Valve has answered the question of keeping Dota 2 alternate accounts alive in public, with numbers. On September 1, 2023, it wrote: "Today, we permanently banned 90,000 smurf accounts that have been active over the last few months". It added that it had "traced every single one of these smurf accounts back to its main account". Steam's own agreement forbids using "IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence". This page shows what Valve has said and done, what Steam's rules say, and how Dota's own relay network shapes ping. It gives no way to keep a smurf or a banned account playing.
We read Valve's Dota 2 announcements through Steam's public news feed, the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Wikipedia's Dota 2 article and Dota 2's Steam store data on October 14, 2026, as text from our server.
What Valve has done about smurfs and cheaters
Valve defines the problem itself. "Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence". After the September 2023 wave it warned that "a main account found associated with a smurf account could result in a wide range of punishments", "from temporary adjustments to behavior scores to permanent account bans".
The waves came with dates and counts. In February 2023 Valve banned "over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat", caught with a honeypot in the game client. In December 2023 it reported "many tens of thousands of smurf account bans today alone". It also began banning professional players' smurfs and went after players who hire behavior score farmers, with "main account bannings" in serious cases. In December 2024 it acted against 65,594 smurf accounts in one week, plus griefers and win traders. In August 2025 it banned "more than 75,000 win traders, smurfs, and other bad actors".
Account trading draws the same response. In 2021 Valve wrote that "if you are found to be selling accounts, boosting or engaged in similar game ruining behaviors, your primary account may also be subject to a ban". It added that it had "recently increased our ban rate for boosters and purchased accounts".
How Dota ties accounts to people
Ranked play asks for a phone number. Wikipedia dates the rule to April 2017, when Valve began "requiring the registration of a unique phone number to a player's account" for ranked games, as a measure against griefing and smurfing. Players who are reported often enough, or who leave games early, go into low priority matchmaking. That penalty "remains on a player's account until they win a specific number of games".
Valve asks players to report suspected smurfs with the in-game tools, which feed its "anti-smurf efforts". Every measure Valve names here works on the account: its phone number, the reports against it and the main account behind a smurf.
What Steam's agreement says
Dota 2 is free to play on Steam, out since July 9, 2013, so Steam's agreement applies to every player. Its latest revision, dated September 10, 2026, is plain about accounts. It forbids sharing your password or your account, or letting anyone else use them, unless Valve has said so. An account is "strictly personal", and you may not "sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account".
A section on automation forbids scripts and bots for "Automating the Steam account creation process" and "Faking gameplay statistics (e.g., inflated wins or losses, XP, playtime)". It covers automated reports in systems like overwatch too. Cheats and any interference with anti-cheat software are forbidden. Then comes the clause on addresses: "You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence". For any of this, "Valve may restrict or terminate your Account(s) or a particular Subscription".
Steam and Valve on the questions proxy users ask
| Question | What the rules say |
|---|---|
| A smurf account | banned in waves; mains traced and punished |
| Sharing an account | not allowed; accounts are personal |
| Buying or selling one | not allowed; can ban the primary account |
| Boosting | a ban reason, by Valve's 2021 post |
| Bots for accounts or stats | forbidden by the agreement |
| Hiding where you live | IP proxying for it is forbidden |
| Getting around a ban | bans sit on accounts; Valve can terminate them |
Steam Subscriber Agreement, sections 1 to 4; Valve, Dota 2 posts of 2021 to 2025
Ping, regions and Valve's own relays
Dota's game traffic travels on Valve's own relay network. In a post of March 2024, Valve described how it answered attacks on Dota servers by "routing every single packet of data transmitted across the network through relays". The relay authenticates the player and forwards the traffic, so "the IP address of the server was always hidden". Valve then used the same network to pick its own routes, often faster than the internet's default ones. With Steam Datagram Relay, "the Steam overlay will show your ping time and what route we’re giving you". Valve runs "relays in 31 data centers with a capacity of over 5TBit", and says the network "lowers ping for every Dota customer".
