Valve, which owns Steam and is behind the MOBA Dota 2, has found an extremely effective method of spotting and banning cheaters without them realizing anything.
40,000 accounts were able to be banned in a single day thanks to this method, the secrets of which have been revealed by the development team.
The small lines you must not read
There’s League of Legends, but there’s also Dota 2. Valve’s MOBA still brings together millions of players and is still supported by a professional esports circuit whose success continues. The stakes, especially financial, are very high, and the developers spend their time fighting against cheating. As we know, the less scrupulous players compete in inventiveness to find new methods, and the teams spend their time chasing after them. To succeed in catching these cheaters, it is therefore necessary to deceive their vigilance. This is what Valve recently managed to achieve, which was able to ban 40,000 accounts with a rather interesting method.
A few days ago, Valve deployed a very discreet update for the game client, which does not seem to bring much except an optimization of the latter. However, hidden in the heart of this patch is a new section full of data invisible to ordinary players. Unfortunately for cheaters, this section has been designed to be read only by third-party software identified as fraudulent tools.
” This patch contained a decoy to catch malicious individuals […]. Each of the accounts banned today read this “secret” area of the files, allowing us to say with great certainty that each ban is totally justified. »
Using this method, Valve was able to identify, collect and ban 40,000 fraudulent accounts. A nice catch that satisfies the teams, who want above all to keep their competitive game as clean as possible.
The game of cat and mouse
Fighting cheating in competitive games is essential for the studios behind it. We know, for example, that Activision has banned more than 500,000 accounts, and that the company is developing many tools to be more efficient. This fight can involve depriving cheaters of certain in-game options, assembling them on dedicated servers, or by these means of detecting third-party software. Either way, the fight continues, and everyone in the industry is aware that it is a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
” We know that some individuals will continue to develop and use new ways to cheat in order to gain an advantage at the expense of others. As we always have, we will continue to detect and block these methods as they appear, as well as ban those affected. »
To situate the importance of Dota 2, know that over the last 30 days, the average attendance of the game was 395,516 players, with a peak at more than 675,000.
Source : Valve
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