Valve has banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts in the last few weeks after these accounts were caught using cheat software. The company confirmed that it recently patched a known bug that was being exploited by third-party software to cheat in Dota. Before fixing the bug, the company set a honeypot trap to catch players who were using the software to exploit the bug.
The company confirmed that the cheat software was giving users an unfair advantage in the game. Developers first investigated how this bug works and then decided to identify and remove the accounts that were using exploiting the bug.
“With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. 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,” says the company.
Valve confirmed that this ban wave is large and the company won’t tolerate cheating. If any professional player is caught cheating, they will also be banned from all Valve competitive events.
