Valve has had enough of cheaters, people abusing role queue, and anyone buying or selling accounts.
The ban hammer of justice has been brought down on particularly low conduct accounts, with bans of up to 19 years being served out.
“Users that reach this low level of behavior in the game are too big of a tax on the rest of the community and are not wanted”, said the Dota 2 team in a recent developer update.
One Redditor has already received the full 19-year ban.
According to the Reddit thread, the player in question has a conduct score of 509, which is very low, and suggests repeated abusive behavior or cheating.
Redditor, LOSS35, also discovered that the account in question had been boosted (played by another higher-skilled player to increase its rank):
“Your account played 110 ranked matches, majority on Tinker (77% winrate) and Huskar (83% winrate). From that point on, your account has played a regular hero spread with a 39% winrate.”
Valve has said that these bans will go into effect without any advance notice or warning, and has promised that these cheaters won’t be able to easily hop onto a new account to start cheating again by locking out phone numbers too. Valve currently requires all players to provide a valid phone number to participate in online ranked matchmaking.
Valve is also cracking down on smurfing (high-rank players playing on low-rank alternate accounts) by closing loopholes that allowed players to dodge the phone number verification system.
Access to ranked matches will now also require at least 100 hours of playtime in Dota 2.
READ MORE: Dota 2 matchmaking gets updated for the new ranked season
