Gorgc revealed a new problem due to a wave of bans for Overwolf

The phenomenon of the ‘smurf pool’ that has arisen with the banning of players for using the Overwolf add-on has been described by Janne ‘Gorgc’ Stefanovski.

In a private broadcast on Twitch, the content creator gave his view on the issue.

“What is a ‘smurf pool’? All the people who were banned for Overwolf created new accounts for themselves and started playing against each other. And this will continue until they hit 1200 games.

But when they get out of there, they'll have a really high MMR because they're taking advantage of the double rating rate against each other. Technically, in terms of rankings, they're like akkbarers.It's an unrealistic suck.

It's not real ranking, because you're playing with people from different skill groups. You're not playing with pros, you're not playing with anyone who hasn't gotten banned. I think that's what it's all about. You play with the same forty people over and over again, farming the rankings on them. You don't play with people from regular matchmaking.The smurf pool is between 7,000 and 8,000 MMR. They're farming each other, peppering each other's rankings.

Anyway it doesn't really matter. I just explained how it works. You don't have to believe me I don't care about that but that's how it works.”

In early 2024 Valve began mass blocking user accounts for the Overwolf app which allowed access to advanced stats; changing hero skins; most paid Dota Plus features for free were provided etc — used by players of various ranks including professional cyber sportsmen; at that moment opinions in community divided — some Dota 2 fans supported developers' actions while a number opinion leaders said that it’s unfair to apply same sanctions for changing skins as well as for actions actually harming others players.

Recall earlier scheme to gain MMR by abusing dual rating tokens was described by Janne 'Gorgc' Stefanovski.