In this article I will point out why players use Dota 2 Smurf accounts and why Smurfs are so bad for the Dota 2 matchmaking system. Enjoy Reading!We all hate Dota 2 Smurf Accounts, but they are a part of our daily gaming experience – there are many reasons why people actually do it over and over again…
What is a smurf account in Dota 2?
The term “smurf” is viral all over the gaming community and multiplayer games. View the Dota 2 glossary for all Dota terms. A person is called Smurf when he/she already has a an account and creates a new account.
In Dota 2 this needs a completely new Steam account, which is not intended. Every player in Dota 2 gets calibrated for an MMR skill rank and the matchmaking system is creating fair and fun games for everyone…
Whenever a Smurf joins the battle it’s most likely the case that the skill of the player and the calibrated MMR do not match. At that point, a lot of problems arise for the whole Dota 2 ecosystem. And if you haven’t already heard it: Dota 2 is full of Smurfs…
What are the Requirements for a Dota 2 Smurf Account?
Disclaimer: Keep in mind that I do not support any Smurf behaviour, it’s just for giving information.
Let’s say, we need a fresh new Ranked-Matchmaking-Ready Dota 2 account – what are the minimum requirements? 😉
Smurf Requirements:
- A new Steam account (Dota 2 is free to play).
- A unique phone number connected to the Dota 2 account is required to queue for ranked matches.
- An amount of played games or time (Valve is changing this frequently). In the latest known cases, players have to play at least 100 hours of unranked Dota 2 matches or they have to play 25 matches and then the system evaluates a number of games between 0-100 that you have to play before beeing able to calibrate.
- Now the Dota account needs to be calibrated in 10 matches for the single rank with role performances. The Calibration MMR (First MMR value) has a maxmimum value, more than a Divine rank is not realistic.
- The Smurf Account is ready to use.
How long does it take to create a new Dota 2 Smurf Account?
The techniques that are being used are behind the visibility of the majority, Smurfers keep the information for themself and try to not make it public. There are extremely efficient ways to create a Dota 2 Smurf account in a very short time. Valve is updating the algorithm frequently and is trying to hunt down and ban every possible smurf technique – Smurfers have to come up with new methods over and over again.
As the player SPS999 stated in this Reddit article (already some time ago) it is possible to create a new account for matchmaking in 42 hours with professional smurf techniques. By abusing bot scripts, and stacking up with 5 friends on rarely used server areas, they get matched in nearly every single game and force a quick win in no time.
A normal player would need about 150 hours to create a new calibrated Dota 2 account, if you play 3 hours a day, it would take 1.5 months. Because of that, there is a market for Dota 2 accounts, some players want to skip this effort of 150 hours and want to buy a matchmaking ready account.
The Smurf creators got their techniques to reach it faster trough scripted bot games, or through special player techniques, where a single game only has a duration of a few minutes until a win is forced. Because of that Smurf accounts are quite cheap, the price depends on the calibrated skill rank that you need.
Why Dota 2 Players use Smurf Accounts?Attempts to Recalibrate the own Skill Level:
Many players think they are better than their rank and that they deserve more. They want to find out if they could persist in a higher bracket. They create the new account as a secret project and if they reach a higher rank (find all Dota 2 ranks here) it will be their new main account. This nearly never works out. Spending the same amount of time on the real account is a better idea. 😉
Having a Lower Leveled Account to play with Noob Friends:
In a group of friends, there are always some noob friends or Dota 2 beginner players and whenever you play along with them, chances are high that you will lose MMR. A good player with an Ancient+ rank does not like to lose his MMR. The main reason he is playing Dota 2 consecutively is to increase his MMR.
But they also want to play with their friends: Therefore, those players make a smurf account to satisfy their lower leveled friends and to play some nice hero combos with them – while making sure to not lose any MMR.
Of course, it is possible to just play unranked (normal) matches but the majority of the Dota 2 community just loves to play ranked, if it’s not ranked there is no motivation of winning a match…
King of Noobs – The Desire to play in a lower skill bracket to have easy games:
The typical abuser loves to win easy matches. He wants to be queued against players that have a lower skill and they want to own them to feel better. They create a new account for fun and try to lose all of the calibration matches to land in a low skill bracket. Afterward, they have easy games, in which they are the king of the noobs. 😉
Many Dota 2 Pros are using Smurf accounts:
Often Smurf accounts are created by professional Dota 2 players. Their main account is often under strong visibility, fans and opponents are watching how the player is behaving, but he does not want that in every single game. An anonymous account to try new heroes, new tactics and items is often required to play out of the visibility. Therefore nearly every Dota 2 pro player got a Smurf account. The downside is, that if the Smurf account is in a much lower bracket, it will ruin the game experience of many many people.
