This month I want to highlight a blog post, Cheaters Will Never Be Welcome in Dota, by the Dota development team. Dota is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game from Valve, and is considered a catalyst for the entire MOBA genre. Valve released this brief post describing a recent ban wave. What is interesting about this ban wave is that the Dota team goes into detail on their anti-cheat methodology. They deprecated a previously valid section of code for normal game users, but left that code intact for third party cheat programs to continue using. This meant that after the anti-cheat patch went live, only cheaters would access that code, which enabled the Dota team to log cheaters’ accounts for future action.

This anti-cheat tactic is brilliant. Typically development teams are not forthcoming in describing the specifics of their anti-cheat actions, however I believe the Dota team shared these details because it shatters confidence in third party cheat programs. When seemingly valid game code is a potential honeypot to capture cheaters, then players looking to cheat can’t be confident in any third party programs. Although game cheating is a never-ending game of cat and mouse, I believe the Dota team made strong progress with this latest action.

https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3677788723152833273

“…we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. 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.”