[brnaftr361]

I've played for many years including CS1.6, CS:S, GO, and 2. I regularly snoop profiles and overwhelmingly there are accounts with 1 game, all F2P games, short account lives, low hours (CS2, GO + account), low or no commendations, low match count, blocked stat tracking... Slews of markers that these are less-than-legit, either smurfing (IMO a form of cheating) or outright hacking. Then they coincidentally overperform for their respective rank. That's without mentioning coming across numerous individuals with [sometimes multiple] bans recorded on their accounts.

My account is 20 years old. And has several games with hundreds of hours including a couple of perfect games, not to mention a hundred or more games. Also phone verified. I don't expect everyone to have similar accounts, but it's seldom I'm matched against anything even remotely similar, say 5 year old accounts with similar playtimes in non-F2P games, though many profiles are private, which itself is - I think - also suspicious since virtually everyone leverages aliases on Steam so I can't really imagine a case for this other than obscuration, though I'm certain some people do it for privacy reasons I expect that rationale is rare.

Beyond that I would say there are a lot of suspicious individuals I've been matched against in both premier and comp . Regardless of whether or not they're smurfs it makes MM obnoxious if only because you end up matched against people who rage and ruin 45m-1h of your time by competing illicitly.

The MM algo is also just shit without these considerations lumped on top of it. I regularly play with my friends who rank lower and that draws my rank down so we get matched in low ranks, resulting in violent pubstomping. Of course I play on my only account, so I'm sure I get hackusated a lot, which would ostensibly get my trust factor drug through the mud. I suppose that's a solid incentive for smurfing on its own, especially since the system is opaque.

It's all pretty bad, frankly. Faceit is hardly better, a lot of the community is pretty toxic and obnoxious salty tryhard metabangers that aren't fun to play with.