Valve Bans 40,000 Dota 2 Cheaters By Using The Honeypot Patch

Dota 2 is a game that really needs no introduction from anyone. It has been one of the most popular esports for years now, rewarding the International champions with almost $20 million. However, one thing that always comes in a package with being a popular online game is players cheating to win.

Since its release 10 years ago, Dota 2 has continuously had this problem, but it has got increasingly worse recently. Valve has finally taken some action and banned over 40,000 accounts for cheating via third-party software.

The company used the “Honeypot” patch to achieve this, displaying a secret code to any player using exploits, automatically registering them to a database, and banning them.

If there is one game that deserves credit for popularising esports, it is Dota 2. What was originally a community-created mod for Warcraft III, turned into one of the biggest titles in the gaming world. Dota 2 has been one of the faces of PC gaming for almost a decade now.

Even though learning to play the MOBA game isn’t very easy, it has shown no sign of slowing down. 2021’s International Dota 2 tournament hit a new peak in the prize pool, amassing $40 million from crowd-funding. Similarly, the game’s live-service elements rake in millions of Dollars every year.

Valve made $293 million in Battle Pass revenue from September 2022 to January 2023, in less than 5 months. Numbers like these in recent times show how popular Dota 2 is even now. And, when an online multiplayer game is liked, you are always going to get cheaters, like Fortnite.

This has been a problem ever since the game came out in July 2013. But, this got extremely bad in December 2022 when hackers were running rampant in Dota 2 with no one to stop them. Players sounded the alarm and tried to grab the attention of Valve to solve this issue.

Now, Valve has finally taken some serious action against cheaters and banned thousands of them. In a new post on the Dota 2 website, the company announced that it has banned over 40,000 players for cheating.

Anyone utilizing third-party software in a certain way to gain information from the Dota client not visible during gameplay and cheat has been permanently banned due to a new patch.

Dota 2 developers mentioned explained in the post how they released a patch to find these cheaters as soon as they understood the exploit.

This patch created a honeypot, a section of data inside the Dota 2 client that only cheaters with third-party software could read. Every account that stumbled in on this code because they were cheating got caught and suffered a well-deserved ban.

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.”

Hence, not only did the developers fix the issue causing making this cheat possible, but they also banned the perpetrators. The numbers were so large because this was a family of cheats the Dota 2 devs got rid of. Most activities like this take place in secret, but this happened publicly to make the position of developers clear.

So, Valve is working hard to rid Dota 2 of cheaters. It doesn’t matter if you are a professional player, if you cheat in the MOBA game, you will not survive the ban.