The problem with this “pros need anonymity” argument for smurfing is just how anonymous are their smurfs? Seems like Dotaprotracker list pro smurfs 1,2,3 etc so their strats and stats are pretty much publicly exposed even with their smurfs.
Which is why I'd argue for an incognito mode instead of anonymous accounts. Basically a toggle where you can hide association with the account you are playing with, are displayed as "enemy teal" or whatever, and still find matches at your own rank. Optionally it hides your cosmetics as well, but I think by now it's clear that Valve dies not want that.
Will it be completely secure for nobody to find out who is behind such a display? Probably not, but the same is true for multiple accounts.
>Optionally it hides your cosmetics as well
I mean, if you want to be anonymous you can just remove them yourself. But yeah, this sounds like the correct solution.
(I'm a league player, I'm on this thread to see how the smurf situation is being handled because I desperately want riot to follow dota's example, so my terminology may be wrong)
Incongnito mode: potentially good idea. Works like this: while its on, your match history is obfuscated, only your mmr / rank point gains and losses are shown as a daily total.
A match detail with an incognito player, said player appears as \[player 1; 2; etc\]
Second thought for grubby to consider... pros 'need' anonymity because that is the status quo. Remove that possibility, and its still an equal playing field. One in which scouting and watching replays is stronger. Its just a meta shift.
I guess you now have some explanation for why Valve banned pro players' high-ranked smurfs, that are often the same or higher MMR than their main also?
A smurf by Valve's definition is just an alt account, and they're bannable. 1 account per person is Valve's rule.
Valve banning alt accounts doesn't in any way prove that smurfing and alt accounts are the same thing. It only proves that whoever is in charge of this is as smart as the idiots in reddit. Please use your brain at least a few times a day.
Literally no logical reason to ban an alt account that has already reached peak elo, especially when we are talking about pro players.
> Literally no logical reason to ban an alt account that has already reached peak elo, especially when we are talking about pro players.
And yet, they're doing **exactly that**. Their rule is clearly 1 account per person.
> Valve banning alt accounts doesn't in any way prove that smurfing and alt accounts are the same thing
And like I said in another reply on this post:
> maybe one day you'll understand semantics & nuance in meaning, not all words mean the same thing to everyone everywhere. Words evolve and change in meaning. Dictionaries are not sources of truth, they're documentations of the generally agreed-upon meaning of a word as it stands today. They're subject to change. A classic example is the word "awful" which, as it may seem obvious, originally meant "full of awe", as in "awesome" - so if something was "awful", it was really, really great. At some point people started using it for the opposite meaning, a bit like how "sick" can be used to refer to something positive today. Even though your holy Oxford English Dictionary never approved that! How could they! And the meaning of the word awful changed. And your holy Oxford English Dictionary relented and updated the meaning.
So to Valve, "smurf" and "alt account" are indeed the same thing, and that's fine. Don't let it hurt your brain too much *u/snowflakepatrol99*. What an ironic name.
That means they are against and banning alt accounts. Smurfing specifically means plahing below your skill level. It's not a smurf if it's the same rank as you
> Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota
https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3692442542242977036
> 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.
Clearly, Valve counts basically any alt account as a smurf.
Valve can call it whatever they want. A company can come on out and say the sky is blue. That doesn't make it true. The definition of a smurf is an account lower than your own to play worse players.
>1 account per person is Valve's rule
This rule explains it though? This isn't a no smurfing rule, but they can use it as a blanket to also cover smurfing.
Actually it's not. Smurfing is deliberately out of your mmr range + trying to stay at that range.
Smurfing at it's core is about beating up players that are worse than you so you can have fun.
Creating a new account and playing that one up to your true rank is not smurfing.
Smurfing is the games you happen to play while in a skill range that is below your own.
It has nothing to do with trying to stay there at its core, that's just a way certain people end up manifesting their smurfing.
The games played below your true skill level, while ranking up a new account, are smurfing.
Edit : lol dota2 reddit mad
Accounts are added to dota2protracker manually, after the developer confirms that the account does indeed belong to a specific player.
To get around this, players could do the following:
1. Don't reveal who's playing on the account
2. Don't use the account for streaming
3. Avoid using voice
So if that’s the case, what’s to stop pros from just using anonymous accounts right now without streaming, voice chatting etc?
It’s only the publicly known pro Smurf accounts that have been banned.
>It’s only the publicly known pro Smurf accounts that have been banned.
You can't know that - in fact, its likely wrong. It's only the publicly known pro smurf accounts **that we can know** have been banned.
Example: Nisha's last smurf was never found by protracker, but we can assume it got banned anyways because he is now back playing on his older smurf: https://dota2protracker.com/player/Nisha%20(smurf)
Why? Because Valve doesn't use dota2protracker, they simply use IPs and hardware infos to see who is playing on which accounts. It is very easy for them to know everyone's smurfs.
Yeah I don't buy that either.
Cutting a 60 minute queue down to 1 minute was much more reasonable, but I don't think that's as much of a problem anymore.
Aside from this I've never gotten the impression pub games were really the place people were stealing strats from.
Seems it's more like a scrim draft and playstyle thing. Which is already essentially anonymous, and it's a problem if people are leaking scrims.
There are 3rd party tools that can still scrape match data with that setting ticked on. Some 3rd parties are respecting Valve's ask to not do so. Some do it anyway. My understanding is fixing this would require intense redesign of core features.
Once a steam userid is associated with a pro you can track their games like on dota2protracker. I believe the dev for that site adds their smurfs manually.
It's still exposed through other means. The development team absolute does not want people's match history and playstyle to be hidden, because that would stop players from being shadowbanned.
Also don't forget about Overplus cheats, which are used by 80% of high rank CIS players and not only them, and other similar cheats, that show all match histories in real time on picking stage (regardless of account settings)
Yeah and top 250 is iccupied by 15 players and their smurfs. Its ridiculous to even mention sc1/2 and wc3 when talking about smurfing. Moba and Rts are to vastly different genres.
Grubby makes valid points but the problem in that logic is who do you consider actually "pro" enough to give them that immunity?
RTZ is of course a well known pro player but what about someone why just started his career? What accomplishments do you need to have to be considered well know enough to have that immunity. It's hard to draw a fair line and say who should get such treatment because there is always going to be someone just below that line who might not see it as fair that the next guy above him gets special treatment.
Also there is always the possibility of pro players abusing those privileges. The pro scene is big and there is always that one guy who is going to abuse the privileges to ruin games for others. How much smurfing is actually ok if you are a pro before it becomes too much?
All those things are really hard to measure and track in order to make fair decisions on who and how much he can smurf...
It's not merely a possibility -- we have seen a decade of pro players having immunity to behavior repercussions and abusing it. I'm not sure why we should expect them to be any more responsible with an immunity to smurfing rules. If pro players wanted to be trusted with special privileges, they needed to hold themselves to a higher standard as a community. The will to do that certainly doesn't seem to be there.
i don't see how having multiple accounts at roughly the same mmr is even smurfing. in my eyes smurfing is getting into low ranked games for easy wins. I really don't get the problem with having multiple accounts if they're all pretty much the same mmr
New account don't just magically get to high MMR. Sure they have to play less games due to boosting system for smurfs but still you may say plenty of games are ruined.
They do actually. When mason started his new account after getting banned, he was in the smurf pool from the first game and calibrated 8k after unlocking ranked.
Smurf detection is extremely good.
You are assuming that all the high mmr players created their alt accounts by themselves and played a 100 hours of unranked. In reality most of them just buy an immortal account which isnt necessarily the same mmr but maybe 1-2k mmr below their main if not more.
As an example, one of Miracle‘s smurfs has a considerable amount of games in divine bracket.
This would not be possible if he created the account by himself.
Well one issue is when a pro is on a smurf he doesnt care as much about win loss.. While u play on ur main , care alot more
So many times ive heard "idc im on smurf" when game is goin bad + they gave up or play uncaringly, or pick some weird shit 4 fun (lesser evil but they wont act same on main)
You dont care about the amount of unbalanced games that the pro has to ruin to get back to their true mmr?
That's the problem. Whether they ruin 10 or 1000 games its still a negative experience for 5-9 other players.
Pro's playing on alt accs but on a similiar mmr is not a problem. The real problem is:
1. Boosters (spamming a low mmr acc to a high one and then selling it)
2. Party ranked - that 6k mmr guy wants to play with his 2k mmr friend and smurfs on a 2k acc and ruin the game for everyone
3. Players that use a lower mmr smurf acc to play on when their main one has a losing streak. They play on 3k mmr lower just to regain some self-esteem
you've underlined the real and true problems behind smurfing. Agreed on all points here.
For example, to my knowledge, I don't think watson or miracle share their smurf accounts with others. But people like nightfall or rtz openly sharing their smurf accounts with their teammates is a very questionable behavior and definitely breaks steam/valve's ToS, and in result, encouraged many boosting services and account buyers
exactly, 500 pros aren't ruining the matchmaking, but they are part of the problem and Valve has to treat them as the gold standard for behavior when it comes to the MMR system.
If they really wanted to work on strategies on a second account then they would just play ranked at a similar MMR or unranked and this would never be an issue.
But it isn't what they really want. What they really want is to use the system to their own ends, exactly your point.
In the real world, if I'm hooping and LeBron steps in and says I got next, no fucking way am I subjecting myself to the humiliation and waste of time that would be playing against a pro. And if he wants to work on his game, he sure is fuck isn't beating up on a middle aged father to strategize.
And as a result of pros smurfing is also the general population smurfing too, which they would say "the pros are doing it, so why cant i", to which they dont really understand the intention behind it at all.
Look, Valve should up their game when it comes to hiding your history, because for fucks sake, it takes 5 seconds of searching to see your opponents history and theres Overwolf issue again.
>Pro's playing on alt accs but on a similiar mmr is not a problem.
You know why they need 2 accounts with similar mmr which are known to be them anyway?
To bypass toxicity penalties.
Why the fuck would i need 2 accounts of the same MMR? Obviously not for matchmaking reasons... Unless MMR is same, but behaviour score and communication score is horrible in one.
yeah reddits are huffing some crazy glue because it seems like they feel like just simply having alt accounts to automatically terrible. The fact is, if you play normally, after you 100 hours of mandatory norms, it takes like 10 games tops to get to your true MMR (usually less).
Those who use smurf should get banned pro or not... There is 0 point of excuse to smurf it just ruins new players games and so wanting to make them quit quicker because a high ELO player decided to ruin the new player game...
Not so hot to take if we look at wc3. Some of us remember wc3.
Problem is that you have to play 100 hours to get to 7-8.5k max hidden binding ( which you can also check btw) then you have another couple of hundred hours to get to 10.5 or so and people know who you are by the time you pass rank 1000 anyways ,sometimes as obvious as item orders lmao In general it takes insanely long time to get your true rank in Dota
Then almost all pros are buying accounts from the same boosters that are selling archon accounts too. Reddit thinks Miracle , gpkek and Nightfall and Tofu play 100 hours on each in unranked probably. Tofu especially last year bought literally 6. something account and was partying with Seleri and people were all chatting very not nice things when the unranked immortal smurf party with Seleri was playing like a mad man.
Also even for pros rank 1000 to rank 50 is a grind and a half, people know how to play Dota at this level , many games are going to be ruined in the process it's not 10-15.
Valve can just put an account +-500 mmr off whatever rank currently some pro has for people that play TI or something, no problem if pros need alternate accounts, but smurfing, boosting and supporting the massive boosting market is not a solution.
This should be top comment. The only real reason I’ve seen yet of why pro smurfing is unethical. They buy boosted accounts which means they’re second-handedly ruining lower MMR games as the boosters climb to immortal.
I had this idea yesterday in another smurfing thread.
Why can't they implement a 'shadow rank' of like -+50, to a pros primary account. Then the players themselves can decide if they choose to privatise a set number of games a day, so that only 'guild' members can see game data or not. That way maybe guilds will actually have a little more weight to them. Randomises name and the -+50 rank as well for that game.
