Today we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that have been using third party software to cheat in Dota over the past few weeks. This software was able to access information used internally by the Dota client that was not visible during normal play, giving the scammer an unfair advantage.
While addressing the underlying issues that made these cheats possible is a priority, we’ve also decided to weed out these bad actors from Dota’s active player base.
To that end, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method used by these cheats. This patch created a honeypot: a piece of data within the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay but could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today have read this “secret” section of the client, so we can be extremely confident that each ban was well deserved. Each of the accounts banned today have read this “secret” section of the client, so we can be extremely confident that each ban was well deserved.
The proliferation of this family of scammers means today’s lockdown wave is particularly significant, but it’s just the latest action in an ongoing campaign. While the fight against cheaters and cheater developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible and make our position clear: if you run an application that reads data from the Dota client while playing, your account may be permanently banned from Dota be excluded. This includes professional players who will be banned from all competitive Valve events.
Dota is a game played at eye level, where victories are won through skill and tenacity. We expect that some players will continue to develop and use new exploits to continue trying to gain unfair advantages at the expense of other players. As before, we will continue to detect and remove these exploits as they occur and ban users who cheat.
Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who donated their time and energy to help us resolve this issue – from those who reported a player behaving suspiciously in-game to those who submitted Overwatch cases have investigated where this behavior has been observed. Thank you for helping us make Dota a better experience for everyone.