Dota team disqualified for macros

[spartaman64]

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When Juan “Atuun” Ochoa was accused of cheating at Dota 2, he was playing one of its most complicated heroes, a grotesque-looking gnome who can clone himself, trying to help his team win the South American qualifiers for the 2018 International. Ochoa’s actions resulted in his team being disqualified, its dreams of attending August’s $14.7 million prize pool tournament shattered. The team denies any cheating took place

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Ochoa, playing as the hero Meepo, looked to be activating the characters’ Poof ability way too quickly. Poof lets one Meepo teleport to another Meepo, dealing damage in a small area of effect both where he started from and where he ends up. If used when all of them are in the same place, it can cripple opponents nearby. The catch is that .all of Meepo’s clones have to be controlled individually, including when they use Poof, meaning that even the most skilled playerswill have some delay in trying to activate the ability across all of them.

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A Reddit user named caiovigg decided to investigate and, after looking at the match’s combat log, saw that each version of Meepo was tagged as having used the ability at the exact same moment.

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The team contends that the odd behavior was not caused by a script running in the background, but rather one setup using button-binding software that comes with the Razer Synapse mouse Ochoa was using. This could also have been against the tournament’s rules, but Thunder Predator doesn’t believe that these special button bindings gave them an unfair advantage.

I think I know of the Razer Synapse feature he is talking about and it's definitely a macro he's using. Just because it's a feature of the Razer software doesn't change that. And I don't see how they can argue that it isn't giving him an advantage since you can string a bunch of inputs together with 0ms delay in between.  

 

https://kotaku.com/dota-2-team-disqualified-after-allegedly-testing-positi-1827062150

[ScratchCat]

Unless they are providing each person with identical and restricted kit this is bound to happen, potentially unnoticed.

[Paranoid Kami]

It's cheating if one button does multiple actions.

[Cheezdoodlez]

Yeah that button binding thing in Razer Synapse can do many things.. Create macros for example. Which he obviously created if said commands requires more than one button to be pressed...

Not sure how this is tech news though. 

[PlayStation 2]

Womp womp.

[Mr.Meerkat]

Reminds me of how jump smoke scripts eventually got banned in CS torneys. 

I personally think that its not "cheating" however, but it did give them an unfair advantage so IMO, a warning like kicking them out of the tourney (like what's happened) is more than fair but if a ban was handed out for using macros, that would probably be a little too far. 

 

1 hour ago, ScratchCat said:

Unless they are providing each person with identical and restricted kit this is bound to happen, potentially unnoticed.

The problems with that is that at least with FPS pros, they use very specific configs from different key configs and resolutions to different mouses and sensitivities so even if you restricted hardware, restricting software (at least game configs wise) would be a little hard to do as the last thing tourney orgs want is players to spend half a hour in setting up their configs, before every single game. 

[TopHatProductions115]

This is why I don't play competitively. Too many rules/restrictions. Can't use this, can only do this at X time, etc. Just play the dang game  

[Eaglerino]

21 minutes ago, TopHatProductions115 said:

This is why I don't play competitively. Too many rules/restrictions. Can't use this, can only do this at X time, etc. Just play the dang game  

Errrrr what? The competitive gaming rules are literally just use your mouse, keyboard, and the game itself. Don't use third party software to affect your gameplay in any way whatsoever. Not that complicated

[ItsMitch]

They broke the rules, their fault, they missed out on TI8, going to hurt them, but oh well. 

[mynameisjuan]

Why use macros? I thought these games judged skill on how fast can I pound keys on my keyboard

[EPENEX]

I'm not familiar too well with mobas but I can see how macros could be a problem. If you can set it with ingame commands though, like how you can set space to do a crouch jump with alias's in cs:go, then it should be allowed.

[Teddy07]

I remember meepo the gnome from Warcraft 3 dota.

[TopHatProductions115]

So, macros = bad?

[spartaman64]

1 minute ago, TopHatProductions115 said:

So, macros = bad?

If you set one input to a button it's probably fine but when you set a string of inputs to a button is when it becomes illegal

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

27 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Errrrr what? The competitive gaming rules are literally just use your mouse, keyboard, and the game itself. Don't use third party software to affect your gameplay in any way whatsoever. Not that complicated

It's hard to say. Sometimes things are broken in such odd ball ways they could become an advantage. Sort of reminds me of this rant.

 

[Eaglerino]

Just now, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

It's hard to say. Sometimes things are broken in such odd ball ways they could become an advantage. Sort of reminds me of this rant.

