Valve Bans Over 40K Cheaters in Dota 2

In their ongoing fight against smurfers & cheaters, Valve has announced that it has banned more than 40,000 accounts permanently on its latest blogpost earlier today. With the number of cheating cases reaching a new threshold, game developers are constantly working around the clock to make the game better for the community.

While Dota 2 has its own ways of combating the cheaters via the Overwatch system, the newest update saw Valve taking the fight to the cheaters by introducing new methods of detecting & identifying cheaters.

Valve uses “honeypot” method to identify cheaters

According to its latest blog post on its official website, Valve announced that it has permanently banned more than 40,000 accounts as part of its continuing clean-up effort to fix the various backend issues that allowed the cheats to thrive in the first place.

“Today, we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat in Dota over the last few weeks. This software was able to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn't visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage. While fixing the underlying issues that made these cheats possible was a priority, we have also decided to remove these bad actors from the active Dota player base.” Valve said.

Additionally, Valve announced that it has been actively using a honeypot in its recent patches that would have a set of data that could only be read by accounts using the aforementioned exploits. Any suspicious accounts that triggered the secret area would have its details added to a database, where Valve would examine and ban with extremely high-confidence based on the information provided.

While Valve acknowledged that the ongoing battles against cheaters are going to be hard to fight, they also made their stance clear on the matter as they hoped that the initial wave of bans will deter people from potentially using exploits.

“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.” Valve added.