Dota 2 News

Valve banned 90,000 smurf accounts from Dota 2—then got the main accounts too

Valve's been going pretty hard on Dota 2 this year, and the latest is targeting those who start fresh accounts in the free-to-play game so that they can play easy games and stomp rookies. Valve has also traced the accounts back to their main accounts, and says that from now on "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."..
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Valve bans thousands of Dota 2 smurfing accounts, threatens greater future punishments

Earlier this week, Dota 2's summer update was released and included new tools for filtering toxic and unwanted players fromy our matches. Now Valve have taken an extra step of their own by declaring that "smurfing is not welcome in Dota," and permanently banning 90,000 accounts involved in the practice

As Valve bans 90,000 Dota 2 smurf accounts, the Steam developer says the use of alternate accounts to dodge your intended rank, cheat, or grief other players is "not welcome in Dota." It adds that every Dota 2 smurf account banned in this wave has been traced back to its owner's main Steam account, and that in future instances punishments for smurfing in the MOBA will extend to your main account as well.

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Dota 2 Update - 9/1/2023

Since releasing The Summer Client Update we've addressed a number of issues:

Fixed a bug that would appear to allow you to commend/dislike the same player multiple times in postgame
Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause behavior score or communication score to get set to 0 incorrectly (the affected accounts have had their appropriate scores restored)
Re-added the ability to rotate your hero with mousewheel in the Armory and pregame
Re-added the ability to demo custom terrains
In games where the majority of connected players have a behavior score too low to allow them to pause the game, those players will now be able to unpause if the game has been paused for at least 5s
Added persona selector to pregame loadout
Added slot headings to pregame loadout
Re-introduced Hero Relics into the shard shop
Disabled rebundling for items with unlocked styles, or which unpack with dynamic gems
Owned world items can now be demoed through the item details popup
Improved the display of chat wheels in the new Armory
Commending a player no longer prints a chat message every time (to prevent post-game commend sprees from pushing all actual chat offscreen)
Added a new, distinct sound for disliking a player
Fixed grouping by item type in the All Items tab in the Armory
Fixed announcer packs not loading properly when entering pregame
Fixed places in the new Armory where fonts would sometimes display at an incorrect size
Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause dead units to not stay dead (Undying, Spirit Bear, Wraith King)
Fixed multikill banners not being accessible in the new Armory
Fixed an issue that would cause the game to change monitors when running in fullscreen on multi-monitor displays
Fixed Dark Seer's "More Than Mental Mass" taunt not playing sounds
Fixed Phoenix's Crimson Dawn set only changing the appearance of the head instead of the full set
Fixed server crashes involving abilities from Dark Seer, Razor, and Hoodwink
Fixed a client crash when displaying certain tooltips (including Tranquil Boots)
Fixed custom game JavaScript support
Fixed Hammer crashing on startup
Fixed a crash when returning to the dashboard after playing a game
Fixed some over-bright rendering in Vulkan when color-correction post-processing was enabled
Fixed a crash in the Vulkan renderer on Linux
Fixed a crash on Linux GPUs with low memory
Fixed fullscreen flickering on multi-monitor Linux systems
Fixed a crash on MacOS versions older than 10.15
Fixed a hang on MacOS when purchasing certain items in the Armory
Fixed a particle crash on older Windows machines without SSE4.1 support
Fixed terrain sometimes displaying incorrectly (or being invisible) on low-spec Windows machines
Fixed a particle rendering error with Phoenix's Solar Gyre
Fixed display of owned Kill Streak Effect in the Shard Shop
Fixed incorrect items sometimes appearing under the Tools section in the Shard Shop
Fixed some cosmetic particle effects not showing properly when previewing items in the Loadout or in the Armory (Void Spirit weapon particles, for example)
Fixed summons appearing next to heroes in postgame
Fixed Dota Plus quest to commend players not correctly counting all commends
Fixed a server crash when players were spectating under certain conditions
Fixed a rare courier-related server crash in Turbo
Fixed an issue where using Armlet could cause a unit to behave oddly on death (for example, give death bounty twice, or in Wraith King's case, be teleported to the fountain on Reincarnation)

Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota

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.

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.

As we said earlier this year in our blog post about cheating, and as we said earlier this week in our Summer Client Update, and as we will continue to say: Dota is a game best enjoyed when played on an even field. The quality of the people in a given match are what makes a match good. We’re invested in making sure your matches are as good as possible, and smurfing makes matches worse.

As always, if you suspect someone of smurfing in your game, use the in-game reporting options to flag them. This will help us continue to track offenders and gather data used to inform our anti-smurf efforts moving forward.