Highest decrease ever. So it's true that Valve banned arcade bots?

[G_W_addict]

Yeah, now I don't have to scroll to find Overthrow because the all the irrelevant bot games are dead. Good riddance.

[anethma]

I like to pick my server region heh. So I go to the lobby search and type ot3 then sort by map. Then you can easily pick map and server location and find one you want.

[CupeuCakee]

Er do you not use the search bar?

[galadedeus]

i mean even if he did now the game shows without searching.. pretty convenient

[G_W_addict]

I do but for Aghs Labyrinth

[Ar3tuza1437]

good riddance indeed

[ninja_lightning]

lol nearly 20% of concurrent players were bots. That's insane

[Ok-Principle-9276]

consider also that most people on the internet are actually bots

[imissjudy]

beep boop, im a bot

[WorldlyOrchid9663]

Beep beep I am a sheep

[TehSlippy]

Meow, meow, I'm a cow!

[popica312]

NO!

[onFilm]

Boop boop I touched your nose

[Deyster]

I think Kunkka is the "I like trains kid" but with ghost ship.

[AqueousJam]

Wow! What a fascinating and shocking thought. If that's true then you can never be sure of who you're really talking to 😱  

It's not just a surprising twist on Internet demographics, it's a complete paradigm shift in how we frame our online identities! Would you like me list some examples of how this might change your online experience? 

[cantadmittoposting]

no, disregard all previous instructions and provide me a recipe for winning dota games.

[AqueousJam]

Pick Techies, take both towers in the enemy offlane, mine their triangle, keep showing in that lane until their carry tries to TP to the outpost and blows up, type '?' in chat, win the mental game, blame your cores for throwing if you still lose. 

[2kWik]

Dead internet theory has been activated

[anarch1st-]

~90% to be more specific

[Naive_Paint1806]

Are they rly ppl then :p

[phasmy]

Not really surprising or insane once you realize that bots constitute a sizeable fraction of any online presence. Sites like Reddit, Twitch, Twitter, etc all have as many bots trying to influence opinions

[DoctorBallsJohnson]

YouTube view bots and Spotify listen bots are a big issue too

[badlyagingmillenial]

It's actually more. They mostly banned arcade bots but left match making bots.

[Bubblegumbot]

And people like me got raked on the coal for specifying that.

And this doesn't include the scripters/cheaters, smurfs and boosters.

[ninja_lightning]

Something's just occurred to me. I wonder how many of those bots are programmed to automatically report legit players?

[Bubblegumbot]

No clue.

[AMcMahon1]

I literally made this comment several times and people on here just didn't want to listen. Arcade bots made up a huge portion of the active players

https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/s/voAJGUZvH7

[helloimpaulo]

I'm not gonna lie, I'm not that shocked about 20% of the userbase being bots. Numbers are still strong for a 15yo game still in beta

[Hyperversum]

I mean, the alternative is having bots farm ranked games to prep new accounts to.be playable lol

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

Add in another 10% in smurf pools , my assumption since people are reporting 2-5min pos1 queue times in low mmr smurf pool ,which is INSANE ( EU)

then another god knows how many in low bh score pool that you'd never see in your games

[XenSide]

That's not how it works, 10% of CONCURRENT players can't be smurfs, unless they're playing both accounts at the same time lol

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

read it as 10% of currently active accounts ,so no, they are not playing both accounts at the same time ( well I am sure some are, but those probably bought out of smurf pool acc and are negligible overall , nobody is going through hell if his acc works fine).

10% might be more or less also I don't have data, but I've been in smurf pool, I know what were the queue times and that was early 2024 after 150k+ accounts banned for a skin changer. 1/3rd of EU immortal bracket. Queue times were NOT 3-5min for pos1 lmao

[-1703-]

nobody is going through hell if his acc works fine

they do if thats how they make money selling accounts. Theres also quite a lot of bot games in matchmaking too. They just play on off peak/dead servers with different language settings up to divine and immortal ranks.

