Yesterday on February 21, Valve released a statement through the DOTA 2 website news page titled “Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota,” which declared a firm stance against recent cheaters and hackers in Dota 2. The statement announced right from its opening line that over 40,000 accounts had been permanently banned from Dota 2 due to suspicions that they had used third-party cheating software over the past few weeks.

Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dotahttps://t.co/D0keeCjKIF

— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) February 21, 2023

According to Valve, cheaters were able to gain advantages through this software by being “able to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay.” Although the nature of that information was not expressed, there are numerous possible advantages cheaters might have exploited, including extra camera zoom-outs, knowing when they were under vision and possible combo auto-casters. Valve expressed that while eliminating the ability to access these cheats was a priority, it was also important to “remove these bad actors from the active Dota player base.”

Valve also stated that every issued ban was almost certainly justified due to their method of cheat detection that was implemented in the latest Dota 2 patch:

This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this “secret” area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.

Emphasis was also placed that this large-scale ban wave was made to make an example to any player considering using unfair client advantages, and that Valve would treat cheaters from all backgrounds with harsh punishment:

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.