People are abusing a method to make your Dota + Steam crash to boost accounts to Immortal.

Today I played against a certain individual that made the DotA of me and several of my teammates (randoms) crash around 5 minutes into the game. This resulted in 3 abandons, and a win for the enemy.

Any attempts to restart DotA would crash Dota + Steam. Initially after my game crashed, I tried relaunching it, which would then crash and close Steam. Restarting my computer did nothing - the issue remained.

The second the game was over, the issue was resolved, and I was able to open both Dota and Steam, and queue normally.

This seems like an extremely serious exploit to have in the game.

I investigated this persons account, and discovered that they have a 90% winrate, they are immortal, but only have around 400 games. Also, their average game length is just 25 mins, since most of their games end early, due to several DCs in the enemy team.

You can check out the account yourself.https://www.opendota.com/players/354363922 https://www.dotabuff.com/players/354363922

Here are some example match IDs of games where this person crashes several enemies, making them abandon, and in turn gains MMR:https://www.opendota.com/matches/7460361439 https://www.opendota.com/matches/7460236248 https://www.opendota.com/matches/7460121625 https://www.opendota.com/matches/7460062135 https://www.opendota.com/matches/7458356040 https://www.opendota.com/matches/7458300787

Again, this seems EXTREMELY bad. My PC was completely unusable while the game was ongoing after it was crashed, even after restarting my PC. Relaunch DotA was not possible until the game itself was over.

Would appreciate to know if anyone has ran into something similar, or if anything can be done to resolve this. At the very least, this person needs to have their account(s) banned for abuse.