Valve Pulls Out The Banhammer For 90,000 Dota 2 Smurf Accounts

In a recent blog post, Valve announced that it had banned 90,000 smurf accounts in Dota 2 over the past few months to improve the competitive scene in the game. Valve also warned smurfers that each banned account had been traced back to its main account. In the future, such bans could be followed by punishment to the main account, with the most severe being a permanent ban.

Dota 2 is a highly competitive game where players have poured in thousands of hours of playtime. However, smurfs can ruin the integrity of that competition as they would either be highly toxic, be griefers, or even sabotage their team. Some players also smurf to avoid playing at their correct (higher) MMR, resulting in them dominating ranked matches in a low MMR lobby.

Today, we permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts that have been active over the last few months. Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence,” says Valve.

Following Valve’s announcement, many players took it to Reddit or even tried to leave a bad review on Steam after being banned for smurfing. Some tried to justify their smurfing, while others explained why their account shouldn’t be considered a smurf account. In any case, it seems like the competitive scene in Dota 2 should be better than it was before. 

Valve has always been on the lookout for smurfs and cheaters and even banned 40,000 of them earlier this year. This time, however, it seems like the consequences of such behavior have been raised exponentially, as Valve pointed out that each of the smurf accounts has been traced back to its main account. In the future, the main account could also be subjected to punishments as severe as a permanent account ban for smurfing.

Additionally, we have traced every single one of these smurf accounts back to its main account. Going forward, a main account found associated with a smurf account could result in a wide range of punishments, from temporary adjustments to behavior scores to permanent account bans,” says Valve.

The initiative has been well-received by the overall community. However, some players have reported how this has affected players in net cafes. In the following situation, many players have had their accounts flagged for smurfing due to IP/hardware IP. It would be severe in regions like SEA, where gaming in net cafes is an integral part of the gaming culture.

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Valve has yet to comment on how this situation might be tackled. Dota 2 is one of the most popular games with perhaps the biggest esports culture due to its competitive gameplay. It was developed and published by Valve and was released on July 9, 2013, on Windows via Steam.