Valve tricks Dota 2 cheaters and then bans 40,000 of them

Good catch! :D

I hate cheaters so much.

I also play GTA 5 a lot, so you get the idea.

Well played Valve. Nice to see that they still care about removing bots.

every little damage that is done to any (MP-) cheater is a service for humanity. This scum deserves everything bad that comes to them, so kudos valve! ^^

Ah yes, the Ban Hammer.

I agree with hash punishment, but... I cheated once in TF2 as a teen more than 10 years ago, and I still am banned.

Bans shouldn't be permanent, I can't imagine a 5-year ban being less deterrent than a permaban. I think a warning (1 month or couple weeks ban) would be better all around, actually, as you don't use the atomic option right away and leave some room for escalation, so that the cheater knows they have to behave, but I understand that cheats are hard to detect... And some cheaters are not like the others: clueless people, serial cheaters, and cheat developers. The last two categories are the more dangerous, and both will just move on to a new account if one gets banned. VAC bans are not instant to make it harder for the last category.

I wonder if some "serial" cheaters do it in order to level up accounts to sell them, or to sell dropped items on a secondary market?


Last edited by MayeulC on 23 February 2023 at 1:09 pm UTC

Now if only Valve would do the same with TF2

The problem with cheating in general is the same as with security back in the -90. While coding it wasnt even on topic but rather an afterthought. Same goes for games, the anti cheat is most often just bolted on afterwards like Steams VAC is.

Biggest problem with VAC is that it runs in userspace and thus is extremely easy to hide from. In short, VAC is an old antivirii app that is fed with cheat signatures. And the darker sides of the net is chock filled with binary obfuscators and all sorts of software that make using checksumming to find cheats pretty useless. You need to look at what the software really does instead. If a user is using a software connected to the mouse input AND the screen, well, chances are extremely high someone is cheating.

It is also very easy to find cheaters using "AI" or what it really is, pattern matching. But the problem Valve has is finding a pool with clean players, at all levels. Its current attempt is like making an AI find mugs by throwing kitchenware catalogs at it and expecting it to find out what mugs are by itself, not going to happen. Only by giving it a large clean base of matches to then compare the bottomless pit of cheaters with will VACnet be able to discern who is cheating and who is playing legit.

Oh man, I hope videos are posted of some of those cheaters being banned live! In the couple of decades I've been playing online, I've found cheaters are always dog shit to online PvP gaming—ban them or siphon them off to cheater-only servers. They want to cry "it's just a game!" Call the cheaters-only server 'It's Just a Game!' where their cheats will only randomly work, see how long they stick around.

My concern is that this tactic may not work again because now it's public.