DOTA 2 has set up honey traps in the game to attract cheaters, resulting in the banning of 40,000 accounts.
According to an announcement from the official DOTA team, in order to combat cheating, the development team has released a patch to the game which is actually a honeypot designed to attract cheaters.
Third-party cheating software can access certain invisible information within the DOTA client, which allows cheating players to gain unfair advantages. The first step to combating cheating is to fix potential problems and make these cheating methods impossible, while the team also decided to permanently ban these accounts.
With this goal in mind, the technical team understood the working principles of the cheating software and then developed a patch that generates some data that cannot be read in normal gameplay, but can be read by cheating software.
Today, based on this honeypot, DOTA has found over 40,000 accounts that accessed this hidden data. Since this data is not normally read, the development team is confident that all players who accessed this data were using cheats.
As a result, over 40,000 player accounts have been permanently banned. While the scope of the ban is extensive, the DOTA team has stated that they will continue to take more measures to combat cheating and ensure fair competition in the game.
In the blog, the DOTA team also stated their attitude: any player who uses any program to read DOTA client data during the game will be permanently banned. If a professional player is caught, not only will their account be banned, but they will also be prevented from participating in any Valve e-sports events.
The development team expects that some players will continue to develop and use new vulnerabilities to gain unfair advantages at the expense of other players' experiences. Therefore, the technical team will continue to monitor, fix vulnerabilities, and ban any players who engage in cheating.
Honeypot:
A honeypot is a computer term that refers to a trap used to detect or resist unauthorized operations or hacker attacks. It is named after the principle of catching insects in a honey trap.