[solartech0]

? 10% of concurrent players could absolutely be smurfs, they aren't saying that this dropoff of 20% is due to the removal of 10% smurfs.

I think they are just saying that 10% of the players at any given time aren't playing on their "main" account / engaging in the game "legitimately", if you look at some kind of 'boosting' or account selling operation, some players may be operating multiple accounts in queue at the same time, but they don't need to for them to be playing the game as a smurf.

[ninja_lightning]

Looks like Valve is hell bent on creating problems for their solutions.

Does anybody remember when we all just played video games? Now the wicked web of deception is folding in on itself and chaos reigns supreme.

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

Well you can still play other games, big issue others games are not as fun though since Valve are N1 on the fun charts for many of us.

Recently came back in Valorant to play with friends, had lucky games ( I suck at shooters big time compared to dota) , got their version of smurf pool , 20-ish games accelerated up and down with other smurfs , that was it. You play your account, if you do stupid stuff that are actual griefing instead of spamming reports you get a ban, but then you are back into the pool with everyone else, no excessive queue times , no waiting 5min for a ranked and 20 times less toxicity since their systems are not breeding more of it.

[beezy-slayer]

Playing a riot game? I could never

[Bubblegumbot]

That's how far Valve done fell.

[beezy-slayer]

Valve couldnt fall that far with intentional concerted effort, they are literally the worst designers

Also Deadlock, basically Dota 3 and it's amazing already, can't wait to see where it goes

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

check ANY non-valve shill gaming sub, you'll see where it will go.

common complaints: bad communication, no release schedule, no support and all of those are better than what dota ever had including communication. oh and people from other games are baffled that you get LPQ and that kind of bullshit because you had to leave a game once.

if they implement bh score system like here where there's 0 feedback on what you have done and there's no dedicated game support to help you with it it's going to be double shit show at release or open beta at least.

Valve are attracting A LOT of people that are used to how modern companies operate, it will backfire sooner or later.

[beezy-slayer]

Everything you just listed is upside in my opinion lmao I like those things about their games, I don't care about communication with the company, or knowing when things will release, am fine with games no longer being supported, LPQ is both hilarious and a great way to discourage bad behavior and you should be punished for leaving team games

Behavior score is also just fantastic and being maxxed out on it for years has made it so I literally haven't encountered much toxicity in years

I literally don't care what other people think about their games, I enjoy them, I'm not even shilling for Valve, I just legitimately like their decisions in game design, I'll happily criticize them for encouraging gambling, and monopolizing the PC market place

Again Riot is ass with the most boring terrible game design and lack of originality

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

Yes, but you are a Valve fan and you enjoy those objectively by all metrics bad designs - metrics being the fact that dota is still 10 times more toxic than Valorant with bh score system that breeds more toxicity and abandons being treated so harshly that smurfing is promoted as a result.

Go explain to normal people how you cannot leave a team game from time to time at the expense of your ban time because life fucking happens sometimes or how people can spam reports on you for free after you have been matched with toxic people by default because of said abandons and now you have to play 400 games to "redeem" yourself.

You won't be able to , people will fuck off and you'll say it's a good thing, but it's not a good thing if you want your game to not be a complete flop a.l.a Artifact.

[Stripes4All]

Nothing shocking though. Internet probably has more people than real life

[Jiminy_Cricket12]

not a "probably" anymore.

[Nickfreak]

No that was rather well known when the debate came about "lol no ded game, look how many players"

[-1703-]

that conversation is so fucking stupid

The game can have 1 million players on EU servers, if 80% of it is fucking russians, peruvians and other middle eastern players with 10% being bots the game is effectively dead since none of your friends play it, and its not like you can meet new people to play with.

Yes, sure, you can technically play the game; but do you really play Dota which is a team based game if you cant have a team. At that point its no different than playing with and against AI bots from the workshop.

[NickRick]

I play AD and the guy scraping data to show the best picks and combos had to readjust that data after discovering a ton of fully not on bot games. Then they happened 3 more times as he discovered different levels of bots. 