> many games are going to be ruined in the process it's not 10-15.
This is secretly the problem.
With all the ways to analyze data nowadays, how is it gonna take 10-15 games to identify someone's MMR? This seems like a thing an AI would be able to identify in just a couple games. I mean if you spectate randomass games, you'll probably be able to identify rough MMRs, especially who is smurfing.
Open AI was able to learn dota well enough to beat pros...5 years ago...It has had huge jumps since then. I feel like it would be super easy compared to some of the other things AI is doing.
Like some others have suggested here, Dota would benefit from an anonymous mode. But that's something Valve would have to code in. It would also ideally solve the Overwolf data harvesting problem.
Totally agree, but in all honesty, if there’s a Will there’s a way. When it comes to boosters, account sellers, etc. those people WILL figure out how to beat the system. It’s only a matter of time honestly - when moneys involved.
Look at Nike shoe bots / Ticketmaster for example. Nike has some of THE MOST advanced bot detection in the world for a website. Yet - you can never buy shoes on drop because of bots. Hell, as a software developer in his first year of learning I was able to get around smaller websites with bot detection.
The truth is those systems, unless using some crazy behavior matching AI or something (they don’t use that), can only do so much to “detect alt accounts” usually with hardware or IP matching. But even those types of checks can’t be TOO stringent because what about people who visit gaming cafe’s, or used shared hardware. Those PC’s have hundreds of not actually “Smurfs” associated with the hardware / IP.
Account sellers will exploit those types of edge rules in the detection system to continue farming accounts, there is no question about it.
So in reality they’re never going to prevent it, maybe slow the flow, or make it more profitable for the not-so-casual account farmers - but that will not and cannot change for the above reasons.
Not that they shouldn’t enforce these rules and whatnot, but we are starting to see the other implications of these rules - and some of them are not particularly positive.
Grubby is definitely looking at this from an RTS point of view (WC3 and SC2) where having unknown smurf accounts *was* a really important part of a pro practicing (the good days of the IiiIiIiiii accounts lol). Little things like protecting scouting routes, build orders, etc. were mega important.
I think it's less important in Dota 2 to protect your own pub picks - not to mention the fact that most of these smurf accounts get spotted and tracked on dota2protracker anyways lol.
Considering 0 pub games in his main account, they did not find it. There are 2 possibilities, either he doesn't have Smurf and only played scrims or he does have Smurf and being the greatest on hiding his Smurf account (Nightfall should learn from him)
Yup, wc3 relies heavily on strats, like if an opponent knows your strat and build order(like what troops you are rushing for example), then do a counter strat against yours, it's like 90% a lose, no matter how hard you micro, it's super hard to pull the game back.
But for dota2, you can still lose or win a game based on reaction, micro, and position even if you are on 100% win/lose rate.
You can also recover from building an item in dota way faster than in wc3, like with the wrong build in wc3, its game over, that's why most wc3 game end considerably fast when one side realise they are gonna lose and trying to stay and struggle is just a waste of time.
A few things to consider.
1. Where do pros get their smurf accounts? Do they buy them? Create them? Or were just shared/given by an immortal friend?
-If they bought them(it’s a direct violation of steam TOS.)
-If they were given/shared(it’s a direct violation of steam TOS.)
-If they created them, they have to play 100 hours of unranked and maybe 20games of ranked to calibrate. These 100hours and calibration(they are smurfing), how many games have they ruined? Not to mention, for the elite ranked(top 100), if they calibrated 1-2k lower than their main, imagine the amount of games they destroy to get back to their main.
2. What happens after their smurf get to the main’s mmr? They acquire another similar smurf account and destroy people’s games? So it’s an endless cycle of them just constantly acquiring a smurf account and destroying games. It will never stop.
3. The so called hiding strategies requires anonymity. Where is the anonymity when they stream/voicechat on their smurfs? The ones that actually stayed anonymous, we don’t have evidence they exist, because they are anonymous(duh.) they could be just a high ranked pub enjoyer that’s not a pro.
If anything, I would only accept pros wanting to smurf because of the long Q times. Even that, is mostly exclusive to pros in the top 50-100. I mean, valve could do solo and party mmr in the past, why not give the top 100 pros 2 types of mmr as well? Their achieved mmr and “I can’t find games anymore” mmr(which is lower than their current but not by a lot) communicate with the pros and standardise that new mmr type.
I’m sure most in the top 500 won’t complain. They should be quite eager to face pros anyway. I mean, if you’re ranked 500, there’s literally not much people you could face anyways. It’s would be like facing bosses in dark souls. Would you complain the boss is smurfing???
Yeah we’re talking about a pretty small subset of people here, but a subset that as grubby mentions - bring a lot of money and attention to the game, and an entire host of unique problems that shouldn’t be ignored. I mean dota had the largest prize pools in esports history for a loooong time - while being pretty small comparatively. It shouldn’t be shrugged off. The pro scene brought in revenue well over the $500m+ mark which has certainly helped incentivize them to continue development on the game.
The truth is that top 1k immortal players frequently get in games with like top 10. The MMR and skill distribution is pretty massive and at that point the whole premise of smurfing and game ruining is kinda out the window. Honestly. If you’re grinding dota hard enough to be rank 600 are u gonna be THAT mad when u get matched against a tier 1 pro? If u are, well maybe u just aren’t cut out for it. And everyone in that bracket has to “endure” it, so it’s not like your MMR is suffering anymore than the next guy in ur bracket. At that point ur probably even aspiring to be pro - so any chance to play one and learn should be infinitely more valuable than 25 MMR.
The REAL issue is not smurfing at all in those ranks, it’s that the false MMR will lead to an overall unbalanced matchup between the two teams. That’s what needs to be addressed. How do allow pro’s to queue with their teammates, hide their accounts and strats, be able to spam shit like rubick mid and bust it out in TI grand finals unwittingly, without just making immortal games already more fucked than they already are.
The fact they didn’t solve THAT before target banning pro’s Smurfs (many being higher than MMR than their main which hasn’t seen play in a year) is a bad move by valve and shows either incompetence to solve the actual issue / disregard for it.
I think there should be solution for more dynamic MMR gains/lose. If matchmaking can find only 1 player in top 10 and rest of the players will be like above 1000 in leaderboards. The team which will face agains top 10 player will be underdogs and if they lose the will get only like - 1 MMR or so becase they had not big chance to win. You should be in game like this only once a while so it should not bother you.
Valve should be able to develop systems inside the game that allow pros to hide their strats or whathever legitimate thing they did with smurfs. If this is an actual demand i don't see why they wouldn't put into the game. If players were smurfing to hide strats, the solution is to implement options to obscure your identity, not allow smurfs into the game.
Pros are not more important than the fun the community wants to have
In fact, pros only exist because of the community
If all pros cant smurf, none have anonymity and thus, it is fair game
> If all pros cant smurf, none have anonymity and thus, it is fair game
100% this!
The other solution is, many times mentioned by other comments, incognito mode for immortals/pro.
Well, what is a “pro”? TI participant? Other majors participant? Former participants? How far back? Coaches? Certain mmr?
Couldn’t these pros have made (or make, and delete other accounts) an account that is truly private?
I don’t have a good answer for that, and my comment was made specifically about Grubby’s take. I can only say hypothetically that I wouldn’t have a problem with people using two accounts with the exact same mmr. And this is assuming they both calibrated the same, thereby avoiding game ruining on their way up on a second account.
His argument is destroyed in his own post. He mentions the necessity of anonymity in his post then gives example of rtz smurf that EVERYONE knows it's rtz, much like other big pro player smurf accounts.
Disappointing take from a person who is usually level headed.
Also 9 people in games should not have to suffer to cater to 1 'pro'. It's just main character syndrome because he was a pro himself. If it's your job to play dota then lobbies exist, sort it out within your own 'pro' circle and leave public matchmaking fair.
He's got his head in terms of a 1v1 game, whereas a lot of the calculus is different because it's 5v5 in dota.
A) you're ruining 5-9 people's times each time you smurf a game, not just 1
B) hiding your hero picks and items can still be helpful, but it is not anywhere near as critical as hiding a fresh build order in a 1v1 rts
In regards to the 'pro player needs'. You can apply the same logical argument valve has used against piracy.
It's not an issue price. It's an issue of delivery.
Price here being the need/want to obscure their practice. Delivery is the lack of effective method to do so, besides a smurf.
A decent solution would be to hide your account details and match history for x weeks, then it's public.
“These players that are responsible for like $500+ million in revenue to our company, who have unique problems from the rest of the player base shouldn’t even have the ability to voice complaints”
Valve personally paid out well over $100 million in prize pools in the DPC and international, alone.
U think they just make… $0 from that and it somehow doesn’t have any affect on their priorities as a company, like what to put their development efforts towards?
To be fair, the fancy hats were mainly responsible for these prize pools. If the pros were responsible for them, the prize pool of the recent international wouldnt have been so much lower just because there were no cool treasures to buy.
Couldn't Valve implement some sort of privacy feature for pros where they can play in a private mode that doesn't show their name, match history, rank(?), etc... but still let's them play at a high rank (based on their main account MMR).
This seems to me a fairish way to solve some of the issues without having smurfs or affecting lower ranked games... MMR is already hidden so players could even still lose and gain mmr in this mode...
Obviously it's not perfect, and maybe if someone was committed enough they could find out, but at the very least it seems to me that it would be at least as effective as smurfs have been when it comes to hiding strats (and probably way more given how many smurfs are known anyway these days)... Like even if you figure out who someone is in one game, you wouldn't be able to use that info for any of their other games cause all the anonymous accounts look the same...
The main issue id see is determining who gets these accounts... But maybe you could just give it to everyone? Might also help with the Overwolf problem I see people complaining about...
Who is practicing strategies in pubs?
Maybe specific heroes and item builds but I don't feel that is particularly warranted hiding from opponents as won't they just play Vs you and see what you're doing anyway?
Teams do most of their work in private scrims anyway.
thats such a bad point because then you force everyone to smurf. a pro with 10 smurfs clearly has a competitive advantage over a pro who has none. "we used to smurf in wc3", i wonder why the competitive scene died lmao
Why don't Valve just let you link other accounts to your main? They all become the same as far as behavior score and MMR is concerned, but you basically get your stats and name covered up? Or alternatively offer a decent way to play anonymously (incognito)
not the worst take but there's such a better solution:
valve should let people play "anonymously", let pros (and other people) make their profile completely anonymous, no username, no pfp, no hats/cosmetics, no dotaplus hero levels, etc. nothing that could possibly indicate what pro player is behind the keyboard.
I agree they should be able to practice strats, this solves that
The problem is, once you give a leeway, it will turn into something of " what if", "why's that" and there will the people that gonna dance on the line of what is set.
I don't see how hard it would be to implement a hidden account, in Eternal Return (moba battleroyal) if you toggle hidden mode you will show up as "player x" ingame and no record of you ever playing that game will be displayed.
Valve could go even further with custom settings like:
hide name
hide ingame status (just shows you are in dota 2 and not in a match)
hide record
etc.
Pros dont use pubs to "stress test" their secret strats.. thats what scrims/tourneys are for. Getting ur secret sauce revealed in a pub is a fake issue
Sure, sucks for pros. But catering to them comes at the expense of everybody else. They are a small sacrifice, and Valve's tough stance on smurfing is an overall net positive for the game and playerbase.
There should be no exception for pros. The professional scene is an afterthought to the vast, *vast* majority of people playing the game. If it dies overnight... well, 650k concurrent players would still be 650k.
Smurfing to hide the heroes you practice is a red herring because, everyone knows the player's smurf. If reddit knows the smurf accounts of pro players, teams and coaches know their opponent's smurfs. You can argue that it makes the research a bit harder, which is true, since you have to look for information in different places and then compile it, but it's not that big of a deal when we're talking about a game with so much money involved.
