Polygon reported Valve issued an update to Dota 2 recently that patched an exploit used by players using third-party cheating clients, and in doing so, created a “honeypot” to catch those cheaters.
According to Polygon, the battle to address cheating extends much further than just Dota 2 and Valve; several companies with popular games have gone as far as taking cheat makers to court in an attempt to hold them accountable for the practice.
Most recently Bungie won a $4.3 million lawsuit against Destiny 2 cheat developer AimJunkies – a website that sells cheats for a number of different games, including several for Valve’s own games. That $4.3 million win is on top of another $2 million it won alongside Valiant developer Riot Games in a settlement against GatorCheats.
Valve posted news titled: “Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota” In the news, Valve provided details about how many cheaters it banned. The news was posted on February 21, 2023.
“Today, we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat in Dota over the last few weeks. This software was able to access information used internally by the Dota 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 remove these bad actors from the active Dota playerbase.
“With that goal in mind, 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. 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.
“The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today’s ban wave is particularly large, but it’s only the latest action in an ongoing campaign. 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. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.
“Dota is a game best enjoyed when played on an even field, where victories are earned by skill and tenacity. We expect that some players will continue to develop and use new exploits, to continue to detect and remove these exploits at the expense of other players. As before, we will continue to detect and remove these exploits as they come, and continue to ban users who cheat…”
In my opinion, nobody wants to play in a game against cheaters. The cheaters give themselves an unfair advantage over those who enjoy playing a video game and taking the time to build up their characters without cheating. There is always going to be a risk to cheaters who fool around with a cheat exploit. 40,000 of those cheaters are now finding out why they shouldn’t have cheated.