2y ago

Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota

www.dota2.com

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.

Games @sh.itjust.works

nanoUFO @sh.itjust.works

2y ago

Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota, Valve bans 90k smurf accounts

www.dota2.com /newsentry/3692442542242977036

54 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  That was my exact experience with the original Warcraft 3 mod to the point I’ve never bothered with MOBAs beyond Overwatch.
- 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
- 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.
  
  Ahh thanks, that does sound really shitty to do.
  
  You still need a valid phone number to play ranked games, so there is some limitation.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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
Look, I'm all about fairness...but why prevent people from colouring themselves blue and adding a white flappy hat?

54 comments