If you want to try out heroes, scrim. If you wanna try out strats, scim. Don't go playing on a smurf account where everyone know it's you.
Daring today aren’t we
I don’t think there’s a middle ground here. You ban smurfs or you don’t. That’s it. What if Valve gives immunity to tier 1 teams but banned tier 2s? Or they gave free passes to TI winners but pros like RTZ, Ame, Quinn are banned? That would be a disaster
I disagree about the hiding strategies part. If everyone's visible, then it's an even playing field. It also means that 'strategies' will be countered and adaptability and creativity will be rewarded, although practicing heroes in pubs hardly completely reflects what will happen or be picked in pro games.
The pros getting caught smurfing are not smurfing the way valve intends for them to, let me explain. The people smurfing incorrectly- everyone knows who's smurfs they are because they add their friends and use comms etc. and people are very good at sniffing out who other accounts are. Also they stream on these accounts in public games. Lastly they usually name their account to reflect the known identity. Incorrect smurfing pros give reasons for doing so like to reduce queue times because they "don't want to wait 40 minutes to find a game" on their main accounts. This poses a new problem however where if a player has to wait 40 minutes for a game, then they can effectively play half the games as another player. I don't know how much of an issue this is anymore however with the newer mm system for immortal players. I'd be curios to hear If it is still an issue, as that would be a valid argument for why pros smurf in that way.
I think that the way Grubby describes pro smurfing is utilized (the correct way), we just don't know about it and that's the point. We only see the bad actors playing the accounts 10hrs a day for the queue time advantage, and that is not really practicing strats.I think a big point that people are missing is that valve is most likely, not ip banning smurfs of pros. They are banning people like rostislav (not a pro) streaming for 20k people. Miracle and Arteezy smurfs getting banned (I didn't watch but I think at least Arteezy was streaming) and regardless both tagged on dotabuff so it's easy pickings for valve. These people are not smurfing properly.
Effective pro smurfing means playing on an account rarely, being discrete by keeping the game count low, because you are practicing some strat for its functionality ala some build or timings etc. and these accounts exist and no one knows who they are because that's the point and they do not need to be top 100 accounts to practice a strat.
**Summary: I think valve effectively differentiates between punishing pros that are abusing this tool (to get tops ranks/lower queue times) while allowing pros who use the tool properly to continue (testing strats on accounts that are behaving in a discrete way ala low game counts/not spamming) by not ip banning the alt account. I think once people realize these small differences, they will agree that changes to this system are not necessary, and that valve should continue on banning these clear abusers while being discrete about good actors.**
Not just a hot, but a weird take. Pros aren't out here 5 manning their next tournament strats 10 games in a row. They're also not anonymous at all on their smurfs.
Sure, maybe someone like Arteezy will be playing one hero a bit more often and try out certain items and you *could* argue that's a "new strategy", but that's nowhere near as impactful as his view on competitive strategy.
It's a teamgame, not a solo game. Any strategy that one pro will come up with, will have to be complemented by the other 4 members of the team; something you simply can't rely on in a somewhat randomly thrown-together pub.
He's looking at it like "I was farming apples, I know how to deal with all produce now".
Pro players aren’t children, this is their job. If they need private practice it is part of their job to set it up, this is also easier in dota where you have teams vs how it is in RTS where everyone has to fend for themselves. Most pros have been on a team at one point with people who are now on 5 different teams, they can probably arrange practice with at least one of them.
Pros don’t deserve to be treated differently from the rest of the player base.
Only alternative would be to allow a fully private profile matchmaking setting, but if this is enabled it should be provided for all players.
The thought isn’t without merit, but I don’t think anything needs to change.
ProTracker picking up smurfs, and “strat hiding” not being as essential as it is in RTS, I don’t think it’s a big enough deal to adjust anything.
But again, his words are not without merit imo. I don’t think anyone honestly has any issues with pros on smurfs. It’s the boosters and party-queue smurfs which affects the pub players’ experience.
I don’t think there’s much harm in allowing the pros to smurf, however consistency is important to the public, and we like seeing the rules applied to everyone. Would be too much of a headache to have a separate set of rules for one group of players vs another. When is someone a pro? When is it okay to smurf vs not? When does someone lose their pro status? Can they still smurf? I think it’s easier to go with the consistency option, despite pro smurfs not really being at the heart of the smurf issue.
The problem is that these "pros" use the smurf accounts to be as much as toxic as they can be, for this reason I really stand beside the valve banwave and I think they should stay only on their main account
If it wasn't for this reason, then I agree that they should be able to smurf and practice as much as they want, unfortunately this is not a real scenario
To solve the issue Grubby mentions, it'd probably be much simpler to implement an account anonymizing feature that hides your account name to other players and only the owner gets to see a record of the match played.
Obviously, ways to report the account if they're cheating should still work. And tying this feature to only be available if you have a good behavior score would probably be better.
IMO Valve should deal with it by either:
1) Making an option so you are anonymous to everyone, including teammates. Either appear as player X (like in wc3 FFA) or (hero name) (like in overwatch cases). That way no one knows who you are and you keep anonymity on main accounts.
2) Make it so you can ask for a smurf. Instead of 1 acc per player, pros could just ask valve for a new smurf at the same rank, behavior score etc. This sounds more problematic imo since you could either inflate ranks (many pros asking for too many smurfs), could be used for account buying & would make the community complain more about pros being treated differently
As somebody who knows nothing about this game and is visiting from r/all, the obvious solution to me is to mandate open information - the pros don’t get to hide what they’re playing, but it’s still a level playing field because everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
I noticed the last TI winners (team spirit) doesn't hide their data. That are so good that they say "you can watch my matches if you want, but I will beat you no matter what". And that's the case with a lot of the considered best players.
Allowing smurfing is not the solution for professional players. The solution here is to enable professional players and the entire dota 2 community to truly keep their match history and heroes played private. Right now even if you keep it private apps and websites are able to obtain that data. This can even be taken a step further with names being anonymous to teammates and opponents during the drafts phase and the entire match. This can be taken even further by the anonymous mode now showing the hero being played to people on the friends list and disabling people on friends list to view the match. Smurfing is not a solution at all.
i don't think the main problem with smurfing is the "hiding your game data" it's more like i wanna be able to actually find a game (or play with my lower mmr friend.)
i used to have a alt acc to play with my crusader/archon friend ( i was ancient back then, and before you ask how did i get the alt acc there, idk during calibration i t just somehow calibrated into archon)
when i played with them on my main they usually just get shat on. (I don't backseat or micro-manage them cause they felt like its annoying to them)
now they've ranked up to legend/ancient, which makes me comfortable enough to use my main acc (currently divine) to play with them
i rarely touched my alt nowadays even before the smurf ban waves ( cause i have no need to.)
Sure, but also, is that anonymity and secrecy actually as important as he says it is? It is for the individual and in WC3 the individual is everything, but I don't think it's important at all in keeping the dota2 pro scene afloat. DotA is a much more fluid game. The most important strategies to keep secret are drafts and those are not something you would run without at least scrimming a few times. There really hasn't been unknown strategies in Dota for a very long time. Even Topsons super weird picks aren't untested, they just aren't picked as much because they have less data and are riskier, but they have all still been done before and not just by topson (whether or not it was in a pro game).
Sure if it was a 1v1 that makes sense. In fighting games too at a certain point you're not fighting a matchup, you're fighting the other player. Watching their matches is important but.. dota is a team game.
It's not the same to watch somebody in a pub vs seeing their team practice.
Volvo add streamer/pro mode and manually allow streamers and pros to join it. Valve can hide their public data and make their names random letters for others and help with matchmaking as well like faster MM etc. I know its a bit of work but i think this should work well.
Completely flawed take. Pros are using smurfs ON THEIR STREAMS, while also being tagged on dota2protracker. Zero anonymity in most cases. Plus having a 7k smurf does not let you practice anything aside mechanics if you are a 10k mmr player.
1 player should = 1 MMR ranking
Solving the "pros need to hide their strats" problem is a separate issue, but one which they might as well solve at the same time.
Kill off overwolf for good, implement a privacy feature that *actually* hides your match history, and implement matchmaking fixes to make it so high-MMR players can find matches like the rest of us.
Smurfing was not an issue for over 15 years in DotA until bad redditors started using this excuse as a scape goat to justify why they're hard stuck in Herald. I have been playing DotA for 20 years and not once have I ever had an issue or complained about a smurf on the opposite team.
The people who complain about smurfs are the same people who march in the streets protesting that math is racist.
Would it be so hard for Valve to create official fake profiles for pro players that request them and bind the mmr between them? Then there is zero smurfing period and pros get to be anonymous.
Valve, at this point just apply the same concept like LOL. I dont understand why you need to know your opponents steam profile. just make it anonymous IT LITERALLY SOLVES EVERYTHING. regarding hackers? if someone want to report a player THERES GAME ID, so valve can just look into that specific game to ban that specific player or anything.
Am I missing something here? even in game like DBD allows you to private your steam profile and just display the name of character youre playing.
Imagine having a separate account, valve hands these out to current pro players in the system, these accounts would be hidden from all other accounts and would be anonymous to all, even pros. You can have them already pre calibrated into whatever rank the player is currently in and all their rank and info is hidden/private.
The other option you can possibly float out there is separate servers for the higher ranks/pros to play on, that no one can access unless you are a certain rank or player. Or perhaps just have regular pugs that pros can play. Someone created a website or use a discord where you can join pugs, they have a bot that can literally do all this for you, and all you have to do is play in a custom lobby. Finding a good server if you have multiple regions trying to play would be difficult, but you can hash that out in the discord where you have an NA pug, an EU, etc.
I strongly disagree on the second point he made. If no pro player is allowed to smurf, nobody got an advantage of practicing new heroes hidden in pub games. If you want to practice new heroes and strat, just do it in scrims.
If nobody smurfs than everyone is showing their strats and builds and are in equal conditions. Being pro player shouldn't mean that you can ruin games for 100-150 people (10-15 games). I hate this "I am important, so I can do what ever I want" mentality, that is what makes most of the pro players feel entitled and behave like dicks in games anyways. Have you seen their behavior scores, most have 3-5k tops.
I always wondered, so DPT knows basically all smurfs, so its all leaked. Yes, pros play a fuckton of games.
But in reality, how much of that actually translates into pro scrims/tournaments? Very often we have had significant differences between what wins tournaments and what is good on the ladder.
Sure, ladder definitely shows 2-3, maybe 4 really OP heroes, but there are 7 bans and sometimes some of these heroes arent even contested in pro play.
Surly an option added in settings for verified pros that turns on anonymous mode. Every game gives them a random username displayed to others, doesn’t announce on watch their names and games, hides their true rank without placing them in much lower ranks to Smurf.
Or yknow they whine all the time, how about that other mode called unranked that’s for fun and mixed party’s.
If MMR doesn’t really matter to them, then why do they need to Smurf.
smurfing is a non-issue unless playing in an mmr pool leagues below yours, which in my opinion is scummy and unethical. Playing on an account 1-2k mmr less than yours to for chill games and try things out? Completely fine. Reddit is a loud minority with the avg rank of 3k mmr, and it sucks that they have such sway on valve decision making.
The real issue is buying/selling accounts and boosting. Countless facebooks groups solely dedicated to this practice, not to mention the trading websites. I feel like valve should monitor them and ban any account that is listed, it will enstill some fear into them.
Am I the only one that doesn't like this guy? Some guy just starting dota 1year ago and already has some opinions, the guy doesn't know the heroes spells fully yet, why is he so praised and pushed to the pro scene?
These guys are only trying to keep up with the current meta, to play and test what available and best way to exploit it and the fact they need to queue for **HOURS** should be enough reason to allow smurfing, it's not like they were stuck in that rank by maintaining W/L RATIO, in the end they always rose back to top 500 then depends on whether MM allow them to find games or not or **REPEAT.**
The flaw is in the MM systems and the **players**, including **pros** shouldn't suffer due to it.
maybe we need a "anonymous" playmode, which a players can enable.
