“Despite all of these efforts, the issue has persisted. Now, Dota 2 developer Valve has had enough of playing cat and mouse with smurfs, and has announced that smurfing is now a bannable offence inside the popular MOBA game.” Pulled that from the top lines of the guidelines.
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Is creating new accounts in Dota 2 free or do people have to pay for it?
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What I gonna do? Should I do like 100 more free accounts to play dota? That will work! Cant wait to see how innocent pepega popped off one day in his life and got banned for “smurfing” KEKW.
I think the actual dessision is lay on a surface. Smurfing should be accepted as a normal part of matchmaker by community base. Cause if you are playing for improvement and you have goals - there is nothing and no one can stop you, if you have power of will, time and goal. Otherwise there would be no smurfs in general if climbing would not be possible through them. If you have no goals, playing competitive, you have nothing to do in competitive mode in general. Problem solved. Go next.
PS The point of comp mode is to go from bottom to top - that way you complete the game. Smurf does it multiple times in shorter ammount of time, cause he’s already invested time to develop skill and did it rationaly, when you keep playing casualy in a mode designed to improve, those smurfs give you a huge lesson. The way you take those lessons is up to you. Pepega goes to cry at forum, pogchamp goes to practice his mechanics. If you are pepega, don’t click purple tab ever, click blue one instead 
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Smurfs have always been bannable in Overwatch since they fall under Blizzard’s definition of cheating, specifically “unfair advantage”.
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I wish smurfs would just leave us alone in the lower gold ranks.
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Problem is how do you know if someone is smurfing or just very good at the game? And how do you prevent from people recreating an free account lol
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And yet none of them are banned cause devs say " he could be lucky that day" when he plays as a master and on thr next match he plays like a bronce to derank
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When you play long that game, you know who is on Gold or Plat or higher level… Doomfist playing in gold rank on a brand new account, killing 70% of your team that’s an obvious smurf.
The thing is, when I want to play the competitive game I’m expecting to play vs similarly skilled heroes to myself. It’s NOT fair to play as a gold rank player vs Masters or GM. That’s just NOT right…
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You know someone is a smurf in bronze or silver when you hear
AND DEY SAY
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False. Smurfs don’t get banned in OW and they have said they won’t take action in so many words.
All i read from your text is, Pepega here, pepega there, pepega everywhere, and u are defending smurfing.
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If you amass enough reports in game your account is automatically suspended/silenced so some do get banned.
It all depends on how many players actually report. These days it seems too many are apathetic towards reporting.
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There was guy with like 1500 reports who didnt get banned till he complained onforums for getting silenced
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I actually report often and get confirmations quite a bit. Granted I think it depends on the severity of the smurf. I run a 3 stack usually, and if we all see its a very clear smurf, we all report at the exact same time. That usually results in a confirmed banned message the next day or two.
That’s quite interesting, because it takes a lot more than 3 reports before the system automatically implements a ban.
Plus, on Xbox, I report often (as there’s a veritable plague of smurfs on Xbox due to smurf/alt/whatever you want to call them accounts being free to make), and can’t recall the last time I got a confirmation message.
I’m on PC so not sure if that makes a difference. Also I only report smurfs or hackers for cheating. Now it could be 1 of 2 things. Either:
- They were banned because me and my 3 stack all reported at once and they clearly have gotten reported more than just us, we just helped solidify it.
OR
- They actually were hackers and we just didn’t realize it when reporting for cheating and mistook their soft hacks for smurfing. So the system caught it as legit hacks.
Either way I’d say when we actually report them for cheating, its only when its severely obvious, ala Widow hitting every headshot, Hammond rolling through spawns EZ mode and never dying with near perfect aim, or Tracer 1 clipping everyone 200 HP or lower, or them legit saying in chat “Hey this is my alt/smurf,”
Keeping in mind my ranks range from Bronze to Gold. So no way in hell is a widow’s accuracy 80% in those ranks legitimately for example.
Forum Mod Edit: This post has been edited by a moderator due to language. Blizzard Support - Forum Code of Conduct
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What they haven’t done is publish any figure about how many accounts they’ve banned.
Why… because it is a lot lower than people think.
It was just an easy PR win.
They do. My friends had 2 accounts closed for it.
But he was trolling in bronze. So technically he was banned for that.
Just playing well isn’t bannable.
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Alting is good under TOS; “Smurfing”, or throwing down to yo-yo your SR/MMR is against TOS and clearly bannable.
My gripe is cheap, easily employed machine learning tools could call out these accounts as they stand out statistically like a sore thumb. But when you have teams in LFG called “Road to Bronze” and so-on and do nothing, it tells you they are not serious about the problem.
Blizzard will never do anything about smurfs for as long as the game is not free