Valve is finally taking a step against one of the biggest issues in the Dota 2 community: smurfing.

DOTA 2 SMURFS BEWARE: VALVE IS BRINGING OUT THE BANHAMMER

Dota 2‘s latest update brought about a new wave of improvements for the decade-old game. Finally, Valve has taken steps to ease the onboarding process of new players into the game. But no amount of good scaffolding in multiplayer games will be effective with smurf accounts around.

Smurf accounts – named after the blue, humanoid creatures – are new accounts created by experienced players. They use these accounts to play in the lower-skill brackets of match-making. This allows them to prey upon lesser-skilled and less-experienced players. This huge barrier-to-entry prevents many new players from enjoying the game. The smurf accounts simply defeat the newbies, preventing them from getting wins, discouraging them from playing more Dota 2.

Hence, it only makes sense that Valve is finally taking steps to combat this issue. Having a community-made tutorial mode will help ease new players learning Dota 2. Then, once they enter the arena of online multiplayer, they'd be able to play against other genuine new players.

Aside from these new improvements, Valve also now allows players to queue for a newcomers' match. This allows new players to team up with friends and play against a team of bots. It seems like Valve picked a page out of other games' playbooks, this time around. Battle Royale games like Fortnite queue new players against bots on their first few matches. This gives the players a chance to learn the ropes before fighting actual human players. However, the scaffolding is much more subtle in these games. Instead of openly declaring that newbies are playing against bots, they are made to believe that they are playing a completely normal game. In Dota 2, it's much more upfront. Either way, this will help newbies enjoy the game and win small victories before actually playing against other more experienced players.