Online gaming can either be extremely fun or incredibly aggravating depending on the circumstances. It's fun to play against your friends or other people, but all it takes is one lag spike or griefer to ruin the online experience. Developers have done a lot to try and make their online experiences better for all players. Dota 2, Valve's popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, just took a big step in trying to rectify some of its online issues.
Valve announced through Twitter that Dota 2 has banned more than 40,000 players from the game who were found "abusing matchmaking." Theses bans will appear as game bans on Steam and matchmaking bans on the official game. This coincides with an update posted on the game's official website, which stated that the company is making its "smurf detection system" more sensitive.
Smurfing is a very common practice that occurs in online games. It's when a player of high skill or ranking logs into a separate account of a lower ranking to play against others who are below their skill level. This is done so that the high rank player can score some easy wins against low rank players without compromising their own record, or so they can try on new strategies for when they play on their main account. Smurfing has become controversial among the gaming community. While there is nothing inherently wrong with creating a brand new account to play on, infiltrating lower rankings for quick victories can ruin the experience for others, especially new players who are still learning to play.
Smurfing isn't the only online practice that Dota 2 has had to deal with. There is also boosting, which has a much broader definition than smurfing, but refers to various methods of gaming the system in order to get higher on online leaderboards. This can be done by paying another user to play on their account so that you can automatically play against high rank players or getting your friends to join the opponent's team and sabotaging them so that your team can rank up.
Abusing the online matchmaking system doesn't just happen in Dota 2. Popular online games such as Fortnite have also encountered reports of smurfing and matchmaking abuse. Some developers have tried to combat this by introducing skill-based matchmaking to their games to purposely pit players of the same rank together, such as in Apex Legends or Call of Duty, but that practice has garnered just as much controversy.
It's a problem with no obvious solutions, as certain players will always find ways to take advantage of the system, and implementing too stringent of regulations may harm more players than help them. At the very least, this move by Valve is a step in the right direction that shows the company will work to ensure that all players, regardless of skill level, will have a good experience with Dota 2.