Valve: Explained: Why Valve banned 40,000 Dota 2 accounts

Valve has permanently banned more than 40,000 Dota 2 accounts over the last few weeks. These account holders were banned for using third-party software to cheat the game. Valve has also updated its blog post and shared a tweet to announce the latest ban. In the blog post, the company revealed that it had recently patched an issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota. Moreover, this fix also laid down a trap in the game that helped the developer to catch players using the exploit.

How did the software help unethical players in Dota 2
The company explained that the cheating software allows players to take unfair advantage in the game. Using this software, players can access information used internally by the Dota client. This data ideally shouldn’t be visible during gameplay. However, after an investigation conducted by Valve, it discovered how this hack worked. So, the developer decided to identify and remove the “bad actors” from the active Dota player base.
Valve said, “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.” The company also claimed that all 40,000 of the banned accounts were allowed to access this hidden section of data and that it had “extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.”

How Valve is fighting against the cheaters
The company also highlighted that the number of accounts that were banned was mostly from a particular family of cheating clients. Valve also describes this action taken as a step forward for its ongoing campaign to tackle players who are abusing the popular MOBA game.
Valve has also issued a warning that said, “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.”