From the Dota 2 website:
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.
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I don’t play DOTA2 but that’s some seriously great live service management. Smurfing in Overwatch2 drove me nuts (I’ve even given up playing the game). Constant leavers, toxic behavior, and no repercussions.
Tracking smurf accounts back to their main (likely by reviewing IPs as one account logs out and another logs in) is a powerful way to stamp out this behavior and deter people from smurfing in F2P games where having multiple accounts doesn’t cost a cent.
Up timing, but depending on data permissions upon download they may also have things like device fingerprints. Agreed on the service management though. Brilliant work.
Oh man, i played dota more than half of my life (started from dota1 as warcraft 3 custom map). Don’t regret anything hahaha
This is such a great change. I wish league of legends would do the same. In lol it feels like more players have smurf accounts than not. Smurfs contribute nothing to the games and only ruin the experience for the other 9 players.
Playing in plat / emerald elo feels like each game is a complete landslide in favor of one team. I wonder if banning Smurf accounts would fix this issue and make games more fun
That’s terrible! We have to tell Papa Smurf, Gargamel must be behind this!
Your comment is really smurfy! I was just thinking, “This type of account should be called a Gargamel account, not a Smurf account. Smurfs are nice. Gargamel is the bad one.”
That’ll scare the smurf out of these mother smurfers
Wish they did this in Rocket League. I stopped playing because of all the smurfs. Shits annoying.
How exactly does smurfing work? I don’t play Dota and the description on the page doesn’t really help me understand
Smurfing is when a player has a secondary account so they can play against/with lower ranked players. Imagine a chess grand master putting on a disguise and going to a beginners chess tournament
On chess.com smurfing is actually not permitted, but chess grandmaster can play on special accounts to do fun challenges and all of the elo is refunded to the players that they beat.
Smurfing is when you play Ranked ladder on an alt-account in a much lower skill bracket with the intention to curb stomp lesser-skilled players.
It’s a very big issue in any competitive multiplayer game, especially direct competitors of DOTA 2 like League of Legends and SMITE. Valve may just be the first company to start actively banning smurfs.
Smurfing is knowingly and deliberately playing at the incorrect skill-level/mmr/elo. Most times, people will create or buy a separate account that somehow has a lower mmr/elo attached to it, to do this. You can ‘play bad’ or ‘throw the game’ for 50 games in a row and your rating will tank a lot, so that’s a bummer to encounter as your new teammate randomly… Then this player can win a lot of games in a row playing as ‘themselves’ and completely stomp games all the way back to their ‘true’ mmr. Does that help explain it?
Yep I understand now! Thanks for the explanation. I don’t get how that’d be fun unless the person just enjoys being an asshole…
This seems like a reasonable approach but the smurfs have already ruined all the games prior to being banned. I wonder how difficult it is to prevent smurfing altogether? Doesn’t seem like it’d be easy at all.
For Korea and China, probably quite easy.
Both regions require you to register for the game using a residential ID due to strict internet laws in those regions. China’s are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you’d see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
As for the West, the only companies from my experience that genuinely ask for personal details beyond a username, email address and password are those that host shoddy Korean MMO’s and have notoriously bad internet security. Valve have tried to address smurfing in the past by requiring accounts to register phone numbers before they can play Ranked, but this can easily be bypassed with cheap burner phones and other services.
China’s are so notoriously strict that the kind of toxic degeneracy you’d see on the European or North American servers would probably nuke your social credit score or land you in prison if you tried to pull it there.
Got any resources to back this up? I have a hard time imagining a culture where cheating is the norm alongside one that ruins your life if caught cheating. One of these things can’t be true.
Doesn’t China literally have a social credit score system?
maybe ban the main account for a period? like first offense, 1 month
Meanwhile, smurfs in CSGO/CS2
By what metrics do they use to even tell a player is a smurf to be able to take action against them?
On top of my head (uneducated guess) :
- multiple accounts regularly logging in through a single IP
- day/time login patterns
- same champion pools
- consistently stomps games
- frequent higher than average KDA
- frequent higher than average CS/min
- higher than rank level winrate
- higher than rank level MMR
These items taken individually don’t tell much. But when cross-referenced with other data, I’m pretty sure it becomes clear really fast when someone is smurfing.
don’t forget fun stuff like:
mouse and keyboard config
audio and visual config
and the ability of the creating and looking into a log file in the gamr folder
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