Your Dota client
on your own connection
Steam Datagram Relay
31 data centers; Valve picks the route
The game server
its address stays hidden
Regions are a setting in the client. Valve's update notes of July 2022 fixed "a bug with matchmaking region selection" that kept players from picking low ping and higher ping regions together. Valve's leaderboards are split into regions as well: North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and China, where Perfect World holds the rights to publish the game.
What people search about Dota 2
Keyword Planner counted 40,500 searches a month worldwide for "dota 2 ranked" on October 14, 2026. "buy dota 2 account" drew 2,400 and "steam account sharing" 1,300. "dota 2 low priority" drew 1,000 and "dota 2 boosting" 880. "dota 2 ping" drew 590. "dota 2 smurf ban" averaged 480, and its last three months drew 48% more searches than the three before them. "dota 2 proxy" drew 10 a month, and Keyword Planner gives no figure for "dota 2 vpn". In Search Console this page had 6 impressions and no clicks in 120 days.
What proxy and VPN sellers' pages promise
We read five such pages on October 14, 2026. Rayobyte's Dota 2 page, updated in March 2026, offers a proxy "to get around an IP ban". It goes on: "So even if you get banned while using your proxy, you can swap out your proxy’s IP with a different one". Valve's posts describe bans on accounts, and it traced every one of 90,000 banned smurfs to its main.
PureVPN's page of May 2025 lists "Bypass IP Bans or Restrictions" and "Run Multiple Accounts", the second "without raising suspicion". It even notes that dodging regional matchmaking penalties "borders on unethical play and is against Valve's ToS". The page names Valve's terms and still sells the use.
LagoFast and GearUP sell ping boosters for Dota 2. GearUP's guide of July 2026 explains well what high ping does to a fight, and LagoFast's page calls its product "Capable of effectively lowering high ping in Dota 2". Both leave out Valve's relay network, and both show no measurement of their own. GearUP's guide for players in the Philippines points first to the region switch in the game.
Where a proxy fits
HProxy sells nothing for smurf accounts, boosting, shared accounts or getting around a ban. Our lines are built for other jobs: checking your own site or ads from another country, reading public pages for research, or testing. For other games and their rules, see proxies for Counter-Strike, proxies for Steam and proxies for Rust. Static ISP proxies are $2.70 per IP a month, and residential traffic begins at $0.44 per GB. The free proxy checker shows what an address reports, and how to check a proxy covers the rest. Two basics pages help as well: what a residential proxy is and whether free proxies are safe.
What this page does not cover
- How Valve finds smurfs or ties them to main accounts. Valve does not publish it.
- Steam Support's own pages on the ranked phone rule and low priority. We could not find them by address, so those two facts rest on Wikipedia.
- How a proxy or VPN changes ping in a real match. We did not play Dota or route it through anything.
- Perfect World's rules for the Chinese client.
The ban counts are Valve's own, and two of them are floors. We will check Valve's announcements again by January 14, 2027.
Sources
We read all of these on October 14, 2026, as text from our server.
- Valve, Dota 2 announcements read through Steam's news feed: Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota (February 21, 2023), Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota (September 1, 2023), The Frostivus 2023 Update is Here! (December 14, 2023), Frostivus is Upon Us (December 19, 2024) and The International: Bundles and Predictions (August 19, 2025).
- Valve, A New Approach to Helping Players Learn Dota (March 25, 2021), the Dota 2 update notes of July 18, 2022, and Between the Lanes: Denying Denial of Service (March 6, 2024).
- Valve, the Steam Subscriber Agreement in its revision of September 10, 2026.
- Wikipedia, Dota 2, and the Dota 2 store page data.
- Rayobyte, PureVPN, LagoFast and GearUP, their Dota 2 pages (not linked).
- Google Keyword Planner, worldwide monthly averages for 40 phrases around Dota 2, and Google Search Console for this page.
