Dota 2 News

Disabled some functionality used by third-party tools:
- Disabled the "record" command in matchmaking games. This was used to record, in realtime, a local demo that would contain information that wasn't intended to be visible to the client during a game. Demo recording is still enabled for local lobbies to enable SFM and community content creation.
- Disabled a large number of console commands during matchmaking games that could be used to introspect client state. For example, "dota_lobby_debug", "cl_dota_ambient_tree_shake_cooldown", and "dev_simulate_gcdown" no longer function in these games, while "ping", "disconnect", and "dota_toggle_autoattack" still do.

- Player profiles can no longer be accessed in matchmaking during the pregame phase. They can still be accessed once the picking phase ends.

With more than a little braggadocio, Valve has announced that it's permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for cheating. In a post to the official Dota 2 blog yesterday, the company revealed that it had constructed a cunning trap to catch thousands of players that were using "third-party software" to "access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn't visible during normal gameplay," lending them an unfair advantage in-game...
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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 to 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 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.

Lastly, we'd like to thank those who offered their time and energy to help us resolve this — from those who reported a player acting suspiciously in-game, to those who reviewed overwatch cases where this behavior was observed. Thank you for helping to make Dota a better experience for everyone.