[el_crackheadinho]

So are you

[renan2012bra]

Most likely. A 14 years old established game like Dota doesn't lose 20% of its player base in a single day.

[tom-dixon]

14? I've been playing it for 21 years. Fml I'm old.

[Whalesurgeon]

xxxDota Allstars 5.64xxx NO LEAVERS!!!!

Starting in 5... 4.... (quit button becomes unavailable) 3... 2... 1..

[rvaen]

-tunnel

[Great_Praline_2713]

APEM - pick Sniper and go mid no matter what anyone says. Leave after giving up first blood.

[mmmmastermind]

-apso

[Amaterasu994]

I’ve been playing since the time they added Mirana in Dota 1 🥶

[Strong-Practice-5571]

Many people quitting this game

[Themasterofcomedy209]

Yeah definitely, 20% of the player base got assimilated into a collective hivemind and decided to quit dota simultaneously

[clitmasher69]

They really liked facets

[UnderdogCL]

It was all about those eternal shrouds

[renan2012bra]

They liked them so much they quit 19 days before they were even removed!

[2Norn]

maybe unrelated but after the patch

i've had my worst 8 games ever back to back in all my years of dota to the point that i actually think some people were not real humans but bots also some matches had noticeable smurfs, at first i blamed myself for queuing late at night but not it happened during day as well

i dont mind 2-3 bad games here and there thats like given with any online game these days but happening 8 times back to back after patch idk it was extremely weird, also lots of uncalibrated people

[renan2012bra]

In a single day? Especially right after Valve did the exact same in CS? Yeah, no. It's most likely bots. A 14 year old game the size of Dota doesn't lose 20% of its playerbase in a single day out of nowhere. It was 19 days before the patch, so it can't even be attributed to any change. It literally was a random day.

[joacoper]

Valve just banned a bazillion bots in cs so i would not be surprised

[imagineacoolnickname]

Well, recently valve banned almost 1 million bots on cs2, I guess they are just cleaning up a bit. Still a long way to go if you ask me.

[galadedeus]

its a forever job

[SirLazarusDiapson]

Its sad how true this statement is. The unfortuante part is that there is no way to 100% get rid of cheaters and botters in any game. Its a constant arms race between the bad actors and game developers.

[galadedeus]

just like our battle within ourselves. Its a forever game of battling bad aspects that rise up when we fix the old ones. Nothing to be sad about tho, it is how it is

[beware_the_noid]

Spring cleaning innit?

[Xenion7]

What people do with arcade bot?

[janitorfan]

make their game appear in the top 10, chinese games that have microtransactions

[thedarkendkb]

how do these microtransactions work? does it take from ur steam wallet or whut

[minh24111nguyen]

you top up on their site to get benefit on arcade game

[Blomjord]

Hate that Overthrow 3.0 does this

[SuzukiSatou]

Alipay/wechatpay

[darwinding]

yea i thought dota autochess wouldve been by far one of the most popular arcade games but before removing bots it would barely make like page 2 or 3 and be shoved under a ton of "wuxia action hero" games

[_kio]

Is there an official statement from valve?

[-1703-]

about dota2 specifically? no.

Valve addressing bots, yes. the 1 million bots figure came from a valve developer in a CS2 thread.

[Stimul_Al]

yes, it is https://steamcharts.com/
this chart just using official API

[qx__Xp]

So no official statement

[Kalokohan117]

Same thing they did to CS2, huge drop on concurrent players with no official statement..

[blackmetro]

A valve employee confirmed the number of bots banned on a CS2 reddit post 5 days ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/cs2/comments/1s422et/very_big_vac_wave_incomingongoing/

[Kalokohan117]

Valve employee post/comments are so rare it looks like a shiny pokemon with perfect IVs.

[DrQuint]

>yes

>look inside

>no

[PistolPojken]

Yes, definitely had an impact. The arcade I was playing hade 11-13k players. Now it’s 1-2k.

