I wonder if others also have this feeling that during evenings smurfs are more prominent.
I’m silver 3 for some time and when I play during lunchtime I win all the games. Not super easily but I win them. Then I go up in ranking and in the evening when I play again I see a drastic increase of skill in my opponents. Which makes me barely win or loose and then I go down again few slots.
I have to say it’s quite annoying and I consider not playing competitive any more during late hours to finally be able to jump to gold.
As an old guy that usually can only play late night(around 10pm-1am west coast), I think the night matches are okay until the player count shrinks. Once the pool shrinks, the difficulty spikes up a lot. For west cost is about 12~12:30, and match quality suffers as wider range of mmrs are put together. Depending on your time zone, it might be easier to check the steam player count chart and find a time where player count is higher. For lower rank it’s important since there are less lower rank player than higher rank player. (middle point is around Gold3/Plat1, so if you are silver 3 it means you roughly have the same amount of same rank player as D3~C2 depending on your queue.)
I’ll have to check that. Maybe indeed it’s not really smurfs but better players in the same division. Although my instinct tells me there are more players in the evenings than lunch time.
Could also be that during lunch time only one who plays are old pricks like me because kids are still at school.
I am assuming NA, for east coast, night time have more player cause west coast is 3 hours later. so after 6pm west coast would be 3pm and player count would keep climbing, then slowly taper out and drop quickly after 12pm-1am east coast. So if you are like me queuing both region, you will find that during weekend afternoon, you get more NAE servers matches, but late night you mostly get NAW servers as east coast player goes to sleep. Different region have different peak timing, I think for US central probably best in terms of ping(cause many servers seems to be hosted in central region) and population when you play. Also, there are a lot more NAE players compare to NAW players.(I think there was a old poll to see which region player from, but that was pre f2p so I don’t know how much different it is now. )
Nah I’m in EU so basically everyone who can play with some normal ping would be ± 1 hour time zone.