There are a lot of places people might expect to see inappropriate images on the internet, but being sent one while playing Dota 2 probably isn’t very high up on that list.
As part of the International 2020 Battle Pass, Valve has added the ability to create and join Guilds to the popular MOBA, but it looks like there might have been a few oversights in the system that are now being abused.
Players are reporting that some invitations to join a Guild result in them being shown various inappropriate images with absolutely no way to avoid it. This is because players are free to upload images as their Guilds banner/avatar and as of now, there isn’t a filter system to keep those images PG.
The biggest instance of this happened live on Michelle “Moxxi” Song’s Twitch stream, where a Guild invite flashed onto the screen for a brief moment. And not only did it feature an image of male genitalia, but the name of the guild was also a racial slur.
This invitation was not sent by someone on Moxxi’s friend list nor was it from someone who she was playing against in the match that had just concluded. A random player was able to send her a message through this new feature.
Nothing about the situation was under her control, but since it was live on stream, it could result in her channel being banned or at least flagged for showing inappropriate content.
Moxxi reached out to Valve on Twitter once the stream ended, asking if there was a way to block similar actions from coming through. It hasn’t just happened to Moxxi either, as other big Dota streamers like Janne “Gorgc” Stefanovski have also had similar things happen to them too while live, though he was just scrolling through the Guild listings.
Valve will likely add privacy filters and other protective measures to avoid things like this happening, but for now, anyone who is playing or streaming Dota should be careful because inappropriate images and Guild names are all over the place.
