Valve has announced that it's on the hunt for Smurf accounts and their associated main accounts.
Valve has successfully banned 90,000 Dota 2 Smurf accounts that have been active over the last few months and has traced these back to their respective main accounts. For those who are unaware, smurf accounts are used by players to avoid playing at the right MMR, abandon games, grief, cheat and be toxic with no consequences.
In a blog post on the official Dota 2 homepage, Valve explained that "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."
"Dota is a game best enjoyed when played on an even field", the blog post continues. "The quality of the people in a given match is what makes a match good. We’re invested in making sure your matches are as good as possible, and smurfing makes matches worse."
This isn't the first time Valve has cracked down on Smurfing in Dota 2. In February this year, the publisher managed to ban 40,000 Smurf accounts in one day, after luring them into a trap.
Honey trap
In another blog post titled "Cheaters will never be welcome in Dota", Valve revealed how it managed to trap so many fake accounts. In an effort to catch offending players, the developer managed to identify third-party software that gave players an unfair advantage.
"While fixing the underlying issues that made these cheats possible was a priority, we have also decided to remove these bad actors from the active Dota player base", the blog post said.
It seems as if the war on cheaters and Smurfs is never over as far as Valve is concerned
With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this "secret" area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved."
It seems as if the war on cheaters and Smurfs is never over, as far as Valve is concerned. As it prepares to catch even more players red-handed, Valve has issued a statement imploring players to report those who seem to have an unfair advantage over other players.
For those who are a fan of Dota 2, be sure to check out these other fantastic PC games available to play right now.
