Overcorrect their rank. For new accounts, overshoot their rank until they are over their head and start to have bad games. Smurfs create accounts to have fun, and the biggest difficulty to smurf is the time it takes to make one. So if it is quickly at or above their elo, they will abandon the account, or actually be at the appropriate rank and no longer have a disproportionate impact.
This minimizes the amount of time that a smurf account can be active as a smurf.
Thoughts?
I think that overall it is still less of an impact than a smurf in low elo.
One: the first aspect is time - the smurf will be demotivated sooner in the grand scheme and can impact fewer overall games.
Two: higher elos will be less affected. there is greater teamplay and possibility to play around a bad teammate, than for lower elo to fight against someone who is just many tiers higher mechanically skilled than you
This introduces another problem and that is genuine players who are playing for the first time may not be at the skill level of a iron player.
EG - my friend who plays CSGO opened silver 1 in valorant only on the basis of aim and almost no utility awareness. He did not even know what a yoru TP is or common cypher trip setups.
When he goes against teams in ranked where people are not good with util, he top frags, while if you get those annoying util users, he barely manages to get 10 kills or any impact in the game.
If let's say, he was boosted quickly to gold or plat, he would just ruin so many games while valorant manages to derank him to the current level.
Even right now, his skills are very disproportionate where his aim is like platinum, game sense is like silver gold (owing to the fact that there are still some similarities in maps of CSGO and valorant) but util awareness is like a low bronze. He does not even know that a Jett can dash at you if you hold certain angles and the same with raze satchels.
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