Over 40,000 Dota 2 Cheaters Banned After Valve Sneakily Sets a Trap for Them

If you've played video games, you know of the existence of cheaters. There's always that one or two people who would do anything to win. Well, over 40,000 people had that thought while playing Dota 2 and Valve has managed to bring the ban hammer down on them.

Credit: Valve

In a blog post titled "Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota", the publisher of Dota 2 laid out how cheaters were using third-party software to access information in the Dota client that normally wasn't visible to players during gameplay. Thus, they inserted a section of data that would never be read during normal gameplay, but was read by those using the third-party software.

Valve claims every one of the 40,000 accounts banned had read from this section of data, and that the company is confident that every ban is accurate. The blog post also warns that anybody found cheating will be banned from the game, including professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.

The post continues: "We expect that some players will continue to develop and use new exploits, to continue to try to gain unfair advantages 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."

At the moment, it seems like just the accounts are banned, which means the cheaters could open new accounts to continue playing. There is precedence from other game publishers for hardware ID bans, although this route seems to not be favoured by Valve.

Across the industry, game publishers are starting to crack down harder on cheaters, with Ubisoft punishing those who try to obtain an unfair advantage on console by using third-party devices that allow for a mouse and keyboard to be used for better aiming and movement.