Dota 2 fans are calling on developer Valve to ban a controversial piece of software known as Overplus that players are using to gain an unfair advantage in the draft stage of a match.
Overplus is effectively a new version of apps that were previously outlawed by Valve, which takes a look at which Dota 2 heroes your opponents are strongest with before the draft even starts and gives you this information. That means you can ban their best heroes, and likely counter pick them before they have even shown what they will pick in that game.
In Dota 2, where some heroes are effectively hard countered by others, this can be a massive advantage at any level, and for players who only play a small handful of heroes, it can make their lives very difficult. While there is no way to tell if your opponent has the app, if your most played or most successful hero is banned in a game, there’s a decent chance an external app like Overplus has told your opponent to ban that hero.
The app appears to work by identifying your Steam account as you load into a match, and then searching through the Dota API to find your most-played heroes in recent matches. It is possible to turn off third-party sites accessing this data, but that would almost make it impossible to use useful services such as Dotabuff. However, some people claim that even with this setting disabled the Overplus app still shows their data to users.
Overplus has been available for a while and can be picked up for as little as $2.26 a month, so it isn’t exactly hard to get access to or particularly new. However, over recent weeks it seems a lot of the Western community has learned about the app thanks to multiple posts on the Dota 2 sub-Reddit and a few high-profile players starting to use the app.
This has caused a lot of backlash, with many fans on community hubs calling for Valve to ban the software and implement a patch that would make it unable to find previous match data. Some people think that not revealing player names in any way until the draft is over is the solution, which is something League of Legends does.
Given that Overplus gives its users a significant advantage over those who do not have the app, it should be banned by Valve. However, given that this software appeared after a previous ban that took out the same functionality on apps like Overwolf, it will likely continue to be a cat-and-mouse game between the cheat makers and Valve until the latter implements a solution where there is no way to find this data.
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