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.

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.

  • Clbull@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    311·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Defaced@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • pleasemakesense@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        all smurfs arent gone yet sadly. Hopefully as the report system has collected enough reports many of them will get banned

        • Defaced@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          It’s just refreshing seeing a company publicly state smurfs aren’t tolerated. It’s always this unspoken thing that smurfs are just always there because they’re not technically against any TOS. Finally a company has the balls to float out say smurfs ruin the game for others.

    • xep@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • matter@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        2 is higher than 3 or 4.

        Presumably OP is about as skilled as, or a little more than, account farmers (who are bound to be pretty good to make any money…) and less skilled than professional YouTubers.