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.
I’m honestly surprised they actually did it. But it seems like a one-time effort. There’ll probably be 45k again in a few months and another ban wave in a few years. They didn’t say that they added more smurf detection tools or anything. I mean, how many players can be on the same IP using the same PC configuration but never together? That should be easy enough to detect.
There’s such things as privacy laws, which so far Valve seems to be following. You can’t just track users based on their identifying characteristics.
And, to answer your rhetorical question, quite a few. In this thread alone there’s someone playing on net cafe, sharing the same computer with hundreds of people probably. I know of a friend of mine who plays on their single household PC and sometimes his child plays on the PC. I know another couple that also own a single PC, admittedly not playing dota, but they also share one PC where they take turns playing on.
It’s not trivial to tell these people apart from actual smurfers.
Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time. How is that going to unintentionally ban somebody playing at a net-cafe? It would make it harder to detect smurfs in an internet cafe due to the number of different hardware configurations. But somebody at home would have to emulate that environment: multiple PCs with accounts online and actively playing.
Yes, privacy laws, but the data they are collecting is to make the service possible. Unless I’m mistaken, a user would be allowed to request deletion of the data prior to account deletion.
Other software vendors literally install a rootkit on your PC for anti-cheat measures and if you have a phone with Google or Apple software running on, your privacy is out of the window as they collect a whole bunch of information by default. Hell, Microsoft probably knows you’re using a pirated or unlicensed version with your permanent connection to the internet. All by the book.
If you can not see how “Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time” literally describes net cafes, then I don’t know anymore.
Bro, if you’re player X with smurfs A,B,C, then playing them all the same time as player X isn’t possible.
In a net cafe player X can play on A, player Y on B, player Z on C at the same time, which means accounts A,B,C will not get banned. Also, the are 2 IPs the public IP and the internal IP on the LAN.
How are you not getting this?
Because just since Player X can play on A and player Y on B, that does not mean it’s guaranteed to happen. There are so many people at net cafes, it’s very easy to have people in there that never played at the same time. By your logic, those must be smurfs - but of course they aren’t, they just randomly never played at the same time. So detecting them as smurfs would be wrong. Ergo it is not as easy as you say it is. Same with the other situations where households don’t have a game-ready PC for every person, that’s very common. They’ll never play at the same time but on the same PC/IP, thus they are smurfs?
I didn’t think I had to say it, but of course there’s more that goes into detecting smurfs. It’s not just those criteria. Win streaks or progression speed, payment modalities used (if any), social networks, reports, number of people on the same IP, and probably more.
I’m honestly surprised they actually did it. But it seems like a one-time effort. There’ll probably be 45k again in a few months and another ban wave in a few years. They didn’t say that they added more smurf detection tools or anything. I mean, how many players can be on the same IP using the same PC configuration but never together? That should be easy enough to detect.
There’s such things as privacy laws, which so far Valve seems to be following. You can’t just track users based on their identifying characteristics.
And, to answer your rhetorical question, quite a few. In this thread alone there’s someone playing on net cafe, sharing the same computer with hundreds of people probably. I know of a friend of mine who plays on their single household PC and sometimes his child plays on the PC. I know another couple that also own a single PC, admittedly not playing dota, but they also share one PC where they take turns playing on.
It’s not trivial to tell these people apart from actual smurfers.
Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time. How is that going to unintentionally ban somebody playing at a net-cafe? It would make it harder to detect smurfs in an internet cafe due to the number of different hardware configurations. But somebody at home would have to emulate that environment: multiple PCs with accounts online and actively playing.
Yes, privacy laws, but the data they are collecting is to make the service possible. Unless I’m mistaken, a user would be allowed to request deletion of the data prior to account deletion.
Other software vendors literally install a rootkit on your PC for anti-cheat measures and if you have a phone with Google or Apple software running on, your privacy is out of the window as they collect a whole bunch of information by default. Hell, Microsoft probably knows you’re using a pirated or unlicensed version with your permanent connection to the internet. All by the book.
If you can not see how “Same hardware config, same IP, accounts never active at the same time” literally describes net cafes, then I don’t know anymore.
Bro, if you’re player X with smurfs A,B,C, then playing them all the same time as player X isn’t possible.
In a net cafe player X can play on A, player Y on B, player Z on C at the same time, which means accounts A,B,C will not get banned. Also, the are 2 IPs the public IP and the internal IP on the LAN.
How are you not getting this?
Because just since Player X can play on A and player Y on B, that does not mean it’s guaranteed to happen. There are so many people at net cafes, it’s very easy to have people in there that never played at the same time. By your logic, those must be smurfs - but of course they aren’t, they just randomly never played at the same time. So detecting them as smurfs would be wrong. Ergo it is not as easy as you say it is. Same with the other situations where households don’t have a game-ready PC for every person, that’s very common. They’ll never play at the same time but on the same PC/IP, thus they are smurfs?
I didn’t think I had to say it, but of course there’s more that goes into detecting smurfs. It’s not just those criteria. Win streaks or progression speed, payment modalities used (if any), social networks, reports, number of people on the same IP, and probably more.