Valve Banned 90,000 Smurf Accounts from Dota 2

This year, Valve is going pretty hard on Dota 2. Valve banned 90,000 Smurf accounts from Dota 2. The company 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. Smurf accounts are brand-new accounts used by experienced players to avoid playing at a proper matchmaking level—or to just cheat, grieve, troll, and be broadly toxic without permanent consequence.

The company also 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 behaviour scores to permanent account bans.”

Valve Banned 90,000 Smurf Accounts from Dota 2

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For many players in competitive, smurfing has been a huge problem. It’s extremely frustrating to enjoy playing against people who’re either profoundly more skilled than you or just there to make the game worse for everyone else.

This is the second big smash for Valve this year. The company has already knocked out 40,000 accounts in a day for cheating. To achieve that Valve laid a trap for using third-party software that accessed data not usually read by the game client: They made secret data that only the cheat software would read, then banned accounts that had read it.

Though it’s a decade or so old, Dota 2 is still very much alive. Earlier this year it got a massive update that made the map 40% bigger. The company introduced a slew of other updates.

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