VALORANT coach boycotts ranked until Riot addresses smurf scourge

Woohoojin, a well-known coach in the VALORANT community known for his educational content, is done with the game’s ranked mode until Riot Games takes action and gets rid of the bots that are plaguing the competitive play.

We reported on this issue in May after a player ran into five newly made accounts that showed extremely bot behavior. The community believes that people create these new accounts to get them up to Iron and then sell them to smurfs attempting to run challenges or simply ruin the matches of lower-ranked players.

Related: What is smurfing in gaming?

And by the looks of it, Woohoojin and his students were the latest victim of the infamous bots in VALORANT ranked. The coach took five of the lowest-ranked players in his community and prepped strategies for every single map to help them to win matches and grind the ranked ladder despite having no aim. But unfortunately, they kept running into matches against the same five-stack of bot accounts.

“[These are] automated accounts being power leveled to Iron to be sold for petties to the next Immortal player who wants to start a stupid smurf challenge account,” Woohoojin explained in the video above, which was released on June 7.

Related: VALORANT players want this Premier feature to save them from cheaters, smurfs in ranked

Woohojin said he feels defeated after this latest experience with VALORANT ranked. Even though he acknowledged the boycott poses a serious threat to his income as a content creator, he’s willing to continue with it until Riot solves the problem because he wants to be true to himself.

The coach is uncertain whether Riot will take action and offered a piece of advice to fellow content creators that want to start the smurf challenge. Woohojin told them to play their matches in customs with willing participants and even vowed to help them create the lobbies if they can’t do it alone.

Granted that Riot leans heavily on content creators and several of them use smurf accounts, it’s unlikely that the publisher will listen to Woohoojin’s demands.