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.
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.
Smurfing prevented me from playing LoL and Dota2, impossible to get into a game when you can’t get off the ground, the opposition is made up of smurfs and half or more of your team as well, and you get shit on for trying to learn how to play.
That was my exact experience with the original Warcraft 3 mod to the point I’ve never bothered with MOBAs beyond Overwatch.
DotA Allstars was the worst and was the thing that made me initially not get into MOBAs. I always used to nickname that game Defense of the Assholes because of how toxic the player base was. My teens were otherwise spent playing Footman Frenzy, BattleTanks, WW2/WW1 Battle for Europe, Run Kitty Run and other maps.
Best memory was sixteen years ago being labelled a feeder, kicked from an -apem game on Bnet mid-match, added to a global banlist, and told by the game host to hang myself when I asked him what his fucking problem was.
What was the cardinal sin I committed which led to such a heavy-handed and toxic response, you may ask? I bought Mekanism while playing Dragon Knight. Apparently without any tutorials and in a casual pub match on Blizzard’s own servers, I should have known that players needed to buy Buriza and not a healing/buffing item.
League of Legends has a very unique account selling problem that Riot have proven outright fucking incompetent in addressing.
You need to hit level 30 on your account to start playing Ranked, which can take about 112 hours of cumulative play time to achieve. This has created a black market for fresh League accounts that have been pushed to Level 30 and are ready to be played in Ranked.
Unranked League accounts that are level 30 fetch about $1 - $10 on illicit websites because there are whole industries of Chinese gold farming firms and bots infiltrating the game. If you want an account that’s in Iron 3 or Iron 4 (the two lowest divisions in Ranked), it can fetch a few hundred dollars at bare minimum, at least if DongHuaP is to be believed. Iron accounts are so expensive because of how hard they are to actually get into Iron in the first place without tripping Riot’s automated reporting systems and getting banned, but also they’re lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do ‘Iron to Grandmaster’ series.
I’m somebody who peaked at Archon rank in DOTA 2 (LoL equivalent would be Platinum) and used to play StarCraft II at Master level (second highest league in the game, Grandmaster is top-200 in the region), so I’m not exactly incompetent at RTS or MOBA games. But in League my account is borked and I’m in literal elo hell. I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.
DongHuaP mentioned. Auto upvote.
But yeah ELO hell is real… I tried to combat that by only playing with at least 1 premade (duo). If I bring someone in, that makes one less spot for inter/AFKer/troll in my team, right? Yes. But matchmaking also sends you to harder matches because “you are at advantage of playing with a premade”.
Each past season since S07, I reach gold then quit. This season I fell from Gold 4 10LP straight to Silver 4 25LP. 15 loses streak. The hardest I’ve ever fallen. Soul crushing. And I usually end up top 3 players of the match. I make mistakes, but they don’t cost us the loss.
Even in bottom silver, I saw matchmaking sending Platinums in my enemy team (based on porofessor.gg pre-match info). I thought it wasn’t possible to play with 2 divisions difference. Get your shits together and fix matchmaking, Riot.
I was watching a league stream on twitch because I thought I might try to get back into it a little, but one of the ads in the twitch chat that was sponsoring the streamer was for a league Smurf account seller. I noped the fuck out of league and uninstalled instantly. I might give dota 2 another shot now, smurfs were really killing the experience of learning and playing the game.
I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.
If this is the case, then how does this happen?
they’re lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do ‘Iron to Grandmaster’ series.
How exactly does smurfing work? I don’t play Dota and the description on the page doesn’t really help me understand
You’re an experienced player but create a new account to get matched against noobs. Since the game is free, there’s no cost to doing so.
In dota, there is a cost: you have to play 100 hours of unranked before you can play ranked. Honestly, because of this, while smurfing obviously still happens rarely, I don’t think I’ve seen any smurfs in my last 50 games of ranked, which is at least 30 hours of gameplay. I would assume you see more smurfs in unranked games, but since I’m not playing those, I don’t see them.
You still need a valid phone number to play ranked games, so there is some limitation.
Basically someone with a high matchmaking rating creates a brand new Steam account and installs the game, pretending to be a new player. They then proceed to stomp on the actual new players and just be generally as toxic as possible. After all, if that account gets banned, they can always make a new one.
Does this effectively mean that making a new account for any other reason is effectively against the rules in these kinds of game, because you’d start at the bottom rank, or is there some way of telling between an experienced player just making an alt or new account, and one specifically doing it for facing low ranked players?
If you play on a separate account specifically to play in a different skill range, then that would be smurfing. But if you play through the calibration games on that account to your best ability, then it should place you roughly where your other account would be within a handful of games.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Look, I’m all about fairness…but why prevent people from colouring themselves blue and adding a white flappy hat?
