Valve Tricked 40,000 Dota 2 Cheaters Into Exposing Themselves Then Banned Them

ign.com:

Valve has permanently banned over 40,000 accounts in Dota 2 using third-party software to cheat over the past few weeks. These players used software to look at internal data in the Dota client that isn’t ordinarily visible during gameplay.

Valve’s priority was to fix the issues that allowed for cheating in the first place. However, Valve also took the extra step to get rid of these players. “With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using,” Valve said in a statement.

The company continued, “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.”

Valve mentioned that it wanted to make an example out of these banned players and will not tolerate cheaters who use software that reads data from the Dota client. Additionally, professional players will be banned from all Valve competitive events.

In IGN’s Dota 2 review, we said, “The fact that it’s completely and totally free to play in the way we wish all free-to-play games could be isn’t just one of the most generous propositions anywhere in gaming, it creates a level playing field where skill and cooperation are paramount.”

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He's been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.

When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey