Dota 2 News

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.

Dota 2 summer update is out now, and among its many additions are several designed to make "Dota a better place to play, together." It includes a "dislike" button that lets you filter out people you'd rather not play with in future, a new reporting system, real-time review of toxic chat, and more.

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Summer is hurtling toward its inevitable, pumpkin spiced end, and we’re seeing it off in style with a whole bunch of pretty sweet quality of life improvements. “I’ll be the judge of that,” you’re probably saying, eyes squinted in skeptical fashion. Well, how would you like to be the judge of not just blog posts, but real people? Like an actual judge. Because we've built a new player behavior and reporting system from the ground up to enable much better judging, and much better games.

Plus, just like in the allegory of Plato’s cave, you will now be able to see the shadows of clouds as they pass overhead. How is this possible? The copyright on the collected works of Plato has now just lapsed. We’ve also included a few other cool new rendering features inspired by, but not directly copied from, other pre-modern thinkers.

Lastly, we've torn the armory apart and completely rebuilt it to make it easier for you to do, well, everything with your cosmetic items. Epiloguely, we’re also shipping a Collector’s Cache to show all this new stuff off. Honestly, blog posts were simply not designed to convey this much exciting information, so we’ve assembled an update page with all the details.




As much as we all love playing Dota in sweaty rooms with sunny glares shining off our screens, the capricious gods of weather (or whoever decides these things) demand that our brief summer respite comes to a sudden but predictable end. Meaning that along with everything else, it's also time for the next seasonal release for Dota Plus — the Fall 2023 Dota Plus update for those of you keeping track at home — set to begin on September 1st.

[h2]Updated Seasonal Quests & Guild Rewards[/h2]

The update comes with a new set of Dota Plus quests to shore up your shard stash — offering up to 115,200 shards over the course of the season. Guild rewards have also been updated, making new emoticons, sprays, and chat wheels available to high-scoring guilds.





The International is just around the corner, and the final qualified teams will soon be decided. To kick off the celebration ahead of all the action in Seattle, we've got another update in the works tied closely to the event that we'll release in late September. We can hardly wait to cheer on the epic Dota to come.

Finally, to cram a bit more Dota into this blog, we wanted to highlight some of the changes and fixes from the last few weeks that are also shipping today:

• New: Bounty rune spawn locations now show on the minimap before the horn using desaturated icons.
  
• New: Added an option to rebind the Alternative Cast Ability switch key under the Advanced Hotkeys Interface tab.
  
• New: Optimized Dota's network traffic. Dota will now use a little less bandwidth all the time, and a lot less bandwidth sometimes (for example, in illusion-heavy gameplay).
  
• Fixed Invoker Wex sometimes granting the wrong amount of mana regeneration
  
• Fixed Allied Heroes being able to refresh a Hand of Midas that doesn't belong to them
  
• Fixed Wraith King skeletons sometimes ignoring Wraithfire Blast when selecting their target
  
• Fixed Spirit Breaker having an infinite shield when taking the level 25 talent
  
• Fixed Riki's Level 25 Right Talent not displaying the proper cooldown reduction
  
• Fixed being able to blink to one specific location off the top left corner of the map
  
• Fixed various tooltip issues with Invoker's Ghost Walk
  
• Fixed universal heroes not showing up correctly in Ability draft UI tooltips
  
• Fixed Overwhelming Blink doing 100 damage over six seconds instead of 100% of the caster's strength over 6 seconds
  
• Fixed Windranger's Agh's upgrade invisibility effect not visually applying for allies