A massive wave of Dota 2 bans removed over 40,000 cheat accounts from the MOBA hit, with Valve warning rule breakers that “cheaters are never welcome in Dota”.
In a January 21 website post, Valve confirms, “Today we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that used third-party software to cheat on Dota over the past few weeks.”
The exploit in question allowed players to see information that would not normally be displayed in-game and plagued the MOBA for quite some time. Valve claims that it “released a fix as soon as we figured out the method used by these cheaters”, which effectively created what it calls a “honeypot”.
This is “a section of data in the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this ‘secret’ area of the client, giving us extremely high confidence that each ban was well deserved.”
The developer confirms that this is just the first step in an ongoing crusade to rid the multiplayer game of cheaters, a lofty goal that unfortunately seems unachievable in most cases.
“While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible and use it to clarify our position: if you are running an application that reads Dota client data while you play games, your account may be permanently blocked from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be excluded from all competitive Valve events.”
“Dota is a game best enjoyed when played on level ground, where victories are achieved with skill and tenacity. We expect some players to continue to develop and use new exploits, continue to try to gain an unfair advantage at the expense of other players. As before, we will continue to detect and remove these exploits as they appear, and we will continue to ban cheating users.
Unfortunately, Dota has been plagued with cheaters over the years, with players criticizing Valve for being slow to eliminate hackers. Some exploits are over a year old, which means they’ve been causing chaos for years. While ban waves often present a new challenge to bad actors, I hope Valve remains adamant about removing them as they appear in the future.
If this recent wipe inspired you to dive back into the world of Dota 2, be sure to check out all the Dota 2 cheats and console commands (not the illegal ones, don’t worry, we’re not bad people ), as well as our Dota 2 roundup ranks and what it means.