Dota 2 reported that in a recent update, they issued bans on thousands of cheater accounts that were using third-party software.

The Great Dota 2 Cheater Ban

In a blog post aptly titled “Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome In Dota” on the official Dota 2 website, they reported that they banned over 40,000 accounts who were cheating with third-party software to cheat in Dota games over the last few weeks. According to them, this third-party software was able to access internal information within the Dota client which gives the cheater an unfair advantage.

Apart from banning the cheaters' accounts, fixing the underlying issues that made these exploits possible in the first place was made a priority.

A patch was rolled out as soon as the method was identified. “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,” read the blog post.

They called this ban wave “only the latest action in an ongoing campaign,” and that they wanted to make example of these thousands of accounts to solidify their stance on these bad actors. “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.” The Dota team will continue to detect and remove the exploits, as well as banning users who try to gain unfair advantages at the expense of other players.

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The blog post closed off with a thanks to the community, “from those who reported a player acting suspiciously in-game, to those who reviewed overwatch cases where this behavior was observed.”

Dota 2 is still one of Steam's most played games, well into its tenure. It enjoys a concurrent player count of anywhere between 200k to 600k constantly, and still holds a prominent esports scene globally. With this in mind, the integrity of the game is understandably well-treasured by the developers and publishers.