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Should you still party with your 5K friend? – Dota 2 Smurf Ban Status
Valve has always been insistent that they hate smurf accounts. For what it’s worth, smurf accounts have detrimental impact on many players’ Dota 2 experience, as getting stomp by an Immortal player when you are only a Legend player, doesn’t feel great.
Moreover, there are incentives for smurf accounts to do what they do as the high demand for Dota 2 boosting or account-buying generates high revenue.
Image source: Dota 2
Smurfing is not welcome in Dota 2
Valve recently banned 90000 smurf accounts that have been active throughout the last few months. That’s a considerable number of smurf accounts out of the player base. Hence, if you’re a smurf yourself, you might find your account unusable now.
Considering the psychological damage a smurf could cause in a Dota 2 ranked game for the other nine players, I had to say that’s rather justified.
What if you’re one of those players who happened to party with a smurf account?
Well, here’s a testimony from a streamer, Dmitry “finargot” Plyusnin, who recently received a notification that his account’s mark as connected to a smurf.
He reached out to Steam Support regarding the concerning indicator, to which the latter informed him that there was not much to do on his end. As long as he’s certain he isn’t a smurf account himself.
Steam Support also shared useful tips on what not to do now if you want to avoid getting flag as a smurf account. For instance, not playing Dota 2 on multiple accounts and not sharing your account with other players. Fairly enough, these are typical norms that a smurf account or account booster must follow when providing their services, so avoid these.
While unmentioned, we can be quite certain that Valve can keep track of the different IP addresses your account has been logged into. This is blatant proof that your account might be accessible by multiple parties, of which you might have paid a smurf for boosting services.
Pro players should be able to have smurf accounts
Then, there’s the exclusive pro players club. Should they be allowed to have their own smurf accounts?
Well, Gaimin Gladiators star Quinn “Quinn” Callahan personally believes they should be. While Quinn has always been controversial in pubs, his justification for pro players to have alternative accounts is surprisingly reasonable.
Pro players are often the centre of attention in ranked games, so that bias can occur among the players in the same match. For instance, his opponents might prioritize him as he’s a prominent pro player, or even his allies could have past beef with him and decide to grief. Let’s not forget that active pro players could be in the midst of practising using a new draft for an upcoming tournament. To which, his public match replay would be available for other competitors to analyse.
As such, it’s not viable for pro players to strategize or practice publicly.
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