Valve bans 40,000 Dota 2 cheaters and flexes its banhammer
We all know that there are still those who use cheats in competitive titles. Dota 2 is, of course, one of the biggest competitive esports titles in the world, and developer Valve continues to fight against cheaters. In a recent ban wave, where Valve smacked over 40,000 cheaters with the banhammer, a fun little trap occured.
Valve’s recent Dota 2 ban wave
In a recent blog post, Valve confirmed that they have permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 cheaters and flexed about it a bit. You see, they trapped those using cheaters in a very clever way. Below you can read about how Valve caught the Dota 2 cheaters and banned them.
Valve explains:
“With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this ‘secret’ area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.
The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today’s ban wave is particularly large, but it’s only the latest action in an ongoing campaign. 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 make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you’re playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.”
Well done, Valve. While the developer doesn’t usually come out and explain these types of ban waves, it is excellent to see that Valve is not only actively fixing exploits but also trapping cheaters in clever ways!
The fight against cheaters obliviously continues. We hope that one day, Valve will be able to rid the Dota 2 gaming world of most, if not all, of the cheaters who use exploits to gain an unfair advantage.
Header image via Valve.
