Valve Is Handing Out Player Bans Of Up To 20 Years

Valve has gotten some players laughing and others crying after the company began to hand out account bans that last up to 20 years.

As shared by Twitter’s Nibel [via Dexerto], a number of Dota 2 players have been slapped with bans, some of them stretching up until January 2038.

The news comes following a recent matchmaking update, with the year 2038 being the furthest-away date in the system. It seems as though this is Valve’s version of a life-long ban from Dota 2.

Reasons for the long bans reportedly include everything from the buying and selling of accounts, to abusive behaviour online.

Along with being very, very long bans, they’re also pretty smart bans. If a banned player tries to re-join a game of Dota 2 they’ll be clocked thanks to the blacklisted phone numbers associated with the account.

According to one Reddit user the bans aren’t completely infallible. Simply changing the date on your PC will trick the system and let you back in, though down the line this behaviour will probably warrant another, more difficult to get around, ban.

Credit: Valve

Over on Twitter, people have been weighing on on how successful the banning model currently is.

One user writes: “They should make the character health drop by a percentage each time. So if you have been a pain for ages you will only ever have characters with 1hp.”

Another user laments: “Now if only they did this for Overwatch…”

While some people are understandably pretty p*ssed off, one Twitter user sums up the situation pretty nicely, writing: “dota has started instituting 20-year ban waves and it’s so funny right now to see people post ‘why was i banned until 2039???’ on reddit and the first reply is ‘well i looked at your chat logs and it seems in 2000 games played, you said slurs in each one.'”

https://twitter.com/Xoferatu/status/1174159643448397825

Featured Image Credit: Reddit User Vitamin-B6