Dodging Dota 2 Low Priority Games:
If Dota 2 players get punished with low priority games, they often do not want to play them right now. Sometimes you are having a good time with friends or make a LAN party. For this, it’s good to have the opportunity to switch the account and keep on playing.
Using a Dota 2 Smurf to get onto the Leaderboard:
Often high-level players play with the same hero in every match on a Smurf account to reach the Leaderboard. If you are an Ancient player and your enemies are Herald what will you do? Of course – crush them. By getting consecutive wins with one hero, it is easy to get into the top 10 of the Leaderboard.
Scammers and Hackers often use Smurf Accounts in Dota 2:
Scammers also use Smurf accounts. Most of them are hackers: At first, they add you to their friend list, play a few games with you and then they send you a link when you click on the link your account is gone. One of my friends lost his account like this. He had a lot of ultra-rare, immortal and arcana skins (find a Dota 2 Steam trading guide here) in that account.
Never click on links of strangers and always be careful with giving away any information in the Steam chat.
Attempts to Recalibrate the own Skill Level:
Many players think they are better than their rank and that they deserve more. They want to find out if they could persist in a higher bracket. They create the new account as a secret project and if they reach a higher rank (find all Dota 2 ranks here) it will be their new main account. This nearly never works out. Spending the same amount of time on the real account is a better idea. 😉
Having a Lower Leveled Account to play with Noob Friends:
In a group of friends, there are always some noob friends or Dota 2 beginner players and whenever you play along with them, chances are high that you will lose MMR. A good player with an Ancient+ rank does not like to lose his MMR. The main reason he is playing Dota 2 consecutively is to increase his MMR.
But they also want to play with their friends: Therefore, those players make a smurf account to satisfy their lower leveled friends and to play some nice hero combos with them – while making sure to not lose any MMR.
Of course, it is possible to just play unranked (normal) matches but the majority of the Dota 2 community just loves to play ranked, if it’s not ranked there is no motivation of winning a match…
King of Noobs – The Desire to play in a lower skill bracket to have easy games:
The typical abuser loves to win easy matches. He wants to be queued against players that have a lower skill and they want to own them to feel better. They create a new account for fun and try to lose all of the calibration matches to land in a low skill bracket. Afterward, they have easy games, in which they are the king of the noobs. 😉
Many Dota 2 Pros are using Smurf accounts:
Often Smurf accounts are created by professional Dota 2 players. Their main account is often under strong visibility, fans and opponents are watching how the player is behaving, but he does not want that in every single game. An anonymous account to try new heroes, new tactics and items is often required to play out of the visibility. Therefore nearly every Dota 2 pro player got a Smurf account. The downside is, that if the Smurf account is in a much lower bracket, it will ruin the game experience of many many people.
Dodging Dota 2 Low Priority Games:
If Dota 2 players get punished with low priority games, they often do not want to play them right now. Sometimes you are having a good time with friends or make a LAN party. For this, it’s good to have the opportunity to switch the account and keep on playing.
Using a Dota 2 Smurf to get onto the Leaderboard:
Often high-level players play with the same hero in every match on a Smurf account to reach the Leaderboard. If you are an Ancient player and your enemies are Herald what will you do? Of course – crush them. By getting consecutive wins with one hero, it is easy to get into the top 10 of the Leaderboard.
Scammers and Hackers often use Smurf Accounts in Dota 2:
Scammers also use Smurf accounts. Most of them are hackers: At first, they add you to their friend list, play a few games with you and then they send you a link when you click on the link your account is gone. One of my friends lost his account like this. He had a lot of ultra-rare, immortal and arcana skins (find a Dota 2 Steam trading guide here) in that account.
Never click on links of strangers and always be careful with giving away any information in the Steam chat.
Info: If a player uses the account of a friend or from someone else, it’s not smurfing, then it’s called Dota 2 account boosting. Find out more about Dota 2 account boosting here and why people do it.
Why Smurf Accounts are so bad for Dota 2?
Smurf Accounts create unbalanced Dota 2 Matches:
Whenever a Smurf is matched against lower leveled players he will ruin the game experience. If he ends the game with a tinker, meepo or any other hero with like 25-0 mid, the game ends in a disaster and it destroys any enjoyment the players could have.
