Valve Bans a Few Players Who Abused Bugs for TI12 Compendium Levels

The Dota 2 community has once again found itself embroiled in controversy, this time for exploiting a bug in the newly released compendium. This exploit allowed players to amass levels far beyond what they had initially purchased, prompting Valve, the game's developer, to respond swiftly.

Dota 2 players have developed a reputation for promptly seizing opportunities to exploit bugs and hasten their progress within the game's compendium system. The latest compendium release was no exception to this trend. A recently discovered bug enabled players to excessively click the "apply levels" button, resulting in an overabundance of levels that far exceeded their legitimate purchases. Some crafty individuals even resorted to using auto clickers to inflate their compendium rewards into the thousands, effectively turning an ordinary level 6 purchase into an astonishing surplus of levels.

Valve Responds to Bug Abusers by Issuing VAC Bans

On September 30th, 2023, those who had taken advantage of this bug received a stern notification from Valve.

Valve took decisive action by temporarily disabling trading and marketing functions for the stickers obtained through the compendium. Additionally, they reverted any compendiums suspected of foul play, back to their base levels, effectively stripping ill-gotten rewards from players' inventories.

Valve also issued VAC bans against those attempting to profit from the bug by selling these capsules on the Steam Marketplace.

The Dota 2 community has a storied history of exploiting bugs to gain unfair advantages within the game's battle pass system. Previous incidents have included abuses that permitted custom lobbies to assemble imbalanced teams and instances of win trading in specific servers with custom preferences. Valve has consistently addressed these issues with prompt fixes, but it remains evident that certain players continue to seek ways to exploit these vulnerabilities.