Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota | Official blog post
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 trac...
Additionally, we have traced every single one of these smurf accounts back to its main account.
Good
Additionally, we have traced every single one of these smurf accounts back to its main account.
So what counts as a smurph then? I've got multiple accounts with 1k+ games. Are those smurphs? For years there was no such thing as MMR re-calibration, so your literal only option was to start over.
If the account is not at roughly the same mmr it seems reasonable to count it as a smurf
It’s a special kind of control complex to try and wail on people below your level, either your life is going shitty or you’re just young and being shitty for the lulz, but at that point, you’re not having fun by challenging yourself, you’re having fun avoiding the challenge and causing other people’s fun to diminish in turn
When I played competitive CS 1.6 (not at any meaningful level, but still better than the average Joe) I would always warm up in some public 24/7 maps and run up huge scores. Difference was those maps weren't ranked. So it wasn't really smurfing.
Point was I didn't feel I could face competition without winning first.
This habit doesn't explain all cases
That doesn't sound like a good justification for either you or the other players. In the case of the other players, obviously it sucks to play against people way out of their league. But even for you if you feel like you need to pick on people not as good as you to feel better about yourself before you take on people around your skill level or better, then you're not dealing with it in a realistic or healthy way.
Pic is so fun 😆
90K accounts. God damn. I'd love to see how many of those we recently active.
This is such great news for me. I'm married and I have a son now. I can only play dota once a week (if I'm lucky). Imagine my frustration when I would get smurfs on the two games I play in a week. It was soul crushing. It was definitely ruining the game
I just started playing again and seeing this plus the thousands of cheating accounts banned in February makes Vavle seem a bit more competent than Riot Games at caring for their playerbase
Tf2 fans sobbing in the background
They flagged my account as being tied to a smurf account (didn't get banned or anything), but I never even owned, created, or used another steam account.
I wonder if it could be because I play at the local net cafe sometimes? They could be seeing a lot of accounts from the same IP?
There seems to be a problem with netcafes, let's hope Valve will take this into account
I'm honestly surprised they actually did it. But it seems like a one-time effort. There'll probably be 45k again in a few months and another ban wave in a few years. They didn't say that they added more smurf detection tools or anything. I mean, how many players can be on the same IP using the same PC configuration but never together? That should be easy enough to detect.
There's such things as privacy laws, which so far Valve seems to be following. You can't just track users based on their identifying characteristics.
And, to answer your rhetorical question, quite a few. In this thread alone there's someone playing on net cafe, sharing the same computer with hundreds of people probably. I know of a friend of mine who plays on their single household PC and sometimes his child plays on the PC. I know another couple that also own a single PC, admittedly not playing dota, but they also share one PC where they take turns playing on.
It's not trivial to tell these people apart from actual smurfers.
Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time. How is that going to unintentionally ban somebody playing at a net-cafe? It would make it harder to detect smurfs in an internet cafe due to the number of different hardware configurations. But somebody at home would have to emulate that environment: multiple PCs with accounts online and actively playing.
Yes, privacy laws, but the data they are collecting is to make the service possible. Unless I'm mistaken, a user would be allowed to request deletion of the data prior to account deletion.
Other software vendors literally install a rootkit on your PC for anti-cheat measures and if you have a phone with Google or Apple software running on, your privacy is out of the window as they collect a whole bunch of information by default. Hell, Microsoft probably knows you're using a pirated or unlicensed version with your permanent connection to the internet. All by the book.
I mean as long as they can absolutely prove it.