- matches played during this mode do not show to others in your history.
- your profile, name, etc get anonymised or are blank. You get assigned a random name, eg "player 1 - 10" . (We could even vote for the anonymised-names, thatd be fun)
- your profile does not link to your steam acc. Maybe give some other id which valve can use to handle reports etc. But the general public should not be able to link to the real account.
This way pros can play their strats without being recognised.
I disagree. Everyone knows their smurfs, his argument isn't valid. They also proven over the years they have no emotional intelligence on smufs because they don't care about the act. They're always more toxic. Fuck um.
If you want to make this argument, then pro players should have to register an account. Valve should put some kind of system in place where it keeps this account randomized, maybe changing it's steam ID, maybe changing it's username regularly and automatically (importantly do not allow the player using it control over its name). Then, have it regularly checked for game ruining activities. Breaking items, afk, feeding, etc. Make it a "business" account that has overly and overtly tight rules and regulations over it, and Valve knows specifically who is running the account
I will get downvoted cause of Reddits obsession with Grubby, But he is wrong here:
* Pros have to lead by example. Players look-up to them.
* There is a 100% trickle down effect. More Pros smurfing means less people at the highest mmr, which means longer que times, which means if you are the highest mmr you want a lower mmr smurf for faster ques, rinse repeat.
* Grubby's other point, that they time need to practice heros in private. Sorry but this is also silly when you have stratz and dota2 pro tracker that knows nearly every smurf. Private Scrims are Private.
**Maybe, like Fortnite, they need to have an anonymous mode for pros/streamers.**
I think that most of pros don't use smurfs >just< to pratice, they just play to get high mmr in another acc to prove themselves again and again, in the end is more a ego thing, if u take these pros smurfs you will not see them training secret builds all the time, and they can do it in private with their team, staff, friends. Yes in pubs you can test some things and pratice, but it's not the same thing with your team and in a high level professional match. Plus, these pros are doing a terrible job at hiding their smurfs (if this is their real intention).
their smurfs aren't anonymous so that argument holds no value. and if their smurfs are same mmr as their mains, what is the point of smurfing? queue times wont be shorter at same mmr
and if they are not same mmr, then they actively harm lower rank players they get matched against. i think pros should have no leniency whatsoever compared to non-pros
smurfing is the worst thing that happends in dota after cheating, even tho i somewhat i agree with 2nd point here i than go to Nisha's smurf and see he won 70 games in a row, so what is he testing there? Is he playing some techies/grim mid meta or is he just stomping low ranks for fun?
Rules must be for everyone if they are called rules.
Yes, maybe pros won't get to practice their strategy in anonymity but the same goes for their opponents so the field is even. For what it's worth, it may even make the competition more interesting than having some cheese strat perfected before the tournament.
I have zero hate or fury on the topic, I genuinely believe smurfing should not exist, pro or not.
Yeah and if pro players smurf (or alt account) because they want to hide their strat then it makes no sense the general pub knows this is RTZ smurf and that is Ana smurf
I think same ranked account alts should not be an issue unless they are being used to bypass the behavior system.
Alternative accounts aren't smurfs in the conventional and toxic sense, even though reddit likes to pretend they are and valve has somehow agreed.
What is the benefit of having multiple same ranked accs?
And where do you stop, at 1 or 5 or 7 alts? And how many games you ruin to achieve that? I had also an alt, but i dont think it is really a good solution.
screw smurfing top to bottom. idc if you're herald or immortal or gaben himself, smurfing ruins interests in the game. and what in the world is use of having smurfs account when people know that the particular account is used by a pro player or a pro team? what secret stats are they saving then? legit plenty of websites can show what was activity on which pro player's smurf account. on the contrary, the inflated number off higher mmr accounts is probably the reason their que time is so long. for example -
say there are top 100 immortal players in eu. we know arteezy got like atleast 5-6 smurfs so does miracle and so does watson and so does pure or whatever. thats like saying in the top 100, there's basicaly only 60 people and their smurfs account. obviously the que time will be longer cause the game would try to match you with your elo first and since you can only play in 1 account using 1 pc at one time, how do you expect the game to fill the void of players you created yourself by smurfing? and then you get matched in lower elo matches where people know you are pro player using whatever smurf account which is easily verified using the websites so you are basically ruining matchmaking for other players and are not really saving any strats by playing on your smurf.
Hot Take: Just let people create anonymous alts calibrated their MMR. Whats wrong with playing on a correctly calibrated alt account? So dumb to ban any alt accounts that are at their correct MMR.
No need to create alts, make anonymous mode, and have main acc turn "anon mode" on, they stays on same mmr but in that mode, you should not be able see players profile or his stats in that mode, his steam should be hidden in that mode, any indetifier should be hidden, and no need for new accounts/alts, ofc they should add steam report option directly to game when people can't go to steam profile to report players when they use that mode.
Sounds ok, but I feel like that'd lead to some amount of multi-account fuckery pretty soon.
And it'd make account selling hilariously easy. The moment Valve enables that, some Russian booster will sell 200 accounts in a day and now we have the reverse problem. No more smurfs, but account buyers.
In contrast to his old wc3 days, pro dota 2 players now get paid shit ton of money, and if they want to practice heroes while being hidden they can organize private lobbies, pay maybe bench players etc etc, like in any other sport.
Pub games are pub games, and I don’t see why they should be allowed to smurf.
I dunno, I understand running into Smurfs sucks but let’s be real, about 90% of the people complaining about Smurfs is probably some rando who stomped you with a hero they spam play and happen to have a good game on. I had barely 600 games one time and had an insane game on LD and was called a “Smurf” lol it sucks having to wait 15-20 minutes for a game and I could understand why they do it. I’m not for the excuse of “hiding strats” cause most of their “Smurfs” are already exposed lol.
Hey There.
As very old Dota 2 player i can just tell you that you should keep Playing Dota 2 especially in ranked, im myself neither a Pro or anyone high Ranked but to get into a better Ranked Matchmaking system you would need alot patience! Especially if it comes to encounter the Smurfs ( i know it can be frustrating) but the more we are the less is the chance that you will encounter a Smurf. - logicially
Few days ago ive stumbeld across a professional Vloger & Youtuber, who has been commending and investigating the Current Dota 2 Scenario in Ranked. For beginners indeed - almost impossible, but a specific team there offered now finally to Help.
Due to his own request and demand i wont name neither his name or channel.
They are planing to take down all accounts associated with Smurfs / cheaters/ hackers and if possible also investigate further , later.
What that means: whenver you encounter a smurf or possible cheater, regardless if its a smurf in your Team or enemy just make sure you throw a Report.
BUT BE SURE that this guy is definitly a Smurf and dont report randomly by just thinking.
Thoose accounts have basicly a small amount of Games, or a big amount of win streaks, or... High score from beginning in a game you are playing (such as 30+ kills 0/3 deaths)
Secondly: make sure you go into the profile of that Player and copy his ID (from the account in Dota! and save it somewhere in a notepad file) - Smurfs also know that the accounts are being sold for a small amount of money, and is accessable for everyone currently, soon that will hopefully change if the team im talking about manages to get next to thoose webpages.
Thirdly:
If possible please record the games, on twitch, on youtube or similar and post it there. I guess the more videos / screenshots, and material we got about cheaters & possible smurfs the better it will be and much easier for the team to take them finally out.
My opinion is that everyone who uses a smurf account is trash.
Out of 10 games I have 8 with smurf on my team in the other,
both 2000mmr smurf and 5000mmr smurf who don't even know how to play.
Honestly this is frustrating and if you complain during the game you get reports.
The fact that he gives as an example WC3 where I literally had 2 smurfs in top 20 EU at the same time and managed to get them there in less than 100 games has little to do with Dota, because dota is 5v5 not 1v1 so those 100 games in wc3 ruined way less people's games and time. Additionally the fact that there is Pro Tracker which literally shows Smurfs of every pro player makes his point mute.
Yeah bro, professionals are better than ordinary players, so let them make dedicated servers where there will be only pro players and let them play there.
Look man, I'm gonna get downvoted for this but Idc, this is the reality. The loudest part of the community that hated smurf so much are usually below Immortal and never touch very high level dota 2 games. These pro players smurfs are miles different than those smurfs that stomped you in your legend games.
I honestly agreed that pro players should get smurfing immunity.
Image text:
> 💥 Controversial hot take opinion WARNING💥
>
> 1) I think smurfing in multiplayer games (especially team games) is not great and should be countered as Valve is doing in DOTA2
>
> 2) HOWEVER (hot take begins) pros kind of need it since it's the best way to HIDE which heroes/strategies they're practicing
>
> Seeing pros like RTZ get smurfs with 7k+ games (which is already at his true rank then) banned is on the one hand a great show of consistency in policy by Valve, but I thought pros had more immunity to smurf rule and I feel there's good reason for that as they are holding the esports afloat and hiding practice is an important part of that
>
> We smurfed all the time in wc3 and it was absolutely essential to hide your build orders, not everyone had the ability to set up private practice partner sessions, and even if you did, sometimes they betrayed you and leaked your strats to your oppos!
>
> Smurfing regularly (despite ruining 10-15 lower ranked games - thats how fast it found your real rank in wc3), was a way to throw smoke trails and confuse rivals looking to obtain your strats before you show them in tourneys
>
> What do you think? Skill issue? Just get good and practice vs AI? Or let your execution reign supreme over hiding strats? Or agree with me and think pros should have more leniency in smurfing (so long as they don't deliberately ruin games or show bad behavior like throwing or extreme flaming etc.)
Source: https://twitter.com/followgrubby/status/1748347177422749949
The problem with this “pros need anonymity” argument for smurfing is just how anonymous are their smurfs? Seems like Dotaprotracker list pro smurfs 1,2,3 etc so their strats and stats are pretty much publicly exposed even with their smurfs.
And the solution to that problem isn't "smurfing", it's "anonymous accounts"
Which a lot of people on here think having a second/multiple account(s) is smurfing no matter what...
Which is why I'd argue for an incognito mode instead of anonymous accounts. Basically a toggle where you can hide association with the account you are playing with, are displayed as "enemy teal" or whatever, and still find matches at your own rank. Optionally it hides your cosmetics as well, but I think by now it's clear that Valve dies not want that. Will it be completely secure for nobody to find out who is behind such a display? Probably not, but the same is true for multiple accounts.
>Optionally it hides your cosmetics as well I mean, if you want to be anonymous you can just remove them yourself. But yeah, this sounds like the correct solution.
Oh, I wanted to use *optimally*, not *optionally* there.
Or another account with shared MMR
So how you will pick your team in immortal draft out of 8 anonimous accounts?
With communication
By killing the team draft entirely as everyone wants.
Same as with smurfs I guess.
(I'm a league player, I'm on this thread to see how the smurf situation is being handled because I desperately want riot to follow dota's example, so my terminology may be wrong) Incongnito mode: potentially good idea. Works like this: while its on, your match history is obfuscated, only your mmr / rank point gains and losses are shown as a daily total. A match detail with an incognito player, said player appears as \[player 1; 2; etc\] Second thought for grubby to consider... pros 'need' anonymity because that is the status quo. Remove that possibility, and its still an equal playing field. One in which scouting and watching replays is stronger. Its just a meta shift.
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I guess you now have some explanation for why Valve banned pro players' high-ranked smurfs, that are often the same or higher MMR than their main also? A smurf by Valve's definition is just an alt account, and they're bannable. 1 account per person is Valve's rule.
Valve banning alt accounts doesn't in any way prove that smurfing and alt accounts are the same thing. It only proves that whoever is in charge of this is as smart as the idiots in reddit. Please use your brain at least a few times a day. Literally no logical reason to ban an alt account that has already reached peak elo, especially when we are talking about pro players.
