Valve cracks down on Dota 2 smurfs with MMR changes

Valve has cracked down on Dota 2 smurfs—skilled players creating new accounts to play against less-experienced players—by introducing a new way of calculating matchmaking rating, or MMR.

Last month, the studio announced changes to matchmaking, including a new detection system to find accounts that were performing far above their MMR level. Since then, Valve has been verifying the system works, and now it's ready to take action.

"We feel ready to activate the rank adjustment portion of the changes," the developer said in a Reddit post yesterday. "The system searches for players that frequently perform significantly above their current skill bracket, and applies an MMR increase to those players until they've reached a skill bracket where they're no longer over-performing."

The adjustments will be "conservative" at first, but players should see more and more changes as Valve's confidence in the system grows.

It's all part of the company's strategy to battle smurfing in Dota 2, which it admits has become worse in recent months. In addition to these MMR changes, it is using account phone number verification to ensure each account belongs to a unique user, and players now have to log 100 hours before they can join ranked games.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.