Valorant fans demand restrictions for new agents as smurfs make game “unbearable”

Valorant players are demanding for the developers to add account restrictions to prevent smurfs from playing any newly released agents until they meet certain criteria.

Like many other competitive games, smurfing is a common issue in Valorant. High-ranked players will often make new accounts to play with their friends or to stomp new players for fun.

When new content is released in Valorant, such as new maps and new agents, encountering smurfs becomes a lot more common – as players flock to try out the latest additions to the game without pressure. With the release of Valorant’s 17th agent, Chamber, an influx of smurfs has once again hit the game.

New Valorant accounts are given free agent unlock tokens after completing a few challenges, which allows smurfs to get their hands on the new agent quicker than usual. Players are now gathering in hopes that Riot will add restrictions to unlocking the new content.

Since Chamber’s release on November 16, multiple threads on Valorant’s official Reddit have highlighted the recent increase of smurfs – and most of them are playing Chamber in particular.

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Valorant player and Reddit user Snookville pointed out that changes need to be made to better protect against smurfs, or Riot need to disallow new agents to be purchased with unlock tokens. “Every new act, episode, or agent that comes out is followed by a literal flood of smurfs, who actively admit to surfing,” said Snookville.

The frustrated player went on to provide multiple solutions to Riot on how to fix the smurfing issues: “Now the obvious answer for Riot would be to add something similar to Prime Gaming on CS:GO where you need a phone number attached to your account. Or, for the love of everything take new characters out of the ‘free agent’ unlock pool for a certain amount of time,” Snookville suggested.

The Redditor’s thread has since got a lot of backing from the Valorant community, with countless other players agreeing that changes are required. “I feel like I’ve been getting smurfed on significantly more recently like a good 20-40% of the time which just makes comp unbearable honestly,” said one commenter.

One poster suggested a more nuclear approach, urging Riot to keep the newest agent out of the free choice pool until they release another character. “Essentially, (make it) long enough that it’s more efficient to grind (or buy) a character’s contract,” they added.

Time will tell if Riot will take additional action against smurfs going forward, or perhaps they’ll make restrictions similar to League of Legends where over 100 hours of playtime is required before ranked queues are unlocked.