Dota 2: Cheating & Scripting Runs Rampant

ENTNN's Veselin Ignatov takes players through why and how people cheat in Dota 2.

Hacking and scripting have always been a part of Dota 2, regardless of whether players like it or not. Of course, every single game has its share of hackers and abusers. For example, there was even a guy in CS: GO who used cheats while playing at a LAN event! That’s just next level cheating.

The interesting thing is that this “script situation” was revealed just a couple of days after the Chinese police arrested four Chinese players. According to their post on Weibo, the players were arrested for creating Dota 2 cheats and thus profiting from their sale.

The numbers from the report are staggering. The four hackers have earned over $140K USD. What’s even more impressive is that this was their “side job” as all of them had other “main” jobs.

It is important to remember that this is not the first time that the Chinese police have arrested hackers. Earlier this year, a report stated that the Chinese government caught 15 players creating cheats for PUBG. Whether or not the Chinese care about gaming or simply prosecute the offenders for tax evasion is still up in the air. One this is certain, this will probably have an effect on the potential cheaters.

Cheats in Dota 2

FALL SCRUB – Sound Hacks are becoming more common from DotA2

Apart from the traditional maphack that players have encountered, there are more and more new scripts that are capable of ruining your fun. Players have probably faced some others(mainly playing Skywrath and/or Lion) who can instant hex/silence, even though we use Blink Dagger to get near them.

Having said that, it seems that the script devs have gone even further. According to a Reddit post, there is a new type of script which is related to using a specific item or ability. He posted a link to an example of the hack where the players are buying Shadow Aamulets and the script sets off the sound globally, which results in a spam of commands towards the server until it crashes.

Here is the example provided. Just be sure to turn your volume down if you value your eardrums:

/U/startz_ken also says that he found a player who was using a script that caused about 700K items events in one game. The average number of item events is around 50. In addition, as of today, there are reports of over 50 people using this script.

Why would someone do this?

The answer to this question is very simple – to save MMR. You may ask how can you save MMR by “bugging” the in-game sound? Well, the Dota 2 engine works in a way that if a certain amount of players disconnect at the same time, the game is then “safe to leave” and no one will lose any MMR.

Cheaters have used this exploit for years, and Valve seems to be unable to find an answer to it. In fact, the only difference now is in the method – using a “Sound Script.” Hopefully, they willattempt to make it harder for hackers to crash the servers. Of course, the ultimate goal will be to eliminate this problem, but it’s highly unlikely to happen. As long as there are games, there will be cheaters, it’s just how life works.

Feel free to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for the latest esports news

Image VIA: Valve