do you distinguish between a talented player and a smurf? Someone who simply played a lot of 1.6 or Quake will have exactly the same indicators as a smurf or even a cheater.
Doing this results in very fair matches if we simply define fair as "both teams have a decent chance of winning", but it completely kills any meaning of ranked progression. If someone is "DMG", that has a completely different meaning combined with a very high hidden rank or a very low hidden rank. It's literally worlds apart. And that's exactly what we're seeing with Trust Factor of course, low trust factor matches are worlds apart in skill (whether that's actual skill or cheats) from high trust factor matches.
What would really help is simply abandoning the idea that the ranked distribution has to look like a bell curve, removing MMR decay, and showing some sort of ranked points after reaching GE. That would get rid of 80% of smurfs easily. Even better would be a ranked system more like LoLs system, so you can decay people's rank without decaying their MMR. Plus ideally some sort of way to recognize when players perform way above or below their expected skill level, and quickly adjusting their MMR. (For situations where people buy accounts or buy boosting services. Some people think that boosting should be detected and then the adjustment should be extra slow - but that's just stupid really. It's not going to stop anyone from boosting, it just means the booster is going to destroy more games. Detect boosting, and rank them up really quickly, and then detect when someone is playing really badly, and rank them down really quickly. That keeps the amount of destroyed games at a minimum.)
For some reason, Valve thought that this was a problem. And they modified the matchmaking system in a way that forces the MMR distribution to be a bell curve from the outside. It's not known what exactly they do, but from tracking sites it seems like the distribution starts to "deform" over the course of a week and then gets "squished down" again.
As a player, the effect this has is that 1. accounts at the upper ranks (Global Elite/SMFC) decay really hard, like if you have an account that is GE and you don't play on that account for 3-6 months, you'll be like MGE afterwards. My main account got actually re-ranked from GE to MG2 after they shifted the ranked distribution - after which I won, and this is not an exaggeration, 38 games in a row, and still kept like 75% win rate until the account was GE again. The other effect is that it takes way too long to rank up now, it used to be that if you won 6 games in a row you would very likely rank up, now it can take easily double that.
Put those two together, and you've got a million smurfs obviously. Because anyone who just bought 10 accs for $70 during a sale (and believe me, many, many people did that) can just rotate around accounts and let them decay again once they're too high to smurf on.
Add to that that there is nothing to do once you're GE, there is simply no higher rank, and yeah it's no surprise the game is full of smurfs.
To make things worse, now that Trust Factor exists you can't even compare experiences anymore. If a new player comes to me and says oh I only play against cheaters or smurfs, I can't even give him a way for it to get better. We have no idea how Trust Factor works, and if you're a new player with a bad Trust Factor... what are you gonna do? You have nothing to look forward to. Prime barely even means anything anymore (not that it ever did, but at least it was a small hurdle), and there's no given way for you to increase your Trust Factor.