Cheating with external software is not a new idea, but Thursday, Valve announced they used false Dota 2 information to find 40,000 cheaters that were then banned.
Dota 2 is a MOBA with a massive player base, and usually, when games attract that kind of attention, cheating is a mutually exclusive side effect of players aiming to ‘git gud’ quickly. In an effort to curb an exploit found online while also removing the cheaters themselves, Valve used a cheating exploit to their advantage in order to trap thousands of cheaters into basically confessing to cheating by utilizing planted information, and anyone who accessed the planted information was banned. That number was over 40,000.
“We released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using,” Valve outlined in a release on their website. “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.”
This hidden section of data was accessed by all 40,000 of the now-banned accounts, and Valve claims that each of these bans was well-deserved, as it had “extremely high confidence that each ban would stand.” Valve also explained that the bans were especially significant due to the popularity of this particular family of cheating clients and that the action taken is an important part of an ongoing campaign aimed at tackling the abuse of such a popular MOBA game.
Valve went on to state: “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.”
While each ban may have been ‘well-deserved,’ Valve also warns those considering employing unfair practices with “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,” in an attempt to curb cheating before it starts.
The whole statement can be read on the Dota 2 website.
