Hacking and scripting problems are killing Dota 2

Over the past two months, Valve has launched a Summer Scrub campaign to fix as many Dota 2 game bugs as possible. They urge the community to report any unusual behavior or bugs in the game. But on the contrary, pub games are now full of scripts and they are killing the player experience.

It seems like Valve’s good effort only provokes the harassers and makes those who go to boost accounts become more aggressive than before. Over the past month, Valve has focused on changing the MMR system and party/solo queue. These two go hand in hand, of course, since your MMR is updated based on your playability. In a recent update, after TI9, Valve announced they would enable and disable the solo queue option, but made no mention of the script being run every day in the game, at all ranks.

At the beginning of this week, Dota 2 publisher in China, Perfect World announced that they were actively investigating, asking the police to arrest the script sellers. There were four arrests this week and Perfect World reported to Valve all the scripts they found. Of course, these scripts will be added in Valve Anti-Cheat and anyone found using it will be banned immediately.

However, the situation in the game was getting worse every day. No matter what server it was, people kept reporting the same unusual behavior. The most common script that grants skill/item toggle without losing cooldown. This causes the server to overflow, resulting in crashes and the game not being updated, so the player’s MMR is not updated after the game ends. That’s what boost account guys want to exploit in case they lose the game.

This week, an employee of stratz.com, a website that collects data using a deep learning API, reported on Reddit about a type of server hack. According to stratz_ken, Stratz’s API “found on Thursday, September 5, that a player using an in-game script generates 700,000 item events in a match (average only 50 per game). Then on Friday we found 3 people using this script. Now, Monday morning, more than 50 people have done it.”

The item Ken mentioned is the Shadow Amulet script, which makes a very loud noise that can be heard by all players in the game causing them all to crash. The script was recorded by Ken in the video below.

WARNING: turn the volume down before watching the two videos below.

The same script is also found on Medusa. Hero on/off Mana Shield

Invoker is also among the heroes that can use this script.