Perhaps everything was going too smoothly to be true, but this week Dota Auto Chess saw a first big stain on its reputation. The immensely popular Dota 2 mod, created by Chinese developer Drodo Studio, is being haunted by an outburst of cheaters. Using hacks, players are able to acquire unlimited gold, and can even take resources away from their opponents.

To make matters worse, Drodo Studio stands pretty much powerless against this reprehensible behavior. There is only so much moderators can do within the Dota 2 engine, and implementing anti-cheat systems for their mods is not one of those things. Only Valve themselves could tackle the issue, should they want to. They do have every reason to step in, given that Auto Chess has over 4.7 million subscribers, and comfortably reaches 200,000 concurrent players every day.

Until the issue is addressed, the only thing players can do to avoid cheaters is hosting custom lobbies and report the cheaters.  One of the most popular Discord servers named "qihl", associated with Team Liquid, has thousands of users, creates lobbies based on players' ranks, and actively removes cheaters from its environment.