The official Dota 2 account on Twitter has announced that developer Valve has banned over a whopping 40,000 players for “abusing matchmaking”. However, it remains unclear what actions would constitute “abusing matchmaking”.

It looks like Valve has finally flipped its lid and went crazy. Most Dota 2 players are in the same boat from playing the same inane game over and over again.

We have banned over 40,000 accounts for players who were found abusing matchmaking. These bans will now appear as game bans in Steam as well as being matchmaking bans in Dota 2.

— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) February 11, 2020

Dota 2 is an online game, which means that it is vulnerable and especially susceptible to threats in the form of exploitations of its ranked matchmaking systems. Two popular ways that this can happen is smurfing and boosting. The former is when new accounts opened by active players are matched with inexperienced players to score easy wins, while the latter refers to the practice using a third party to raise their rank, such as hiring another player to play for them.

In an update on Steam, Valve said:

We are making our smurf detection system more sensitive in this update.

This change will much more proactively target potential smurf accounts, but may on rare occasion give a normal player extra MMR.