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.

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[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago (13 children)

How exactly does smurfing work? I don't play Dota and the description on the page doesn't really help me understand

[–] Zefjor@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] meant2live218@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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