Tresspaser will be shot!
Valve appears to have responded to players’ complaints regarding the cheating spree in Dota 2 in the past month by banning 40,000 accounts.
This is the largest ban wave in Dota 2’s history, with 40,000 Dota 2 players were caught red handed, as per their reports of February 21. And apparently it was caused by a third-party cheating programme that gave players access to concealed client data.
“Today, we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat in Dota over the last few weeks,” Valve stated on their site. “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.”
According to their developer’s notes, the recent patch implemented a honeypot to the client with a set of data which could only be accessed by accounts using third-party cheat software. Any account that triggered the secret area would be put to a database, which Valve checked to make sure that every ban was well-deserved.
This particular set of bans was implemented as Valve’s commitment to fix several glaring issues that enabled these cheats to occur in the first place. And their decision is certainly something that should be appreciated amidst the widespread circulation of cheats in competitive games. Players definitely hope that this will serve as an early warning to any team that tries to outsmart the system, as was the case with Team Flow in SEA a few weeks ago.