Gaming News Steam: 40,000 players banned at once thanks to an ingenious idea from Valve!
No competitive game escapes it, and the studios do everything they can to ensure it doesn’t ruin the gaming experience. We’re obviously talking about cheating, which can very quickly distract players from competitive play. Several strategies have been devised to find and ban cheaters, but Steam’s recent idea has proven very effective!
Dota 2: 40,000 accounts blocked thanks to a sophisticated method
Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, Rocket League, League of Legends, Starcraft II or even PUBG: Battlegrounds are regularly mentioned, but let’s not forget Dota 2, the MOBA developed and published by Valve on Steam. The competitive scene is very structured and supported by hundreds of thousands of players
At Activision, the teams have opted for various anti-cheat tools, Keeping players on servers by denying them various features Time to collect as much data as possible on potential scammers. In other cases players with toxic behavior or cheating with more or less discretion are moved to dedicated servers where they can no longer harm others. At Valve we said goodbye the trap strategy super discreet. And so much to say it worked since 40,000 accounts were recently banned from the servers almost in one fell swoop
The company, led by Gabe Newell, actually devised a trap that was revealed to work after the identified accounts were deleted or blocked. How did Valve do it? The idea is amazingly simple. In a recent, very low-key client update Valve has integrated a new data section whose rows can only be read by cheat software. In other words, these lines are completely invisible and have caught scammers by surprise.
Today, 40,000 accounts have been permanently banned after using third-party cheat software in Dota over the past few weeks. The software provided access to information normally intended for internal use by the Dota customer. Those affected exploited this normally unseen information to gain a significant in-game advantage. In addition to solving the underlying issues that allowed such methods to be used, we set out to ban these malicious individuals from the community.
With this in mind, we released a patch as soon as we became aware of the methods used. This patch included a decoy to catch malicious individuals: a data section was added to the game client that could only be read by cheats. Each of the accounts banned today have read this “secret” section of the game, so we can say with great certainty that every ban is fully justified.
Fight against fraud, a necessary endless search
The fight against fraud is a real one cat and mouse gameWe suspect that the secret lines will be identified soon and bypassed from scammers. The latter often have a head start, and it must wait until a new technique is discovered to successfully counter it. Preventive tools are constantly evolving, but it’s an endless struggle:
Given the scale of this type of cheat software, today’s wave of bans is significant. However, this is just the latest action in an ongoing battle against the teams that develop such software and the people who use it. (…) We know that some people will continue to develop and use new methods of cheating in order to gain an advantage at the expense of others. As we have always done, we will continue to detect and block these methods as soon as they occur, as well as ban those affected.
As a reminder, Dota 2 is one of the three most played games on Steam in the world, with an average of 402,000 players connected at the same time in the last 30 days for a recent high of over 680,000 players. The years pass, however the MOBA doesn’t seem to be running out of steam and should accompany us for quite a while.
