Another wave of bans on players who are smurfing or who are found guilty of account sharing has seemingly been issued by Valve.

Although there is no official update from Valve, the Dota 2 developer, yesterday multiple professional players found their smurf accounts banned. The worst possible scenario for a pro player happened last night, during the DreamLeague Season 22 South America closed qualifiers when former beastcoast captain, Steven "StingeR" Vargas, disconnected mid game and could not return to the lobby. Stinger is currently playing for Mad Kings and was fighting against Thunder Awaken in the SA qualifiers lower bracket rounds.

A few minutes after the game was paused, his teammates confirmed to the game admin that he couldn’t reconnect due to his main account being banned. After about a 10 minute wait, Thunder Awaken were granted a default win and the qualifier matches resumed with the next series.

David "Parker" Nicho Flores was spotted a couple of days back playing on StingeR’s account, which might be the reason for the ban. Following the ban from last night, Parker has actually confirmed that he was indeed playing on his teammate’s account. He also mentioned that he did so not to boost StingeR’s account but because he couldn’t play on his own account because “it was banned for a short time.”

Along with StingeR’s account, other professional players confirmed over social media that their smurf accounts also got banned yesterday. Among those who were hit by the ban wave are Entity players Alimzhan "watson" Islambekov, Vladislav "Kataomi`" Semenov, and Dzmitry "Fishman" Palishchuk. However, their main accounts are safe for now.

This new ban wave comes after Valve started last year a true campaign to clean the servers and declared war on all smurfs and account boosters. In September last year, the game developer announced the banning of 90,000 accounts.

Smurf bans for pro players

At the latest The International edition, in November this year, Valve sat down with the pro players and agreed that they should not be protected when it comes down to banning smurf accounts.

“At The International, some pro players reached out to us to talk about their smurf accounts. Those conversations have continued, and there’s broad agreement amongst pros that banning pro smurf accounts is a win for Dota as a community: The rules should apply to everybody, and from now on they will. And smurfing isn’t even the only naughty thing players are getting up to. Amongst other questionable choices, some bad actors are playing like jerks, ruining games and losing behavior score because of it, then hiring behavior score farmers to drive it back up” - Valve

In December last year, once the Frostivus event was launched, all players received an in game gift from Valve.

While some received free cosmetic items, others unpacked a Toxic Lump of Coal which came with a permanent ban from Dota 2. The most notable ban at that time was on the ex Evil Geniuses player, currently one of the most popular streamers, Mason Venne.

Valve bans StingeR’s account in the middle of DreamLeague qualifier match