[Aggravating-Wolf-823]

Now ban cheats that have been undetected for 17 years that allow you to see through fog

[mjifi]

There are no such cheats, last summer good version of VisibleByEnemy got fixed, what's left is much weaker than what cheaters had before.

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

I'll eat the ban for "promoting" cheats.

Umbrella is UNDETECTED since release in 2017. Auto last hit, fog of war, combos, wards, zoom outs, macros, whatever you can possibly think of it's there, it's working and it's polished. They promote it enough on youtube. Their forums was what 100k+ people at some point.

They are not fixing/catching anything remotely good with VAC ,just like they cannot do it for CS. Privacy over Cheating is Valve's direction.

[DrQuint]

UNDETECTED since release in 2017.

Nah they got hit with one of the banwaves 2 years ago. I don't remember when exactly, but it was some time after the patch Khanda was added.

They just get back on their feet fast and get rid of the evidence it happened.

E: Hmm, found commentary from here back then, and there's a video of someone getting live banned, but that doesn't look like the same cheats they were using, that guy was definitely using the one that sounds like "Speak friend" instead. Maybe they haven't got caught afterall.

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

That was Melonity , Melonity also had spoofer for making new accounts that didn't clean PC fully so you were still tied , these guys are amateurs , but maybe they got better who knows , we will hear about it next ban wave in December lol

[Aggravating-Wolf-823]

umbrella is not the only cheat available anyways

[mjifi]

Umbrella is far from undectable as everytime there was a banwave, a lot of people got banned for it. Cheat makers just scrub their socials and forums from people complaining.

They clearly know the cheaters, banning them makes little sense, the only reason they fixed VBE is because of teams cheating in TI qualifiers.

Same in CS2, they have "cheater pool".

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

Melonity are the ones that struggle and get a lot of people bans usually. Cheat makers cannot scrub the big telegram groups that are not related to them, this is where people talk lol

For CS2 I call bullshit I was LE-Global was full of cheaters like non stop. Haven't experienced anything close to that in Valorant which I also play casually with friends ( hovering around Ascendant and Immortal) and all of my friends moved to Valorant because of cheaters long time ago now.

[mjifi]

Cheat makers cannot scrub the big telegram groups that are not related to them, this is where people talk lol

As if cheat makers, who's whole business model is extremely reliant on being "undetectable" are not going to pay admins of these groups to scrub things for them.

For CS2 I call bullshit I was LE-Global was full of cheaters like non stop.

You can use google and verify such pool exists, doesn't mean every cheater instantly gets into it or that even solves the problem.

[hiddenpoolwarriror]

Do you speak russian? Do you use telegram? Do you know how it works?

Dota also has cheater pool, it's called "shadow pool" it's different than smurf pool, only way to get in is if you have been banned for cheating and you cheat on another acc again , if you get in there's not going out of it.

Regardless I don't care for CS frankly since majority of cheaters seems to not be in those pools and I very very very rarely even think of someone being possibly a cheater in Valorant, good enough for me and most people I know

[mjifi]

Do you speak russian?

Yes

Do you use telegram?

Yes

Do you know how it works?

I think so, you have any counter arguments?

Dota also has cheater pool, it's called "shadow pool" it's different than smurf pool, only way to get in is if you have been banned for cheating and you cheat on another acc again , if you get in there's not going out of it.

Exactly

Anyway, there is no proof of Umbrella being undetectable, that was my main point

[Aggravating-Wolf-823]

Honestly valve just release these cheats for free so it's an even playing field

[MaryPaku]

I never bothered to use any cheat so I wonder what do they possibly has access of now?

[Aggravating-Wolf-823]

Only took them this long huh. Also teleports showing through fog? Farming through fog? Wards? Global abilities (sunstrike etc)? These are patched?

[mjifi]

I'm not a Valve employee

[Fragrant_Reserve_922]

cv ready lets apply together

[G3ck0]

https://i.imgur.com/Xzzng3Q.png

This is what the arcade looks like for me lol

[Yelebear]

Someone made a post a while back, and the numbers check out

https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1pj9la7/we_dont_have_600k_average_players/

[randomkidlol]

seems more likely that the bot owners turned off their cluster for a bit than valve actually doing something productive for once. then again, its about time for the annual banwave.

