Valve has well and truly dropped the ban hammer, as it announces that over 40,000 Dota 2 cheaters have been banned.
Dota 2 cheaters beware, as Valve announces it has banned over 40,000 accounts today (Feb. 21) for using third-party software to cheat. The ban wave was announced by Valve on the official Dota 2 website and in posts on social media.
The ban wave is Dota 2’s largest ever, and was reportedly linked to a third-party cheat software that allowed players to gain access to hidden data from the Dota 2 client. The 40,000 Dota 2 player bans reportedly took effect immediately on Feb. 21.
Dota 2 bans cheaters with honeypot trap
In their post on the Dota 2 news blog, the game’s developers revealed that in a recent patch the company had added a so-called honeypot. A section of data that a non-cheating player would never access, but if someone was using the third-party cheat software, they would.
The company was then able to ban every account that had seen this “secret data” meaning only cheaters were affected. According to the post Valve has “high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.” This stealth update and honeypot also explains the numerous small updates with little details that have hit Dota over the past few weeks.
“Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota”
The ban wave was so large that Valve felt a statement was necessary. Probably to get ahead of the wave of “banned for no reason” Reddit threads and Twitter posts that would surely follow.
While 40,000 isn’t a huge dent for a game that peaks at around 600,000 players on Steam a day, it's still a huge portion. If these accounts belonged to active players, it would represent a near 7% drop in player base.
Zero tolerance on cheaters in Dota 2
Closing their statement Valve warned that no one would be safe from the anti-cheat measures: “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. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.”
Were any pro players hit with the Dota 2 ban wave?
At the time of writing, it's not known if any professional player accounts have been banned. Although we agree with Wu "Sneyking" Jingjun , it would be spicy...
The post ended with a thank you to players who reported, took part in overwatch cases, and those who helped them resolve it. Ultimately a big win for the Dota community ahead of one of the most highly anticipated events of the year!
Stay tuned to Esports.gg for more Dota 2 news and coverage of the upcoming Lima Major!