Ladder/Alternate IDs
Overview[edit]
A player uses a smurf account (to smurf) in order to disguise his true identity. The reason behind smurfing can have many reasons, some of which might overlap. Professionals were known to use anonymous aliases in online ladders to hide their strategies, or to protect themselves from spam of their fans. However, also somewhat decent players create more accounts to play on ladders, either to bypass rulings which prohibit them from resetting their stats to 0-0, or to purposefully play against weaker opponents (so called "newb bashing").
Competitive Usage[edit]
The policy of most ladder portals usually enabled players to create multiple accounts. However, since smurfs were often shared by players, several rules on ladders like ICCup have been implemented and/or deleted over time. In most cases smurfs as shared accounts were prohibited, but tolerated in reality, as checking each account was nearly impossible. Since many Koreans used smurfs in international ladders, most fan pages had threads in which fans tried to unmask the best players. Especially foreigners had a habit in old tournaments to sign up with smurfs, partially to avoid emberassing losses, or to gain an advantage by denying the opponents to prepare for special strategies.
The downside of smurfs in competitive events, especially team leagues, could be found in the potential of abuse. In team leagues like the QCup or the BWCL several transfer rules could be bypassed with the help of smurfs. To abuse, weaker players of a roster would share an account with a newly transferred team mate, who was not yet allowed to play in the current week. Similar issues happened for several tournaments which used qualification systems - players could try to qualify with multiple accounts in a knock out stage to increase their chances to get an "easy grid".
Controversies[edit]
Several controversies revolved around smurfs and their usage in competitive events.
World Dream Tour[edit]
The World Dream Tour featured many controversies, one of which revolved around the progamer Oversky and the American user Ilnp. A few months prior to the event, Ilnp was known to have an APM ratio of only about 160, in the tournament he displayed different hotkey set ups, almost the double APM ratio and unusual strategies. In the Round of 16 Ilnp furthermore lost the first two sets clearly against the Dutch ret. To avoid being knocked out already, he intentionally disced in the second set and ret was forced to repeat the game[1]. Eventually, Ilnp won the event after knocking out better players. Only few days after the event the community was baffled about the result and claimed Ilnp shared his account with an unknown Korean professional; Ilnp declined this accusation[2]. Only in later years it became known that the Korean Oversky played under Ilnp's alias, as well as the facts, that the tournament as a whole was designed force a Zerg player to win and that the disconnect of Ilnp/Oversky against ret was done with the knowledge of the administrator Smuft.[3].
ARTISTTRACK18[edit]
In the BW4Ever Season 11 a Korean Protoss named ARTISTTRACK18 won the initial tournament. During the event the fans, organizers and players started to guess who this Protoss was. In the later course of the season the smurf could be confirmed to be the Polish Draco, who recently went to South Korea and tried to obtain a professional license. He used a smurf to disguise his process.