Valve bans over 40,000 Dota 2 players for cheating

Valve dropped the ban hammer on over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for using third-party software that gave them an advantage in the game.

In what is the biggest ban wave in Dota 2, the players got caught cheating through a trap laid out by the game’s developer. “Every ban was well-deserved,” Valve stated in a blog post made on the official Dota 2 webiste, explaining that once they became aware of the method used by cheaters, they released a patch containing a honeypot to catch the culprits.

According to Valve, the third-party software used by cheaters was accessing information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage.” Any account that touched the honeypot placed by Valve in the game code has now been banned.

This large wave of bans is just one of the steps in a bigger plan of combating cheating in Dota 2, Valve mentioned.

The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today's ban wave is particularly large, but it's only the latest action in an ongoing campaign. 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

Mere hours after the bans were announced by the game’s developer, no professional player is reported to have received a VAC ban through this latest action from Valve.

Over the past few months, the public matchmaking was flooded by players who displayed unusual behavior and the community has been actively complaining and sending reports through the in-game overwatch system. The most common cheat was seemingly giving the bad actors vision advantage on the map.

At the end of their blog post, Valve thanked those who put in the time and energy in helping them understand the cheating behavior and those who reviewed overwatch cases where this behavior was observed.