Dota 2 pros unable to play ranked after losing smurf privileges

Professional Dota 2 players have started losing access to their smurf accounts, preventing them from playing ranked matches, an issue that Seleri and Ace brought up on X (formerly Twitter.)

Gaimin Gladiators’ two-star players planned to play a ranked game together as practice, but they couldn’t due to the queue times exceeding 90 minutes to find a ranked match. A couple of months ago, this would be an activity that they could easily do with their smurf accounts, which had lower MMR.

Since Jan. 15, Valve has banned an SA Dota 2 star in the middle of DreamLeague qualifiers due to breaching account sharing and smurfing guidelines. The associated Dota 2 roster was also dropped by their organization, while ESL also made ruling changes to back up Valve’s stance on smurfing . Following these events, Valve banned almost all professional Dota 2 players’ smurf accounts, as the developer wanted all players to own a single account.

While a small minority of the pro-player scene disagreed with the decisions, others were happy to oblige, but the negative impacts of the new smurfing guidelines started to show up. Even if the top professional players decide to play solo, it can take longer than 40 minutes to find a match. This mainly happens because there tend to be around 10 to 15 high-ranked players looking for a match at most times.

When only 10 players get into a high-level match, the remaining pool of players has to wait for a match to finish unless the matchmaking system can find 10 people to start a second match. In other competitive games that share the same faith, in-house leagues and solutions like FaceIt often save the day for professional players.

These systems allow pros to gather and host games amongst themselves, and they were also a part of the Dota 2 pro ecosystem in the mid-2010s. However, based on Dot Esports knowledge of these in-house leagues, most of these organizations only remained live for a couple of months before they were deserted due to drama or players still valuing their MMR and preferring to play ranked matches instead.