In a new update of Dota 2 called “A new Approach to Helping Players learn Dota”, which basically enhance the overall experience of the game. The new update also includes a new rule that will allow Valve to start banning players who have smurfs accounts in the game.
“Starting today, smurfing will be a bannable offense. We will primarily focus on new accounts created after today for which we have high confidence in their smurfing and game-ruining behavior. Moreover, we will also occasionally manually ban old pre-existing accounts that are clearly game-ruining.”, Valve writes in the announcement.
Smurf account are one of the common problem in the every competitive game. The term was first used in 1996 by a two pro-players from the game WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness, whom they created a new account to pretend to be a newbie and named their account as “PapaSmurf” and “Smurfette” to troll the game and other players. Eventually, they are caught by another smurf account. After that, the term was used by the game community and it spread like wildfire across multiplayer online game.
Today, smurfs accounts are not only used to troll a game or to practice a new character, but it is also used by other players to earn money by means of boosting an account or by selling it. This results to rapid increase of smurfing which ruins the experience of new players in the lower rank that are still learning on how to play better in the game.
Valve also encouraging players to report players who they think are smurfing, “if you are found to be selling accounts, boosting or engaged in similar game ruining behaviors, your primary account may also be subject to a ban. To go along with this, we’ve recently increased our ban rate for boosters and purchased accounts. For cases where we don’t have extremely high confidence, but do have cause for smurf suspicion, those accounts are more likely to play with other suspected smurfs until we gain confidence to judge one way or the other. If you do suspect someone of smurfing in your game, use the new post-game report option included in this update to flag them. This will help us track legit offenders and gather data used to inform our anti-smurf efforts moving forward.”.
You can also check the full updates on Dota 2 official blog: https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/2995430596679058277
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