Valve is banning naughty Dota 2 players with a surprise gift of coal

Dota 2 is on a Godlike streak with its latest ban wave, which has arrived courtesy of Frostivus 2023 and already banned tens of thousands of smurf accounts.

The world of Dota doesn’t have a Santa Claus, but it seems that Wraith King is stepping up to fill his shoes nonetheless, and his “Naughty List” includes thousands of accounts that have been positively unsportsmanlike.

Indeed, the Frostivus 2023 update that rolled out incorporates a hilarious surprise for smurfs and other bad actors in Dota 2. Some of these players were surprised to learn that the specific Frostivus bundle in their Armory was not a gift chest featuring cosmetics and the like, but a “highly toxic lump of coal,” with punishments ranging from behavior score penalties to main account bans.

One of the players caught in the act is Mason “mason” Venne, whom you might recognize from the Evil Geniuses Dota 2 roster in 2014, or Infamous in 2019. After opening his gift chest, Mason took to Reddit to discuss the ban at length, apologizing to the community and explaining that his misconduct involved hiring a behavior score booster.

According to the Frostivus announcement post, “many tens of thousands of smurf account bans” were targeted, so Mason is not going to be the only one weathering this crackdown.

Valve is not relenting in its regulation of smurfs and cheaters

Earlier this year, Valve announced that it was banning a whopping 40,000 cheaters, and followed that up with another ban wave in September, getting rid of another 90,000 smurf accounts. Smurfing, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is when a player who would usually be match-made at a higher rank makes a new account, to play against lower-ranked players.

Now, the Frostivus 2023 event is doubling down on the game’s commitment to sweeping unruly players out of the community, so it’ll be interesting to see if there’ll be even more of these brutal ban waves in the near future.

At any rate, the eponymous update also comes with gameplay patch 7.35, introducing a host of changes and bug fixes that you can check out here. There are also Christmas-themed cosmetics, premium sets, and new UI animations, so be sure to check them out when you have a moment.