Valve's Latest Dota 2 Ban Wave is Hilariously Festive
Santa Gaben has been keeping track of Dota 2 players (not while they’re sleeping, Valve assures us) on his naughty or nice list and those who made the former have received a ‘gift’ from Valve in the form of a “Highly Toxic” lump of coal – and a ban to go with it.
The oddly festive ban wave arrived with the Dota 2’s latest Frostivus update, which added plenty to celebrate for those on Valve’s Nice list, including new and returning Frostivus cosmetics, many quality-of-life client features, new Dota Plus premium sets, as well as a myriad of gameplay tweaks with patch 7.35.
If you found yourself on Valve’s Naughty list, well, the official Frostivus blog update explains things in savage detail:
On the other hand, if you’re on the Naughty List, we’ve got great news for everybody else and bad news for you, because this year is gonna be a bloodbath. You might remember back in September, we got out the ban hammer and permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts. Since then, we've continued to invest in player behavior monitoring, on both the manual and automatic analysis fronts. Over the last few weeks, we've engaged in an even more aggressive ban wave, including many tens of thousands of smurf account bans today alone.
Ouch.
The resulting bans have made for some admittedly hilarious content as some players unwrapped their “gifts” and discovered their bans live on stream:
<p dir=«ltr» lang=«en» xml:lang=«en»>This might be the funniest thing I've ever seen relating to Dota. Well played Valve. pic.twitter.com/v37jGXHQK1One of the affected players, pictured above, one Mason “mason” Venne took to the Dota 2 subreddit to apologize and plead with Valve to lift his ban.
Dota 2’s Frostivus 2023 event is now live and runs through January 11, 2024.
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