As we reported yeaterday, Valve has announced that it would be banning people in various waves in the latest blog.

Although, Valve didn't mention was the length of the bans, and some players are now discovering their account is in jail for up to 19 years.

There are lots of people complaining about getting banned for nearly two decades in Dota 2 Steam forum and subreddit. In actuality, that ban is a lifetime ban that involves blacklisting the account’s linked phone number so it can’t be used for another account. if you are interested in deep-diving into the topic, you can check the Reddit thread which discussed the intricate details.

The main reason for this wave of ban is that Valve is combating a recent influx of ‘smurf’ and ‘booster’ accounts for the upcoming new season. Players with extremely low behavior scores or breaking Steam’s ToS regarding the buying and selling of accounts or detected using exploits to gain an advantage over other players should be in great danger now, and also ,these banned accounts will have the associated phone number blacklisted from being able to access ranked matchmaking.