It’s one reason why many Dota 2 players quit playing if there are a lot of these games it is extremely frustrating. In lower skill brackets these one-sided games are more often than in higher brackets.
Throwing and Ruining Games:
Game throwers also use smurf accounts. You may have seen players in your team that throw the game without any reason. Why do they do that? The thing is they do not care because they have tons of accounts. If one account is banned, they use another one or buy a new Smurf account.
How do people Earn Money with Dota 2 Smurf Accounts?
Some people are using Smurf accounts as an earning factor. If you play good in your calibration matches, chances are high to get a great starting rank. Players spam one hero and try to get consecutive wins and after getting a good rank, they sell it in a local Facebook group. In my opinion, this is one of the slowest and worst ways to make money online, but maybe people have fun while doing it and keep on doing it over and over again.
And it is not the end of it. You will find tons of sites on google that sell Dota 2 accounts. According to the rank, the price varies. They hire a bunch of good players to provide them with new id’s and tell them to rank it. Later on, the recruited players get a cut from each account they contribute to the website.
Nowadays, Smurf accounts have started to become a proper business, and people are earning a lot of money from it. However, there are no chances that these types of companies will stay forever. Steam is coming up with continuous updates to provide its users with better gameplay!
What is Valve is doing against Dota 2 Smurf Accounts?
Valve is making frequent small updates in the game to detect Smurf accounts: They make the AI much stronger to identify accounts that are abusing the matchmaking system and try to enter ranked matches. On 11 Jan 2019 Valve reset and banned up to 17,000 Dota 2 accounts that are abusing the matchmaking system. One of the most vital steps Valve realized until now.
Today we reset roughly 17,000 accounts that were found to be abusing matchmaking to get into ranked. These techniques were mostly used by smurfs or account buyers.
— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) January 11, 2019
Still, there are many other Smurfs accounts out there. But Valve is planning to realize more significant updates in the future that will take out all the Smurf accounts from the Dota 2 community.
The stronger the AI of the game will get, the harder it will get for Smurfers. 😉
How can I detect a Smurf in Dota 2?
Smurfs are mostly found in lower-ranked games. After the game has started, check the profile of your opponents first. In the feeds section, check how many rampages the players have taken in the past few days. If the number is above three with the same hero, then your enemy might be a Smurf. Tell your team to focus on the hero that the smurf will pick, counter him and make his life hard!
Some Players abuse the Trust into Smurfers:
Smurfs mostly go for the mid lane, because they want to end fast without wasting any time. I have seen many people calling themselves as a Smurf. “Smurf player let me mid.” But no one knows if he is that good. He might be lying to take the mid lane. Checking the profile is the most useful way to detect a smurf.
Which Dota 2 Heroes Smurf Players Mostly Pick?
Smurf players mostly go for the heroes that are unstoppable after 10-15 minutes. Moreover, heroes, which low-rank players can not counter easily. Common Smurf picks are Meepo, Invoker, Phantom Assassin or Riki.
Carry Smurfs mostly pick Riki because low-rank players do not believe in early warding and dust. Kill & escape is an easy strategy on a lower skill level. The Smurf-Riki goes for a quick diffusal blade as the first item within 13 minutes. None of the enemy heroes can escape in the early game from a Riki with diffusal blade. There are 90% chances the game will end within 30 minutes.
The only way to counter a Smurf in Dota 2 is to play smart and to play together. Instead of going for your same typical build, go for the “according to the situation” build. Do not pick support if you are planning to play carry with it. The support has to sacrifice for his team, only then the team can win the game.
How to Report a Smurfer in Dota 2?
Unfortunately, there is no official way to report a Smurf, checkout the Dota 2 report FAQ for more info.
I do not know the logic behind this, but Valve does not feel comfortable by giving this authority to the public. The only way through which you can aware Valve about a Smurf is to write a long text in the comment section of a report. You get four options in the report section, select any of them, and write a proper text in the comment section. Maybe, Valve’s support will read it and take action against the Smurf.
Conclusion:
Smurfing kills the game, so if you love Dota 2 do not Smurf or support other Smurfers.
The only way you can save yourself from Smurfs is to keep your rank high. The higher your rank is, the fewer Smurfs you will face in Dota 2. Want to improve your rank? Check out all of our Dota 2 guides, and within a few days, you will find a massive change in your MMR development!
Have Fun playing and let’s hope for a Dota 2 world without Smurf Accounts! 😉
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