If you cheat in DotA 2, you're going to get caught out eventually. Not only there are a lot of people in a game who can catch on and report you, but Valve is watching. In its latest ban wave, Valve swung its hammer down over more than 40,000 players, ending their cheating runs in one of the world's most popular competitive games.
The latest cheat focus was on players "abusing matchmaking," according to Valve's tweet on the matter, suggesting it may have targeted those smurfing, or gaming the system to try to play against weaker players to increase their chances of winning.
We have banned over 40,000 accounts for players who were found abusing matchmaking. These bans will now appear as game bans in Steam as well as being matchmaking bans in Dota 2.
— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) February 11, 2020
The last time we saw a banwave this hefty Valve took down 17,000 accounts in January 2019, though it has issued longer bans in smaller numbers since. As Kotaku highlights, in September 2019 it banned some gamers for 19 years, practically guaranteeing they'll never play the game again... on those accounts at least.
