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Looks like Dota 2’s anti-hack fix is immobilising innocent heroes

It's not clear how the hacks work, but players have been discussing what they've seen happening on Reddit

Dota 2 has recently seen some players using command scripts to crash servers. Valve released a game update last week designed to detect players trying to do this, but it looks like it might be having a bit of a knock-on effect for non-cheating players too.

As previously reported by Dot Esports, scripting hacks have been cropping up in Dota 2 of late. It appears that some players have been using them to crash servers, with the effect that it can prevent loss of MMR. If a certain volume of players disconnect from a match around the same time, the results could be discounted because it could be perceived as linked to a server issue. So, those about to lose a ranked match could in theory protect their MMR from taking a hit by taking advantage of the exploit, which is of course something of an issue for a competitive game.

Now, as the site has spotted, it appears that some players clicking rapidly in the game are finding that their heroes become immobilised – they won’t respond to the player’s input. Valve’s update will be designed to detect those using the command scripts, which put out an impossibly huge number of commands, so while it could be that the players are accidentally triggering the new system it could also be an unplanned issue arising from the update, as happens sometimes.

This hack, as Dota 2 statistics site Stratz staff member Stratz_ken explained on Reddit, appears to be players purchasing items that make a noise, like the Arcane item Shadow Amulet, in the game and then “scripting to set off the sound globally” – also resulting in an incredibly loud noise in-game (please turn your volume down if you check out the video in that post).

Read more: Here are best Dota 2 heroes for beginners

In the post, Stratz_ken says that they recently discovered a user generating about 700,000 item “events” in a single game, when the average number is only around 50, later followed by more players using it.

New update makes spam-clicking dangerous; may cause the game to become unresponsive to all input from r/DotA2

You can see the immobilising effect in action in the video posted by Reddit user Anyymi above.

It also looks like there’s no way to overcome the issue in-game just yet, judging by comments made by other users experiencing it under the video. Some have said that reconnecting and restarting the game hasn’t worked for them, and one user said that restarting their computer didn’t seem to solve it either.