Valve is not playing around with bad actors in the Dota 2 <\/em>community right now, actively banning more than 40,000 accounts permanently amidst continued issues with exploits and other problems in the game.<\/p>
This specific set of bans was part of a clean-up effort from Valve as the company worked to fix various backend issues that allowed these cheats to happen in the first place.<\/p>
\u201cToday, we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat in Dota<\/em> over the last few weeks,\u201d Valve said. \u201cThis software was able to access information used internally by the Dota<\/em> client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage. While fixing the underlying issues that made these cheats possible was a priority, we have also decided to remove these bad actors from the active Dota<\/em> playerbase.\u201d<\/p>
According to the Dota 2<\/em> devs, a recent patch introduced a \u201choneypot\u201d in the client that would have a set of data that could only be read by accounts using third-party cheat software. Any account that tripped that secret area would be added to a database Valve then examined and banned with \u201cextremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.\u201d<\/p>
Valve is well aware that the cheats being used, and even cheats in the same family as the more popular ones it is trying to combat, are going to be hard to fight. However, this large initial wave of bans is part of a bigger movement Valve wants to make public in hopes of deterring more people from potentially using exploits.<\/p>
Related: <\/strong>Dota 2<\/em> players were at risk of being hacked via \u200b\u200bcustom games for a year<\/strong><\/a><\/p>
Since Dec. 2022, the Dota <\/em>community and several high-profile players have rallied to share information and try to get Valve\u2019s attention on rampant cheating<\/a> and issues like hacking\u2014and it looks like the devs are actively working on fixes now.<\/p>