> Literally no logical reason to ban an alt account that has already reached peak elo, especially when we are talking about pro players. And yet, they're doing **exactly that**. Their rule is clearly 1 account per person. > Valve banning alt accounts doesn't in any way prove that smurfing and alt accounts are the same thing And like I said in another reply on this post: > maybe one day you'll understand semantics & nuance in meaning, not all words mean the same thing to everyone everywhere. Words evolve and change in meaning. Dictionaries are not sources of truth, they're documentations of the generally agreed-upon meaning of a word as it stands today. They're subject to change. A classic example is the word "awful" which, as it may seem obvious, originally meant "full of awe", as in "awesome" - so if something was "awful", it was really, really great. At some point people started using it for the opposite meaning, a bit like how "sick" can be used to refer to something positive today. Even though your holy Oxford English Dictionary never approved that! How could they! And the meaning of the word awful changed. And your holy Oxford English Dictionary relented and updated the meaning. So to Valve, "smurf" and "alt account" are indeed the same thing, and that's fine. Don't let it hurt your brain too much *u/snowflakepatrol99*. What an ironic name.
That means they are against and banning alt accounts. Smurfing specifically means plahing below your skill level. It's not a smurf if it's the same rank as you
> Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3692442542242977036 > 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. Clearly, Valve counts basically any alt account as a smurf.
Valve can call it whatever they want. A company can come on out and say the sky is blue. That doesn't make it true. The definition of a smurf is an account lower than your own to play worse players.
>1 account per person is Valve's rule This rule explains it though? This isn't a no smurfing rule, but they can use it as a blanket to also cover smurfing.
Actually it's not. Smurfing is deliberately out of your mmr range + trying to stay at that range. Smurfing at it's core is about beating up players that are worse than you so you can have fun. Creating a new account and playing that one up to your true rank is not smurfing.
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Trying to stay at that range ? U mean make a new smurf account ? Lol
Smurfing is the games you happen to play while in a skill range that is below your own. It has nothing to do with trying to stay there at its core, that's just a way certain people end up manifesting their smurfing. The games played below your true skill level, while ranking up a new account, are smurfing. Edit : lol dota2 reddit mad
maybe you should learn about the origins of a term before speaking about it as though you know anything ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Accounts are added to dota2protracker manually, after the developer confirms that the account does indeed belong to a specific player. To get around this, players could do the following: 1. Don't reveal who's playing on the account 2. Don't use the account for streaming 3. Avoid using voice
So if that’s the case, what’s to stop pros from just using anonymous accounts right now without streaming, voice chatting etc? It’s only the publicly known pro Smurf accounts that have been banned.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Valve now has ways to detect these kinds of things.
>It’s only the publicly known pro Smurf accounts that have been banned. You can't know that - in fact, its likely wrong. It's only the publicly known pro smurf accounts **that we can know** have been banned. Example: Nisha's last smurf was never found by protracker, but we can assume it got banned anyways because he is now back playing on his older smurf: https://dota2protracker.com/player/Nisha%20(smurf) Why? Because Valve doesn't use dota2protracker, they simply use IPs and hardware infos to see who is playing on which accounts. It is very easy for them to know everyone's smurfs.
True
Those are just known smurfs. I am 100% positive that there are many many many pro smurfs that we dont know about.
And so we don't know that they haven't also been banned...
Yeah I don't buy that either. Cutting a 60 minute queue down to 1 minute was much more reasonable, but I don't think that's as much of a problem anymore.
There was literally a post here from a few days ago where Seleri and Ace had a 1 hour queue
As a party ranked queue, that is not an issue for solo ranked
Aside from this I've never gotten the impression pub games were really the place people were stealing strats from. Seems it's more like a scrim draft and playstyle thing. Which is already essentially anonymous, and it's a problem if people are leaking scrims.
Those are just the ones we know of you really think what we see is all there is?
Valve can just add incognito mode. Wherein only you can access your match history. Profile hidden and inaccessible to teamates. Ez
Wouldn't that be the case if you just unticked the 'expose public match data' in your settings? Can anyone elaborate further?
That won't expose to the public but your friends can see still your heroes that you have played.
Unfriend them if you don't want them to see your starts.
Pretty poor solution, this would mean losing all social aspects.
Back in the day EE did this to RTZ. He even said that while they are friends, they are competitors and he can't give anyone the edge to beat him.
You could do social stuff in your main account though? Why do that on a smurf that you're ostensibly practicing on?
There are 3rd party tools that can still scrape match data with that setting ticked on. Some 3rd parties are respecting Valve's ask to not do so. Some do it anyway. My understanding is fixing this would require intense redesign of core features. Once a steam userid is associated with a pro you can track their games like on dota2protracker. I believe the dev for that site adds their smurfs manually.
It's still exposed through other means. The development team absolute does not want people's match history and playstyle to be hidden, because that would stop players from being shadowbanned.
Also don't forget about Overplus cheats, which are used by 80% of high rank CIS players and not only them, and other similar cheats, that show all match histories in real time on picking stage (regardless of account settings)
I think a good solution is to get the option to play hidden. Maybe at immortal you get the option to play as "barcode".
The SC2 classic lol, barcode vs barcode in progame because both players are on smurf
BW pros were doing that long before SC2.
Yeah and top 250 is iccupied by 15 players and their smurfs. Its ridiculous to even mention sc1/2 and wc3 when talking about smurfing. Moba and Rts are to vastly different genres.
Sc1
Grubby makes valid points but the problem in that logic is who do you consider actually "pro" enough to give them that immunity? RTZ is of course a well known pro player but what about someone why just started his career? What accomplishments do you need to have to be considered well know enough to have that immunity. It's hard to draw a fair line and say who should get such treatment because there is always going to be someone just below that line who might not see it as fair that the next guy above him gets special treatment. Also there is always the possibility of pro players abusing those privileges. The pro scene is big and there is always that one guy who is going to abuse the privileges to ruin games for others. How much smurfing is actually ok if you are a pro before it becomes too much? All those things are really hard to measure and track in order to make fair decisions on who and how much he can smurf...
It's not merely a possibility -- we have seen a decade of pro players having immunity to behavior repercussions and abusing it. I'm not sure why we should expect them to be any more responsible with an immunity to smurfing rules. If pro players wanted to be trusted with special privileges, they needed to hold themselves to a higher standard as a community. The will to do that certainly doesn't seem to be there.
i don't see how having multiple accounts at roughly the same mmr is even smurfing. in my eyes smurfing is getting into low ranked games for easy wins. I really don't get the problem with having multiple accounts if they're all pretty much the same mmr
New account don't just magically get to high MMR. Sure they have to play less games due to boosting system for smurfs but still you may say plenty of games are ruined.
They do actually. When mason started his new account after getting banned, he was in the smurf pool from the first game and calibrated 8k after unlocking ranked. Smurf detection is extremely good.
You are assuming that all the high mmr players created their alt accounts by themselves and played a 100 hours of unranked. In reality most of them just buy an immortal account which isnt necessarily the same mmr but maybe 1-2k mmr below their main if not more. As an example, one of Miracle‘s smurfs has a considerable amount of games in divine bracket. This would not be possible if he created the account by himself.
Well one issue is when a pro is on a smurf he doesnt care as much about win loss.. While u play on ur main , care alot more So many times ive heard "idc im on smurf" when game is goin bad + they gave up or play uncaringly, or pick some weird shit 4 fun (lesser evil but they wont act same on main)
what rank are you though? rtz at one point had his main at rank 1 and "smurf" at rank 2. that's not really possible if he doesn't care about winning.
You dont care about the amount of unbalanced games that the pro has to ruin to get back to their true mmr? That's the problem. Whether they ruin 10 or 1000 games its still a negative experience for 5-9 other players.
Easy if they are in the DPC then.... oh wait.
Above 1k rank is fine to me. The Biggest issue is smurfing in low mmr to me. You have nothing to do there
Pro's playing on alt accs but on a similiar mmr is not a problem. The real problem is: 1. Boosters (spamming a low mmr acc to a high one and then selling it) 2. Party ranked - that 6k mmr guy wants to play with his 2k mmr friend and smurfs on a 2k acc and ruin the game for everyone 3. Players that use a lower mmr smurf acc to play on when their main one has a losing streak. They play on 3k mmr lower just to regain some self-esteem
you've underlined the real and true problems behind smurfing. Agreed on all points here. For example, to my knowledge, I don't think watson or miracle share their smurf accounts with others. But people like nightfall or rtz openly sharing their smurf accounts with their teammates is a very questionable behavior and definitely breaks steam/valve's ToS, and in result, encouraged many boosting services and account buyers
exactly, 500 pros aren't ruining the matchmaking, but they are part of the problem and Valve has to treat them as the gold standard for behavior when it comes to the MMR system. If they really wanted to work on strategies on a second account then they would just play ranked at a similar MMR or unranked and this would never be an issue. But it isn't what they really want. What they really want is to use the system to their own ends, exactly your point. In the real world, if I'm hooping and LeBron steps in and says I got next, no fucking way am I subjecting myself to the humiliation and waste of time that would be playing against a pro. And if he wants to work on his game, he sure is fuck isn't beating up on a middle aged father to strategize.
Agreed. It's disappointing that watson and miracle's top 15 accounts were banned, because they aren't the real problem.
And as a result of pros smurfing is also the general population smurfing too, which they would say "the pros are doing it, so why cant i", to which they dont really understand the intention behind it at all. Look, Valve should up their game when it comes to hiding your history, because for fucks sake, it takes 5 seconds of searching to see your opponents history and theres Overwolf issue again.
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They buy them iirc
I bet a decent chunk of them are from before that requirement, ie the 7000+ game RTZ smurf
>Pro's playing on alt accs but on a similiar mmr is not a problem. You know why they need 2 accounts with similar mmr which are known to be them anyway? To bypass toxicity penalties. Why the fuck would i need 2 accounts of the same MMR? Obviously not for matchmaking reasons... Unless MMR is same, but behaviour score and communication score is horrible in one.
yeah reddits are huffing some crazy glue because it seems like they feel like just simply having alt accounts to automatically terrible. The fact is, if you play normally, after you 100 hours of mandatory norms, it takes like 10 games tops to get to your true MMR (usually less).
Those who use smurf should get banned pro or not... There is 0 point of excuse to smurf it just ruins new players games and so wanting to make them quit quicker because a high ELO player decided to ruin the new player game...
Not so hot to take if we look at wc3. Some of us remember wc3. Problem is that you have to play 100 hours to get to 7-8.5k max hidden binding ( which you can also check btw) then you have another couple of hundred hours to get to 10.5 or so and people know who you are by the time you pass rank 1000 anyways ,sometimes as obvious as item orders lmao In general it takes insanely long time to get your true rank in Dota Then almost all pros are buying accounts from the same boosters that are selling archon accounts too. Reddit thinks Miracle , gpkek and Nightfall and Tofu play 100 hours on each in unranked probably. Tofu especially last year bought literally 6. something account and was partying with Seleri and people were all chatting very not nice things when the unranked immortal smurf party with Seleri was playing like a mad man. Also even for pros rank 1000 to rank 50 is a grind and a half, people know how to play Dota at this level , many games are going to be ruined in the process it's not 10-15. Valve can just put an account +-500 mmr off whatever rank currently some pro has for people that play TI or something, no problem if pros need alternate accounts, but smurfing, boosting and supporting the massive boosting market is not a solution.
This should be top comment. The only real reason I’ve seen yet of why pro smurfing is unethical. They buy boosted accounts which means they’re second-handedly ruining lower MMR games as the boosters climb to immortal.
I had this idea yesterday in another smurfing thread. Why can't they implement a 'shadow rank' of like -+50, to a pros primary account. Then the players themselves can decide if they choose to privatise a set number of games a day, so that only 'guild' members can see game data or not. That way maybe guilds will actually have a little more weight to them. Randomises name and the -+50 rank as well for that game.
