Valve bans 40,000 Dota 2 cheaters

Valve has announced that it has banned 40,000 cheaters in its MOBA Dota 2 with a single ban wave over the past few weeks.

The details:

• In a recent blog post, Valve announced that it had banned the accounts of over 40,000 players who had cheated in Dota 2 using third-party software that accessed client data normally hidden from the player during gameplay.
• To catch the cheaters, Valve set up a "honeypot," which is a system designed to catch and study the methods used by a program or individual who is accessing something it shouldn't be able to. In this case, Valve recently added a section of data that would not be accessible in normal gameplay in a patch, which all banned accounts allegedly accessed. The developer stated that it has "extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved" in regards to the bans.
• Valve went on to warn cheaters and program creators that it will "continue to detect and remove these exploits as they come, as well as continue to ban users who cheat," and that the massive ban wave was just the "latest action in an ongoing campaign." Normally, cheaters would be banned behind the scenes; however, it appears that the situation has gotten to the point where Valve felt the need to "make this example visible." Valve concluded the blog post by thanking those who used the in-game report function as well as the community-powered overwatch system used to review suspected cheaters' games.

Other Valve news:

• 2012’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) has broken its all-time concurrent player record once more, over a decade after release. On February 11, 2023, a new record of 1,320,219 in-game players was set; however, this record didn’t last long as a new record of 1,324,800 was achieved just over a week later, on February 19, according to SteamDB.
• Following the release of a blog post on the game's official website, fans of the team-based FPS Team Fortress 2 (TF2) believed they were in for a major update for the first time in years. According to the announcement, a "full-on update-sized update" with new maps, cosmetics, and items submitted by the community was on the way. The hype train came to an abrupt halt after the blog post's wording was changed to refer to the update as a "full-on holiday-sized update," which TF2 players had already been receiving since the developer stopped adding its own creations to the game in 2017.