anecdotally, it seems like valve has mitigated the smurfing issue pretty well in recent years. I very rarely see obvious smurfs in the gold nova range these day

anecdotally, it seems like valve has mitigated the smurfing issue pretty well in recent years. I very rarely see obvious smurfs in the gold nova range these days. unfortunately, the side effect is that there are now a bunch of hoops that a fresh account needs to jump through to get into MM. I think the current state is a decent compromise. it's totally viable to make a new account whenever you have a new friend that starts playing. as long as you only play with them on the smurf account, it will stay in a close MMR range. your friend has to go through the grind anyway, so you may as well do it with them. the grinding does make it pretty annoying to make new accounts over and over again just to tear through the ranks.