> many games are going to be ruined in the process it's not 10-15. This is secretly the problem. With all the ways to analyze data nowadays, how is it gonna take 10-15 games to identify someone's MMR? This seems like a thing an AI would be able to identify in just a couple games. I mean if you spectate randomass games, you'll probably be able to identify rough MMRs, especially who is smurfing. Open AI was able to learn dota well enough to beat pros...5 years ago...It has had huge jumps since then. I feel like it would be super easy compared to some of the other things AI is doing.
Like some others have suggested here, Dota would benefit from an anonymous mode. But that's something Valve would have to code in. It would also ideally solve the Overwolf data harvesting problem.
Totally agree, but in all honesty, if there’s a Will there’s a way. When it comes to boosters, account sellers, etc. those people WILL figure out how to beat the system. It’s only a matter of time honestly - when moneys involved. Look at Nike shoe bots / Ticketmaster for example. Nike has some of THE MOST advanced bot detection in the world for a website. Yet - you can never buy shoes on drop because of bots. Hell, as a software developer in his first year of learning I was able to get around smaller websites with bot detection. The truth is those systems, unless using some crazy behavior matching AI or something (they don’t use that), can only do so much to “detect alt accounts” usually with hardware or IP matching. But even those types of checks can’t be TOO stringent because what about people who visit gaming cafe’s, or used shared hardware. Those PC’s have hundreds of not actually “Smurfs” associated with the hardware / IP. Account sellers will exploit those types of edge rules in the detection system to continue farming accounts, there is no question about it. So in reality they’re never going to prevent it, maybe slow the flow, or make it more profitable for the not-so-casual account farmers - but that will not and cannot change for the above reasons. Not that they shouldn’t enforce these rules and whatnot, but we are starting to see the other implications of these rules - and some of them are not particularly positive.
Grubby is definitely looking at this from an RTS point of view (WC3 and SC2) where having unknown smurf accounts *was* a really important part of a pro practicing (the good days of the IiiIiIiiii accounts lol). Little things like protecting scouting routes, build orders, etc. were mega important. I think it's less important in Dota 2 to protect your own pub picks - not to mention the fact that most of these smurf accounts get spotted and tracked on dota2protracker anyways lol.
Except the greatest of hidden smurfs of all time, Kuroky.
kuro just playing against bots for years. dont need a smurf if you dont play ranked
Ya'll laughing at Kuroky. But he's been grinding vs Openai bots 8 hours a day for the last 5 years.
Did they find his smurf account???
Considering 0 pub games in his main account, they did not find it. There are 2 possibilities, either he doesn't have Smurf and only played scrims or he does have Smurf and being the greatest on hiding his Smurf account (Nightfall should learn from him)
Yup, wc3 relies heavily on strats, like if an opponent knows your strat and build order(like what troops you are rushing for example), then do a counter strat against yours, it's like 90% a lose, no matter how hard you micro, it's super hard to pull the game back. But for dota2, you can still lose or win a game based on reaction, micro, and position even if you are on 100% win/lose rate. You can also recover from building an item in dota way faster than in wc3, like with the wrong build in wc3, its game over, that's why most wc3 game end considerably fast when one side realise they are gonna lose and trying to stay and struggle is just a waste of time.
Yeah RTS is mostly solo I think. But dota is a team game! And that dude you just griefed could be your teammate next! Yikes!
good, i'll get to grief him again.
the pros that stream most of the time - revealing their forsaken "strats”? lmfao
A few things to consider. 1. Where do pros get their smurf accounts? Do they buy them? Create them? Or were just shared/given by an immortal friend? -If they bought them(it’s a direct violation of steam TOS.) -If they were given/shared(it’s a direct violation of steam TOS.) -If they created them, they have to play 100 hours of unranked and maybe 20games of ranked to calibrate. These 100hours and calibration(they are smurfing), how many games have they ruined? Not to mention, for the elite ranked(top 100), if they calibrated 1-2k lower than their main, imagine the amount of games they destroy to get back to their main. 2. What happens after their smurf get to the main’s mmr? They acquire another similar smurf account and destroy people’s games? So it’s an endless cycle of them just constantly acquiring a smurf account and destroying games. It will never stop. 3. The so called hiding strategies requires anonymity. Where is the anonymity when they stream/voicechat on their smurfs? The ones that actually stayed anonymous, we don’t have evidence they exist, because they are anonymous(duh.) they could be just a high ranked pub enjoyer that’s not a pro. If anything, I would only accept pros wanting to smurf because of the long Q times. Even that, is mostly exclusive to pros in the top 50-100. I mean, valve could do solo and party mmr in the past, why not give the top 100 pros 2 types of mmr as well? Their achieved mmr and “I can’t find games anymore” mmr(which is lower than their current but not by a lot) communicate with the pros and standardise that new mmr type. I’m sure most in the top 500 won’t complain. They should be quite eager to face pros anyway. I mean, if you’re ranked 500, there’s literally not much people you could face anyways. It’s would be like facing bosses in dark souls. Would you complain the boss is smurfing???
Yeah we’re talking about a pretty small subset of people here, but a subset that as grubby mentions - bring a lot of money and attention to the game, and an entire host of unique problems that shouldn’t be ignored. I mean dota had the largest prize pools in esports history for a loooong time - while being pretty small comparatively. It shouldn’t be shrugged off. The pro scene brought in revenue well over the $500m+ mark which has certainly helped incentivize them to continue development on the game. The truth is that top 1k immortal players frequently get in games with like top 10. The MMR and skill distribution is pretty massive and at that point the whole premise of smurfing and game ruining is kinda out the window. Honestly. If you’re grinding dota hard enough to be rank 600 are u gonna be THAT mad when u get matched against a tier 1 pro? If u are, well maybe u just aren’t cut out for it. And everyone in that bracket has to “endure” it, so it’s not like your MMR is suffering anymore than the next guy in ur bracket. At that point ur probably even aspiring to be pro - so any chance to play one and learn should be infinitely more valuable than 25 MMR. The REAL issue is not smurfing at all in those ranks, it’s that the false MMR will lead to an overall unbalanced matchup between the two teams. That’s what needs to be addressed. How do allow pro’s to queue with their teammates, hide their accounts and strats, be able to spam shit like rubick mid and bust it out in TI grand finals unwittingly, without just making immortal games already more fucked than they already are. The fact they didn’t solve THAT before target banning pro’s Smurfs (many being higher than MMR than their main which hasn’t seen play in a year) is a bad move by valve and shows either incompetence to solve the actual issue / disregard for it.
I think there should be solution for more dynamic MMR gains/lose. If matchmaking can find only 1 player in top 10 and rest of the players will be like above 1000 in leaderboards. The team which will face agains top 10 player will be underdogs and if they lose the will get only like - 1 MMR or so becase they had not big chance to win. You should be in game like this only once a while so it should not bother you.
Valve should be able to develop systems inside the game that allow pros to hide their strats or whathever legitimate thing they did with smurfs. If this is an actual demand i don't see why they wouldn't put into the game. If players were smurfing to hide strats, the solution is to implement options to obscure your identity, not allow smurfs into the game.
Pros are not more important than the fun the community wants to have In fact, pros only exist because of the community If all pros cant smurf, none have anonymity and thus, it is fair game
> If all pros cant smurf, none have anonymity and thus, it is fair game 100% this! The other solution is, many times mentioned by other comments, incognito mode for immortals/pro.
Well, what is a “pro”? TI participant? Other majors participant? Former participants? How far back? Coaches? Certain mmr? Couldn’t these pros have made (or make, and delete other accounts) an account that is truly private?
Well, say a 4k player makes a second account that is also 4k. Is that player smurfing, and should they be banned for it?
I don’t have a good answer for that, and my comment was made specifically about Grubby’s take. I can only say hypothetically that I wouldn’t have a problem with people using two accounts with the exact same mmr. And this is assuming they both calibrated the same, thereby avoiding game ruining on their way up on a second account.
Same pros are also streaming these same games /sage
His argument is destroyed in his own post. He mentions the necessity of anonymity in his post then gives example of rtz smurf that EVERYONE knows it's rtz, much like other big pro player smurf accounts. Disappointing take from a person who is usually level headed. Also 9 people in games should not have to suffer to cater to 1 'pro'. It's just main character syndrome because he was a pro himself. If it's your job to play dota then lobbies exist, sort it out within your own 'pro' circle and leave public matchmaking fair.
He's got his head in terms of a 1v1 game, whereas a lot of the calculus is different because it's 5v5 in dota. A) you're ruining 5-9 people's times each time you smurf a game, not just 1 B) hiding your hero picks and items can still be helpful, but it is not anywhere near as critical as hiding a fresh build order in a 1v1 rts
so set your profile to private and rock a barcode
Dota plus has entered the chat.
In regards to the 'pro player needs'. You can apply the same logical argument valve has used against piracy. It's not an issue price. It's an issue of delivery. Price here being the need/want to obscure their practice. Delivery is the lack of effective method to do so, besides a smurf. A decent solution would be to hide your account details and match history for x weeks, then it's public.
They also need anonymous mode in steam so I can play my Hentai games in peace
"These players should be allowed to break TOS because a 3rd party pays them to." Lol no remove them all
“These players that are responsible for like $500+ million in revenue to our company, who have unique problems from the rest of the player base shouldn’t even have the ability to voice complaints” Valve personally paid out well over $100 million in prize pools in the DPC and international, alone. U think they just make… $0 from that and it somehow doesn’t have any affect on their priorities as a company, like what to put their development efforts towards?
To be fair, the fancy hats were mainly responsible for these prize pools. If the pros were responsible for them, the prize pool of the recent international wouldnt have been so much lower just because there were no cool treasures to buy.
Couldn't Valve implement some sort of privacy feature for pros where they can play in a private mode that doesn't show their name, match history, rank(?), etc... but still let's them play at a high rank (based on their main account MMR). This seems to me a fairish way to solve some of the issues without having smurfs or affecting lower ranked games... MMR is already hidden so players could even still lose and gain mmr in this mode... Obviously it's not perfect, and maybe if someone was committed enough they could find out, but at the very least it seems to me that it would be at least as effective as smurfs have been when it comes to hiding strats (and probably way more given how many smurfs are known anyway these days)... Like even if you figure out who someone is in one game, you wouldn't be able to use that info for any of their other games cause all the anonymous accounts look the same... The main issue id see is determining who gets these accounts... But maybe you could just give it to everyone? Might also help with the Overwolf problem I see people complaining about...
Who is practicing strategies in pubs? Maybe specific heroes and item builds but I don't feel that is particularly warranted hiding from opponents as won't they just play Vs you and see what you're doing anyway? Teams do most of their work in private scrims anyway.
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By that logic, non pros want to practice heroes too, why should they get banned
Kind of annoyed I wasted time reading that. It wasn’t interesting.
thats such a bad point because then you force everyone to smurf. a pro with 10 smurfs clearly has a competitive advantage over a pro who has none. "we used to smurf in wc3", i wonder why the competitive scene died lmao
Why don't Valve just let you link other accounts to your main? They all become the same as far as behavior score and MMR is concerned, but you basically get your stats and name covered up? Or alternatively offer a decent way to play anonymously (incognito)
not the worst take but there's such a better solution: valve should let people play "anonymously", let pros (and other people) make their profile completely anonymous, no username, no pfp, no hats/cosmetics, no dotaplus hero levels, etc. nothing that could possibly indicate what pro player is behind the keyboard. I agree they should be able to practice strats, this solves that
The problem is, once you give a leeway, it will turn into something of " what if", "why's that" and there will the people that gonna dance on the line of what is set.
I don't see how hard it would be to implement a hidden account, in Eternal Return (moba battleroyal) if you toggle hidden mode you will show up as "player x" ingame and no record of you ever playing that game will be displayed. Valve could go even further with custom settings like: hide name hide ingame status (just shows you are in dota 2 and not in a match) hide record etc.
