The night I went blue ...

@EdwardDLuffyEveryone, raise pitchforks, light up the torches! We have found a smurf cheater! We must punish him! We must end the blue race 🙂

Pointy garb aside, my smurfing experience was different, but can't say it's been fun at all.

I started a secondary account on my work PC because of very different setup and environment, restrictions, etc.. Played Winter Express almost exclusively and only pubs after that LTM ended. LTM fights were a pain as SBMM didn't seem to apply there and I also had very different, roughly tuned peripherals and a huge amount of input lag because my access to settings is pretty restricted.

In pubs, first game was a win, with 6 kills, 1K+ of damage and both teammates dead and spectating, although I was still struggling to overcome the input lag. It didn't feel satisfying, the teammates were more trouble than help, the enemies were literally sitting ducks, not dodging bullets, not pushing, not running away, not using abilities, not healing or otherwise doing these right in the open. It was arguably easier than fighting the AI enabled dummies in the firing range (by the way, I also had issues when trying to complete the tutorial, Lifeline's care package not landing in the first dozen attempts or so).

A few games later, I had the 2K on Lifeline, a couple of wins and my KDR peaked at 8. But it felt very frustrating, I couldn't build anything with my teammates, they were very unpredictable and obviously lacking skill. Sometimes I had other smurfs in my team, those resulted in wins or at least top 3 with good damage and kill count. When there were smurfs in the enemy teams only, the match ended much quicker, usually in a 1v2 or 1v3. Anyway, there weren't that many smurfs and, as I was advancing, I started to see more higher level players around anyway.

Around level 24, the game finally pushed me out of the beginner lobby. How did I noticed that? Easy! My KDR was at 5 or so and literally the first game after reaching 100 kills and buying Caustic, my team got vaporized in mere seconds by a full premade pred team, where my killer had about 11K kills and 1K+ wins for S7 alone (after 2/3 of it!). I spectated them, they had to be pros, judging by how they played together, their impeccable movement and spot on aim.

Now, sitting at 43 hours, most stats are similar to those on my main account, but the experience is awful. I have to struggle with the input lag while facing skilled enemies. I can't care about battlepass grinding, as a lot of challenges depend on locked legends , while rerolling dailies not only eats up precious tokens, but is also very broken (if you do a second reroll, there's a very high chance you will get the initial challenge again). The fact that it takes 25 hours or more to unlock one legend with tokens is one of the most absurd things in this game at this point.