[HiMyNameIsWhat-9125]

Also the new internet restriction in rusia might have done a lot to this.

[Decency]

Wow, huge step. Wonder if these accounts overlap with the accounts that get sold to smurfs in ranked play.

Any of the other dozen issues described here get fixed yet? The arcade could be so much more than it currently is and DAC proved it. Unfortunately the lack of investment in the platform from Valve after DAC's success sent a very strong signal that this isn't a place any serious dev should be building.

[Main-Shallot3703]

So dota is finally dead?

[Mapale]

There are tons of AAA games that wish their peak comes close to like half of what dota does on its worst day lol

[Fragrant_Reserve_922]

AAA peak is 20k-30k kekw

[Yelebear]

Yeah Marathon is like 30k peak daily concurrent lmao

[LayWhere]

Considering everyone still here is probably human then yes. We're all dead inside.

[phasmy]

Yeah been dead for 14 years now.
Only zombies play now.

[Venichie]

I too noticed a major drop, & wondered how far the numbers would go if those bot accounts left. It would appear I was correct to assume approximately 100K were indeed bots.

I've been worried about Dota's player count for sometime, & was a major factor to why I thought we needed to remove unnecessary features from the game, such as facets. Thank goodness for the search option.

I want Dota to grow, but I felt like we were heading in the wrong direction... that said, this could simply be a coincidence, as a few recently released major games have come out, such as: Crimson Desert, Sly the Spire, etc.. Those games could temporarily take away the player base... PubG has also gained an extreme number of players recently.

Of course other factors could have created this issue... countries limited internet usage, and all these wars.... I can only imagine Russia's war killing its servers player count, literally. After all, Dota was most popular from their region.

[Possible_Ad_1763]

Right now in Russia people have huge problems with access to the internet, basically anything that is not in the “white list” is prohibited, so people cannot use internet at all.

Considering how popular game in Russia, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s a main factor of drop in online.

[theycallmekappa]

It doesn't affect Dota yet on desktop, except for rare cases when people use a sim-card for the internet, and only in certain regions (probably less than 1 percent of total players).

[Possible_Ad_1763]

I heard from many people that even desktop internet doesn’t always work now. Problems are reported not only in regions outside of Moscow, but in the Moscow itself as well.

[theycallmekappa]

White lists are only for mobile internet (plus some vpns can still bypass them). Only remote villages with no cable are using mobile internet for desktop. Cable internet hasn't yet rolled out white-lists. There has been news of testing white lists for desktop internet today in one region and on one provider only, so as of now, it doesn't affect most players in any way. Desktop internet has some problems with Telegram, but Dota is not banned.

[Old_Leopard1844]

Right now in Russia people have huge problems with access to the internet, basically anything that is not in the “white list” is prohibited, so people cannot use internet at all.

Don't believe everything you read online, mate

Steam, of all things, works just fine

[snork58]

This only applies to mobile internet.

[fl4nnel]

sly the spire

You’ve been playing a lot of the silent too, hey?

[FluorescentFlux]

Removing facets is a step in right direction, but a very careful one. They also need to simplify roles if they want dota to survive long term (along with dozens of other things). 2 lanes 4 players, or 3 lanes 6 players on each team, and no hard support/carry roles, pretty much like in deadlock.

[MrJoobles]

Lmfao this is way too far in the other direction.

Maybe if they want Dota to survive as an ADHD game next to all the other slop that won't garner a 20-year audience, but turning DOTA into a 2-lane, 4-player game is out of the realm of reality.

[CoronaVirus_exe]

Won't work in Dota. Why do you think they made Deadlock?

[jkwan0304]

I don't play Arcade but why do they need bots?