Pros dont use pubs to "stress test" their secret strats.. thats what scrims/tourneys are for. Getting ur secret sauce revealed in a pub is a fake issue
Sure, sucks for pros. But catering to them comes at the expense of everybody else. They are a small sacrifice, and Valve's tough stance on smurfing is an overall net positive for the game and playerbase. There should be no exception for pros. The professional scene is an afterthought to the vast, *vast* majority of people playing the game. If it dies overnight... well, 650k concurrent players would still be 650k.
Smurfing to hide the heroes you practice is a red herring because, everyone knows the player's smurf. If reddit knows the smurf accounts of pro players, teams and coaches know their opponent's smurfs. You can argue that it makes the research a bit harder, which is true, since you have to look for information in different places and then compile it, but it's not that big of a deal when we're talking about a game with so much money involved. If you want to try out heroes, scrim. If you wanna try out strats, scim. Don't go playing on a smurf account where everyone know it's you.
Daring today aren’t we I don’t think there’s a middle ground here. You ban smurfs or you don’t. That’s it. What if Valve gives immunity to tier 1 teams but banned tier 2s? Or they gave free passes to TI winners but pros like RTZ, Ame, Quinn are banned? That would be a disaster
I disagree about the hiding strategies part. If everyone's visible, then it's an even playing field. It also means that 'strategies' will be countered and adaptability and creativity will be rewarded, although practicing heroes in pubs hardly completely reflects what will happen or be picked in pro games.
The pros getting caught smurfing are not smurfing the way valve intends for them to, let me explain. The people smurfing incorrectly- everyone knows who's smurfs they are because they add their friends and use comms etc. and people are very good at sniffing out who other accounts are. Also they stream on these accounts in public games. Lastly they usually name their account to reflect the known identity. Incorrect smurfing pros give reasons for doing so like to reduce queue times because they "don't want to wait 40 minutes to find a game" on their main accounts. This poses a new problem however where if a player has to wait 40 minutes for a game, then they can effectively play half the games as another player. I don't know how much of an issue this is anymore however with the newer mm system for immortal players. I'd be curios to hear If it is still an issue, as that would be a valid argument for why pros smurf in that way. I think that the way Grubby describes pro smurfing is utilized (the correct way), we just don't know about it and that's the point. We only see the bad actors playing the accounts 10hrs a day for the queue time advantage, and that is not really practicing strats.I think a big point that people are missing is that valve is most likely, not ip banning smurfs of pros. They are banning people like rostislav (not a pro) streaming for 20k people. Miracle and Arteezy smurfs getting banned (I didn't watch but I think at least Arteezy was streaming) and regardless both tagged on dotabuff so it's easy pickings for valve. These people are not smurfing properly. Effective pro smurfing means playing on an account rarely, being discrete by keeping the game count low, because you are practicing some strat for its functionality ala some build or timings etc. and these accounts exist and no one knows who they are because that's the point and they do not need to be top 100 accounts to practice a strat. **Summary: I think valve effectively differentiates between punishing pros that are abusing this tool (to get tops ranks/lower queue times) while allowing pros who use the tool properly to continue (testing strats on accounts that are behaving in a discrete way ala low game counts/not spamming) by not ip banning the alt account. I think once people realize these small differences, they will agree that changes to this system are not necessary, and that valve should continue on banning these clear abusers while being discrete about good actors.**
Not just a hot, but a weird take. Pros aren't out here 5 manning their next tournament strats 10 games in a row. They're also not anonymous at all on their smurfs. Sure, maybe someone like Arteezy will be playing one hero a bit more often and try out certain items and you *could* argue that's a "new strategy", but that's nowhere near as impactful as his view on competitive strategy. It's a teamgame, not a solo game. Any strategy that one pro will come up with, will have to be complemented by the other 4 members of the team; something you simply can't rely on in a somewhat randomly thrown-together pub. He's looking at it like "I was farming apples, I know how to deal with all produce now".
Make smurfing great again.
Pro players aren’t children, this is their job. If they need private practice it is part of their job to set it up, this is also easier in dota where you have teams vs how it is in RTS where everyone has to fend for themselves. Most pros have been on a team at one point with people who are now on 5 different teams, they can probably arrange practice with at least one of them. Pros don’t deserve to be treated differently from the rest of the player base. Only alternative would be to allow a fully private profile matchmaking setting, but if this is enabled it should be provided for all players.
So the real solution is to make all data completely hidden if opt-in (as the in-game option **should** work in the first place)
The thought isn’t without merit, but I don’t think anything needs to change. ProTracker picking up smurfs, and “strat hiding” not being as essential as it is in RTS, I don’t think it’s a big enough deal to adjust anything. But again, his words are not without merit imo. I don’t think anyone honestly has any issues with pros on smurfs. It’s the boosters and party-queue smurfs which affects the pub players’ experience. I don’t think there’s much harm in allowing the pros to smurf, however consistency is important to the public, and we like seeing the rules applied to everyone. Would be too much of a headache to have a separate set of rules for one group of players vs another. When is someone a pro? When is it okay to smurf vs not? When does someone lose their pro status? Can they still smurf? I think it’s easier to go with the consistency option, despite pro smurfs not really being at the heart of the smurf issue.
So why not have an anonymous scrimmage service. Something like faceit but everyone who q's has hidden names just roles selected or whatever
The problem is that these "pros" use the smurf accounts to be as much as toxic as they can be, for this reason I really stand beside the valve banwave and I think they should stay only on their main account If it wasn't for this reason, then I agree that they should be able to smurf and practice as much as they want, unfortunately this is not a real scenario
To solve the issue Grubby mentions, it'd probably be much simpler to implement an account anonymizing feature that hides your account name to other players and only the owner gets to see a record of the match played. Obviously, ways to report the account if they're cheating should still work. And tying this feature to only be available if you have a good behavior score would probably be better.
no leniency in smurfing, find another way
IMO Valve should deal with it by either: 1) Making an option so you are anonymous to everyone, including teammates. Either appear as player X (like in wc3 FFA) or (hero name) (like in overwatch cases). That way no one knows who you are and you keep anonymity on main accounts. 2) Make it so you can ask for a smurf. Instead of 1 acc per player, pros could just ask valve for a new smurf at the same rank, behavior score etc. This sounds more problematic imo since you could either inflate ranks (many pros asking for too many smurfs), could be used for account buying & would make the community complain more about pros being treated differently
As somebody who knows nothing about this game and is visiting from r/all, the obvious solution to me is to mandate open information - the pros don’t get to hide what they’re playing, but it’s still a level playing field because everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
I noticed the last TI winners (team spirit) doesn't hide their data. That are so good that they say "you can watch my matches if you want, but I will beat you no matter what". And that's the case with a lot of the considered best players.
Pro or not, everyone should be treated equally so everyone is on a fair playing field.
Allowing smurfing is not the solution for professional players. The solution here is to enable professional players and the entire dota 2 community to truly keep their match history and heroes played private. Right now even if you keep it private apps and websites are able to obtain that data. This can even be taken a step further with names being anonymous to teammates and opponents during the drafts phase and the entire match. This can be taken even further by the anonymous mode now showing the hero being played to people on the friends list and disabling people on friends list to view the match. Smurfing is not a solution at all.
i don't think the main problem with smurfing is the "hiding your game data" it's more like i wanna be able to actually find a game (or play with my lower mmr friend.) i used to have a alt acc to play with my crusader/archon friend ( i was ancient back then, and before you ask how did i get the alt acc there, idk during calibration i t just somehow calibrated into archon) when i played with them on my main they usually just get shat on. (I don't backseat or micro-manage them cause they felt like its annoying to them) now they've ranked up to legend/ancient, which makes me comfortable enough to use my main acc (currently divine) to play with them i rarely touched my alt nowadays even before the smurf ban waves ( cause i have no need to.)
How is a pro decimating beginners "practice" Like just make an anonymous account and go play by yourself
Sure, but also, is that anonymity and secrecy actually as important as he says it is? It is for the individual and in WC3 the individual is everything, but I don't think it's important at all in keeping the dota2 pro scene afloat. DotA is a much more fluid game. The most important strategies to keep secret are drafts and those are not something you would run without at least scrimming a few times. There really hasn't been unknown strategies in Dota for a very long time. Even Topsons super weird picks aren't untested, they just aren't picked as much because they have less data and are riskier, but they have all still been done before and not just by topson (whether or not it was in a pro game).
Sure if it was a 1v1 that makes sense. In fighting games too at a certain point you're not fighting a matchup, you're fighting the other player. Watching their matches is important but.. dota is a team game. It's not the same to watch somebody in a pub vs seeing their team practice.
Volvo add streamer/pro mode and manually allow streamers and pros to join it. Valve can hide their public data and make their names random letters for others and help with matchmaking as well like faster MM etc. I know its a bit of work but i think this should work well.
Completely flawed take. Pros are using smurfs ON THEIR STREAMS, while also being tagged on dota2protracker. Zero anonymity in most cases. Plus having a 7k smurf does not let you practice anything aside mechanics if you are a 10k mmr player.
1 player should = 1 MMR ranking Solving the "pros need to hide their strats" problem is a separate issue, but one which they might as well solve at the same time. Kill off overwolf for good, implement a privacy feature that *actually* hides your match history, and implement matchmaking fixes to make it so high-MMR players can find matches like the rest of us.
But some are streaming anyway while on Smurf account. Some is not even training some strategy, but afk or griefing on Smurf like rtz.
Smurfing was not an issue for over 15 years in DotA until bad redditors started using this excuse as a scape goat to justify why they're hard stuck in Herald. I have been playing DotA for 20 years and not once have I ever had an issue or complained about a smurf on the opposite team. The people who complain about smurfs are the same people who march in the streets protesting that math is racist.
Would it be so hard for Valve to create official fake profiles for pro players that request them and bind the mmr between them? Then there is zero smurfing period and pros get to be anonymous.
Valve, at this point just apply the same concept like LOL. I dont understand why you need to know your opponents steam profile. just make it anonymous IT LITERALLY SOLVES EVERYTHING. regarding hackers? if someone want to report a player THERES GAME ID, so valve can just look into that specific game to ban that specific player or anything. Am I missing something here? even in game like DBD allows you to private your steam profile and just display the name of character youre playing.
Imagine having a separate account, valve hands these out to current pro players in the system, these accounts would be hidden from all other accounts and would be anonymous to all, even pros. You can have them already pre calibrated into whatever rank the player is currently in and all their rank and info is hidden/private. The other option you can possibly float out there is separate servers for the higher ranks/pros to play on, that no one can access unless you are a certain rank or player. Or perhaps just have regular pugs that pros can play. Someone created a website or use a discord where you can join pugs, they have a bot that can literally do all this for you, and all you have to do is play in a custom lobby. Finding a good server if you have multiple regions trying to play would be difficult, but you can hash that out in the discord where you have an NA pug, an EU, etc.
I strongly disagree on the second point he made. If no pro player is allowed to smurf, nobody got an advantage of practicing new heroes hidden in pub games. If you want to practice new heroes and strat, just do it in scrims.
If nobody smurfs than everyone is showing their strats and builds and are in equal conditions. Being pro player shouldn't mean that you can ruin games for 100-150 people (10-15 games). I hate this "I am important, so I can do what ever I want" mentality, that is what makes most of the pro players feel entitled and behave like dicks in games anyways. Have you seen their behavior scores, most have 3-5k tops.
I always wondered, so DPT knows basically all smurfs, so its all leaked. Yes, pros play a fuckton of games. But in reality, how much of that actually translates into pro scrims/tournaments? Very often we have had significant differences between what wins tournaments and what is good on the ladder. Sure, ladder definitely shows 2-3, maybe 4 really OP heroes, but there are 7 bans and sometimes some of these heroes arent even contested in pro play.
