How Valve Set A Trap To Catch And Permanently Ban 40,000 Dota 2 Cheaters
If you're lost, let's explain some acronyms. MOBA stands for "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena", and it may well be the least-descriptive game genre name of all time, similar to how "Intelligent Dance Music" tells you nothing about what IDM actually sounds like. MOBAs are games like Smite, League of Legends, and the predecessor of Dota 2, the original Defense of the Ancients: three lanes, swarms of opposing minions, and "Champion" or "Hero" characters controlled by players. Push the lanes and take down the enemy base to win.
Valve says that as soon as it understood how the latest round of exploits for Dota 2 functioned, it released a game update that added a small section of data in the game client that would normally never be accessed during gameplay.
However, the third-party tools couldn't tell what memory was used by the game's regular events and what memory comprised the honeypot. As a result, Valve could single out users whose game client accessed those memory locations, because the only way that would happen is if a third-party tool hooked the game and scanned or modified that memory space.
Valve doesn't normally disclose details of its ban waves, but the company says it wanted to make an example of these users to make its position on third-party tools clear. That position is as follows: "if you are running any app that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing, your account can be permanently banned." That includes professional players, who will be banned from all events as well.