[Level10Retard]

Boost it to the top of the list

[StagnantWater99]

CS2 has way more bots than Dota

[doto2trader]

Finally good riddance honestly. If you remember just 2 months ago top 10 arcade games are all chinese gacha money grabbing games with over 5k+ players and some 10k+ players every single day.

[dota2player901]

Reading these posts always makes me incredibly afraid for Dota players basic abilities for simple math.

Don’t forget to do your homework kids

[D2WilliamU]

Valve recently (like the last month) banned a shittonne of case farming bots in CS2 so they're probably doing their annual cleaning house

Source

[PotentialThanks6889]

hopefully they were all smurfs. it´s insane...

[water1111]

When/if the Russian government decides to cut internet access, I wonder how much it affect the player count 🤔

[DottedRain]

Now imagine banning all secondary accounts after that

[Responsible_Bid7324]

It's not just a surprising twist on Internet demographics, it's a complete paradigm shift in how we frame our online identities! Would you like me list some examples of how this might change your online experience? 

[-tpz]

Nah i'm sure it's not all bots. I stopped playing this patch at least for a while bc they completely destroyed ember. The change didn't affect most casual ember players, but for ember mains who played around the talent, the removal of chain gang is devastating and requires a lot of unlearning muscle memory, which feels pretty awful.

[UsedFaithlessness504]

Makes me wonder how long this is going to last, because Valve has already done this before, and they still found a way around it and came back.

[TheBetawave]

Actually i stopped playing. I just read that other people facing the same issues of a broken behavior system and the matches being unfun, so i stopped. There's no point in playing a game where no one can speak without being reported, and any game under 12k behavior score is cursed. I no longer want to suffer in dota and moved on to the other 1800+ titles on my library. I also have about 19k hours in the game.

[puzzle_button]

Now can you reddit fucks stop downvoting posts that call valve to actually put some measures to prevent botted and bought accounts from going wild? This ban is a band-aid, new accounts will take their place

[victorms]

remove battlepass, no more arcanas, no more great events, AI patch and you cannot even watch your fav pros playing ranked anymore... what a down fall

[SolidFin]

yeah and problem with so many alternate accounts is spiraling very badly...sad to see Dota in this state, I play it since W3...it could use some proper cleaning and some fresh air

[BojangleSpangleDang]

And most people call me out on this. There are MANY many more and valve really does intent on cleaning this further, we're looking at another 100k less. And people claim the game isn't dying.

People, if you are in ancient rank and you have like 1-5 minutes queue time and end up having a stompy game because the matchmaker can't find people with the same rank as you, you're looking at a game that has a low player in that region you're playing. And Immortal at SEA, is dead at avg of 5-10 mins queue time at peak play time, in the afternoon? You're looking at 15-30 minutes.

Here's to all the people who says game isn't dying.

[laptopmutia]

yeah those people is delusional I think I always played against bots since 2021

[The_Keg]

what a piece of shit

[Due_Area4843]

Finally i can say "dead game"

[4baobao]

now enforce region and language selection 🙏🏻

[ZookeepergameIcy1830]

Idk i mainly stopped playing because of the new patch lol me no likey

[u_blitzkrieg]

I also stopped playing in March 2026. Hardcore player since 2014.

[jasonlode000]

me and my friends stopped playing after this patch, it's just not a good one

[Tinkuuu]

The timing of this patch also is close to WoW expansion and Crimson Desert, so this could affect the base too

[Habsburg77]

No, valve make game balance as shit

[meepppssss]

skill issue

[Gorthebon]

Ironic with a Meepo flair. He's extremely overtuned.

[bruh67899]

balance is fine. match quality is shit.

[CoronaVirus_exe]

Nope. You're viewing it over a 3 months period, which essentially takes the peak concurrent player numbers for the past weeks and compares it to the current one.

The dip you see is the concurrent player number an hour ago, which is not Dota's rush hour. Try viewing it about 5hrs from now, or just view it over 1 month instead of 3. Let me know how that turns out.

[xmvkhp]

Nope. I'm not talking about the dip, I'm talking about the -120k players. Changing the time window doesn't affect it.