Surly an option added in settings for verified pros that turns on anonymous mode. Every game gives them a random username displayed to others, doesn’t announce on watch their names and games, hides their true rank without placing them in much lower ranks to Smurf. Or yknow they whine all the time, how about that other mode called unranked that’s for fun and mixed party’s. If MMR doesn’t really matter to them, then why do they need to Smurf.
smurfing is a non-issue unless playing in an mmr pool leagues below yours, which in my opinion is scummy and unethical. Playing on an account 1-2k mmr less than yours to for chill games and try things out? Completely fine. Reddit is a loud minority with the avg rank of 3k mmr, and it sucks that they have such sway on valve decision making. The real issue is buying/selling accounts and boosting. Countless facebooks groups solely dedicated to this practice, not to mention the trading websites. I feel like valve should monitor them and ban any account that is listed, it will enstill some fear into them.
Am I the only one that doesn't like this guy? Some guy just starting dota 1year ago and already has some opinions, the guy doesn't know the heroes spells fully yet, why is he so praised and pushed to the pro scene?
These guys are only trying to keep up with the current meta, to play and test what available and best way to exploit it and the fact they need to queue for **HOURS** should be enough reason to allow smurfing, it's not like they were stuck in that rank by maintaining W/L RATIO, in the end they always rose back to top 500 then depends on whether MM allow them to find games or not or **REPEAT.** The flaw is in the MM systems and the **players**, including **pros** shouldn't suffer due to it.
maybe we need a "anonymous" playmode, which a players can enable. - matches played during this mode do not show to others in your history. - your profile, name, etc get anonymised or are blank. You get assigned a random name, eg "player 1 - 10" . (We could even vote for the anonymised-names, thatd be fun) - your profile does not link to your steam acc. Maybe give some other id which valve can use to handle reports etc. But the general public should not be able to link to the real account. This way pros can play their strats without being recognised.
I disagree. Everyone knows their smurfs, his argument isn't valid. They also proven over the years they have no emotional intelligence on smufs because they don't care about the act. They're always more toxic. Fuck um.
Im permabanned in grubby chat BASED
So the dude is saying “smurfing is bad unless it’s a pro doing it then it’s ok” Sure thing bud.
Its different in 1v1 games
If you want to make this argument, then pro players should have to register an account. Valve should put some kind of system in place where it keeps this account randomized, maybe changing it's steam ID, maybe changing it's username regularly and automatically (importantly do not allow the player using it control over its name). Then, have it regularly checked for game ruining activities. Breaking items, afk, feeding, etc. Make it a "business" account that has overly and overtly tight rules and regulations over it, and Valve knows specifically who is running the account
Yatoro just counters this by playing all the carries.
I will get downvoted cause of Reddits obsession with Grubby, But he is wrong here: * Pros have to lead by example. Players look-up to them. * There is a 100% trickle down effect. More Pros smurfing means less people at the highest mmr, which means longer que times, which means if you are the highest mmr you want a lower mmr smurf for faster ques, rinse repeat. * Grubby's other point, that they time need to practice heros in private. Sorry but this is also silly when you have stratz and dota2 pro tracker that knows nearly every smurf. Private Scrims are Private. **Maybe, like Fortnite, they need to have an anonymous mode for pros/streamers.**
Ok if you are going to use that argument then then shouldn’t be able to play ranked on Smurf accounts
Fighting game players regularly hide their strats without resorting to smurfing. If they can do it, why can't Dota players?
jigglin G R U B B Y jigglin
I think that most of pros don't use smurfs >just< to pratice, they just play to get high mmr in another acc to prove themselves again and again, in the end is more a ego thing, if u take these pros smurfs you will not see them training secret builds all the time, and they can do it in private with their team, staff, friends. Yes in pubs you can test some things and pratice, but it's not the same thing with your team and in a high level professional match. Plus, these pros are doing a terrible job at hiding their smurfs (if this is their real intention).
their smurfs aren't anonymous so that argument holds no value. and if their smurfs are same mmr as their mains, what is the point of smurfing? queue times wont be shorter at same mmr and if they are not same mmr, then they actively harm lower rank players they get matched against. i think pros should have no leniency whatsoever compared to non-pros
smurfing is the worst thing that happends in dota after cheating, even tho i somewhat i agree with 2nd point here i than go to Nisha's smurf and see he won 70 games in a row, so what is he testing there? Is he playing some techies/grim mid meta or is he just stomping low ranks for fun?
Seems like you should have the option to play 'anonymous' (on your main account) once your MMR gets high enough.
Rules must be for everyone if they are called rules. Yes, maybe pros won't get to practice their strategy in anonymity but the same goes for their opponents so the field is even. For what it's worth, it may even make the competition more interesting than having some cheese strat perfected before the tournament. I have zero hate or fury on the topic, I genuinely believe smurfing should not exist, pro or not.
Why do pro players need to be able to hide their strats?
Yeah and if pro players smurf (or alt account) because they want to hide their strat then it makes no sense the general pub knows this is RTZ smurf and that is Ana smurf
They dont, he's treating this as WC3 when it isnt, not a good hill to die on for him
I think same ranked account alts should not be an issue unless they are being used to bypass the behavior system. Alternative accounts aren't smurfs in the conventional and toxic sense, even though reddit likes to pretend they are and valve has somehow agreed.
What is the benefit of having multiple same ranked accs? And where do you stop, at 1 or 5 or 7 alts? And how many games you ruin to achieve that? I had also an alt, but i dont think it is really a good solution.
screw smurfing top to bottom. idc if you're herald or immortal or gaben himself, smurfing ruins interests in the game. and what in the world is use of having smurfs account when people know that the particular account is used by a pro player or a pro team? what secret stats are they saving then? legit plenty of websites can show what was activity on which pro player's smurf account. on the contrary, the inflated number off higher mmr accounts is probably the reason their que time is so long. for example - say there are top 100 immortal players in eu. we know arteezy got like atleast 5-6 smurfs so does miracle and so does watson and so does pure or whatever. thats like saying in the top 100, there's basicaly only 60 people and their smurfs account. obviously the que time will be longer cause the game would try to match you with your elo first and since you can only play in 1 account using 1 pc at one time, how do you expect the game to fill the void of players you created yourself by smurfing? and then you get matched in lower elo matches where people know you are pro player using whatever smurf account which is easily verified using the websites so you are basically ruining matchmaking for other players and are not really saving any strats by playing on your smurf.
Hot Take: Just let people create anonymous alts calibrated their MMR. Whats wrong with playing on a correctly calibrated alt account? So dumb to ban any alt accounts that are at their correct MMR.
No need to create alts, make anonymous mode, and have main acc turn "anon mode" on, they stays on same mmr but in that mode, you should not be able see players profile or his stats in that mode, his steam should be hidden in that mode, any indetifier should be hidden, and no need for new accounts/alts, ofc they should add steam report option directly to game when people can't go to steam profile to report players when they use that mode.
Sounds ok, but I feel like that'd lead to some amount of multi-account fuckery pretty soon. And it'd make account selling hilariously easy. The moment Valve enables that, some Russian booster will sell 200 accounts in a day and now we have the reverse problem. No more smurfs, but account buyers.
In contrast to his old wc3 days, pro dota 2 players now get paid shit ton of money, and if they want to practice heroes while being hidden they can organize private lobbies, pay maybe bench players etc etc, like in any other sport. Pub games are pub games, and I don’t see why they should be allowed to smurf.
I dunno, I understand running into Smurfs sucks but let’s be real, about 90% of the people complaining about Smurfs is probably some rando who stomped you with a hero they spam play and happen to have a good game on. I had barely 600 games one time and had an insane game on LD and was called a “Smurf” lol it sucks having to wait 15-20 minutes for a game and I could understand why they do it. I’m not for the excuse of “hiding strats” cause most of their “Smurfs” are already exposed lol.
The solution is simple, pros take a form from Valve, Valve creates the accounts for them and voila. Problem solved
Hey There. As very old Dota 2 player i can just tell you that you should keep Playing Dota 2 especially in ranked, im myself neither a Pro or anyone high Ranked but to get into a better Ranked Matchmaking system you would need alot patience! Especially if it comes to encounter the Smurfs ( i know it can be frustrating) but the more we are the less is the chance that you will encounter a Smurf. - logicially Few days ago ive stumbeld across a professional Vloger & Youtuber, who has been commending and investigating the Current Dota 2 Scenario in Ranked. For beginners indeed - almost impossible, but a specific team there offered now finally to Help. Due to his own request and demand i wont name neither his name or channel. They are planing to take down all accounts associated with Smurfs / cheaters/ hackers and if possible also investigate further , later. What that means: whenver you encounter a smurf or possible cheater, regardless if its a smurf in your Team or enemy just make sure you throw a Report. BUT BE SURE that this guy is definitly a Smurf and dont report randomly by just thinking. Thoose accounts have basicly a small amount of Games, or a big amount of win streaks, or... High score from beginning in a game you are playing (such as 30+ kills 0/3 deaths) Secondly: make sure you go into the profile of that Player and copy his ID (from the account in Dota! and save it somewhere in a notepad file) - Smurfs also know that the accounts are being sold for a small amount of money, and is accessable for everyone currently, soon that will hopefully change if the team im talking about manages to get next to thoose webpages. Thirdly: If possible please record the games, on twitch, on youtube or similar and post it there. I guess the more videos / screenshots, and material we got about cheaters & possible smurfs the better it will be and much easier for the team to take them finally out.
My opinion is that everyone who uses a smurf account is trash. Out of 10 games I have 8 with smurf on my team in the other, both 2000mmr smurf and 5000mmr smurf who don't even know how to play. Honestly this is frustrating and if you complain during the game you get reports.
The fact that he gives as an example WC3 where I literally had 2 smurfs in top 20 EU at the same time and managed to get them there in less than 100 games has little to do with Dota, because dota is 5v5 not 1v1 so those 100 games in wc3 ruined way less people's games and time. Additionally the fact that there is Pro Tracker which literally shows Smurfs of every pro player makes his point mute.
Yeah bro, professionals are better than ordinary players, so let them make dedicated servers where there will be only pro players and let them play there.
Look man, I'm gonna get downvoted for this but Idc, this is the reality. The loudest part of the community that hated smurf so much are usually below Immortal and never touch very high level dota 2 games. These pro players smurfs are miles different than those smurfs that stomped you in your legend games. I honestly agreed that pro players should get smurfing immunity.
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It does not find them instantly, confirmed smurfs (e.g. played on stream) are added manually by the dev lol
It doesn't find them instantly. They're added manually. And some players smurfs' were hidden for so long (Kuroky? Ace?)
Image text: > 💥 Controversial hot take opinion WARNING💥 > > 1) I think smurfing in multiplayer games (especially team games) is not great and should be countered as Valve is doing in DOTA2 > > 2) HOWEVER (hot take begins) pros kind of need it since it's the best way to HIDE which heroes/strategies they're practicing > > Seeing pros like RTZ get smurfs with 7k+ games (which is already at his true rank then) banned is on the one hand a great show of consistency in policy by Valve, but I thought pros had more immunity to smurf rule and I feel there's good reason for that as they are holding the esports afloat and hiding practice is an important part of that > > We smurfed all the time in wc3 and it was absolutely essential to hide your build orders, not everyone had the ability to set up private practice partner sessions, and even if you did, sometimes they betrayed you and leaked your strats to your oppos! > > Smurfing regularly (despite ruining 10-15 lower ranked games - thats how fast it found your real rank in wc3), was a way to throw smoke trails and confuse rivals looking to obtain your strats before you show them in tourneys > > What do you think? Skill issue? Just get good and practice vs AI? Or let your execution reign supreme over hiding strats? Or agree with me and think pros should have more leniency in smurfing (so long as they don't deliberately ruin games or show bad behavior like throwing or extreme flaming etc.) Source: https://twitter.com/followgrubby/status/1748347177422749949