It never ends
Valve’s attempts to combat cheating in the Dota 2 community are unlikely to diminish anytime soon, especially with recent problems in the Dota 2 competitive scene regarding account smurfing and match fixing allegations.
At the start of September, they announced that they would be focusing on eliminating smurf accounts, which are usually those who start fresh accounts in Dota 2 in order to play easier games and level up by crushing newbies. About 90,000 smurf accounts have been wiped, and every single one of those main accounts has been traced. Additionally, they emphasised that main accounts belonging to players found to also be operating smurf accounts, could also be seriously punished in the future.
“Today, we permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts that have been active over the last few months,” said Valve. “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 behaviour scores to permanent account bans.”
However, unlike their past attempts, the smurf bans have received mixed reactions from the community, especially from veterans and professionals. Many pros are known to use it during live broadcasting or fun match sessions, with the majority of them thinking that it will not negatively impact their regular accounts’ accomplishments. Furthermore, there were reports claimed that their accounts have been wrongfully flagged by Valve.
Aside from the potential tension between them and the veteran players, they must also deal with the issue of match fixing in the competitive Dota 2, which occurs every season.
Near the end of last August, a pro player for the Dota 2 IVY team from Russia named Arslan “xanni” Shadzhanov admitted that he was involved in some match-fixing during the 2021–2022 season. He did it all along with numerous Russian players while still representing Team Empire in the Dota 2 Pro Circuit Eastern Europe 2022 season.
This discovery demonstrates that their attempts to combat match-fixing are far from effective. In fact, this happened back when they cracked down on some of the players from the DPC SEA and China who were involved in a similar incident during the same season and banned them from competition permanently. And this year, Boom Esports fans have been up in arms about the arrival of Chung “WS” Wei Shen, who has been embroiled in a scandal in the past years.
Valve must take harsher action in the future to maintain a better competitive environment and community, or they risk a more severe fall in viewership, which is possibly affected by controversies around it.
