Skiter and Quinn have spoken out about the smurf bans of professional players
Team Falcons Carry Oliver skiter Lepko has shared his thoughts on the recent wave of smurf bans on professional Dota 2 players.
Skiter thinks bans are the right thing to do, and he's glad that Valve came to this.
Banning smurfs at the professional level is a great change.
According to Oliver, playing smurfs is cheating because some teams use them to hide their training, giving them an advantage on the pro scene.
Aside from the obvious problems with smurfs, some teams use hidden accounts to hide their training in pubs, thus gaining an unfair advantage over teams that follow the rules.
Gaiming Gladiators Midlaner Quinn Quinn Callahan is of a similar opinion
The wave of smurf bans is so based. I haven't agreed so wholeheartedly with a decision in a long time.
The player feels that the only acceptable use of smurf accounts might be to train on new heroes. However, even that makes little sense, as smurfs are easily tracked on the pro-tracker and there is no anonymity for cyber athletes.
Maybe it's for the best. The only argument FOR smurfs by pro-players is practicing heroes not on the main account. However, the vast majority of smurfs were shown on the pro tracker. Not all of them, of course, but there was no great anonymity about it.
Recall that Valve recently conducted a major sweep of smurf accounts of professional Dota 2 players. Smurfs Yatoro, Mira, Watson, Nightfall, Fishman, TORONTOTOKYO, and others were banned. It got to the point that Mad Kings Support, Steven StingeR Vargas, was banned right during an official qualification match for DreamLeague Season 22.
The reasons for the wave of bans could be many. Team Spirit manager Dmitry Korb3n Belov believes that Valve paid attention to smurfing, particularly in Eastern Europe, after the banning of the account of Belarusian streamer Rostislav rostislav_999 Protasenya, which occurred due to complaints from Reddit users. After the first smurf was blocked, Rostislav started new accounts, which were subsequently banned as well. This may have prompted Valve to address the smurfing issue in this way.