 

It's not that hard actually. Most every game from Runescape to WoW to shooters to MOBAs especially don't want you using third party software to assign 3 button presses to a single button press. This is very clearly stated in the rules of the game of what will and won't get you banned

[Taf the Ghost]

19 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

They broke the rules, their fault, they missed out on TI8, going to hurt them, but oh well. 

Unlikely they'd have won the Bo5 to get through.

 

Also, Atun had actually made videos about setting up macros.

 

Since most don't know the details of Dota 2, a Reddit user noticed that Atun was able to perform some tasks on a hero called "Meepo" instantaneously. Because of the way the game interface works, this isn't possible without some form of scripting. Part of the response from Atun's team, while seemingly belligerent, tone-deaf or whiny, needs to be understood that if this was done via some 3rd party Client-injecting program, the Team would have potentially gotten Lifetime bans from Valve tournaments. 

 

The penalty was the correct one. Being able to accelerate certain parts of the hero Meepo gives advantages that are against the rules in Professional Competitive. The issue had come up before, and 3rd party tools are not allowed, but this wasn't something horribly malicious. "Unfair advantage" would probably be the best wording.

[BachChain]

I don't play DotA, but most source games have built-in alias support.

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

The problems with that is that at least with FPS pros, they use very specific configs from different key configs and resolutions to different mouses and sensitivities so even if you restricted hardware, restricting software (at least game configs wise) would be a little hard to do as the last thing tourney orgs want is players to spend half a hour in setting up their configs, before every single game. 

Some sort of inspection/randomized screening of software against known cheats/macros would seem the only solution then, otherwise one could simply bind multiple actions to multiple buttons, then rewire the mouse somehow to simulate each button press at the same time. This would then come to the definition of a macro, is software only cheating or would soldering together keys also count?

[Christophe Corazza]

He might just have really really really fast fingers 

[Zodiark1593]

29 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

Some sort of inspection/randomized screening of software against known cheats/macros would seem the only solution then, otherwise one could simply bind multiple actions to multiple buttons, then rewire the mouse somehow to simulate each button press at the same time. This would then come to the definition of a macro, is software only cheating or would soldering together keys also count?

Hmm, a specially made keyboard with jumpers underneath to allow for Macros that cannot be screened by software would be an interesting product...

 

*starts plotting evil plan*

[Trixanity]

1 hour ago, Eaglerino said:

It's not that hard actually. Most every game from Runescape to WoW to shooters to MOBAs especially don't want you using third party software to assign 3 button presses to a single button press. This is very clearly stated in the rules of the game of what will and won't get you banned

WoW actually has built-in macro support. It can't automate actions for you as such though. First of all you're limited by a global cooldown for each action you do. So you can't push one button and cast 10 spells at the same time or subsequently in automatic fashion but you can make a macro that casts a string of spells in a particular order for each time you press that button (eg button1; spell1, button1;spell2, button1;spell3), so you could technically play the game with one button (if we exclude the mouse buttons from that equation) if you wanted to and it has been done.

 

You can however do multiple actions within a restricted ruleset. You can for example equip weapons, target someone and cast a spell while saying something in chat all with a single button press - partly because only the spell will trigger a cooldown.

Essentially the rules are you have to play the game yourself; no automation.

Same goes for the built-in addon support: no automation but depending on the addon a large advantage can be had versus someone who doesn't use any. It's all about respecting the boundaries of the game without exploiting it.

 

No external software allowed of course or rather: not one that exploits or breaks the game (and of course not one that automates actions).

[jagdtigger]

I dont think using macros are equivalent to cheating, there is a ton of free software that lets you do this. So there is no unfair advantage in using a resource that is accessible to anyone.

[Eaglerino]

3 hours ago, Trixanity said:

WoW actually has built-in macro support. It can't automate actions for you as such though. First of all you're limited by a global cooldown for each action you do. So you can't push one button and cast 10 spells at the same time or subsequently in automatic fashion but you can make a macro that casts a string of spells in a particular order for each time you press that button (eg button1; spell1, button1;spell2, button1;spell3), so you could technically play the game with one button (if we exclude the mouse buttons from that equation) if you wanted to and it has been done.

 

You can however do multiple actions within a restricted ruleset. You can for example equip weapons, target someone and cast a spell while saying something in chat all with a single button press - partly because only the spell will trigger a cooldown.

Essentially the rules are you have to play the game yourself; no automation.

Same goes for the built-in addon support: no automation but depending on the addon a large advantage can be had versus someone who doesn't use any. It's all about respecting the boundaries of the game without exploiting it.

 

No external software allowed of course or rather: not one that exploits or breaks the game (and of course not one that automates actions).

I'm only talking about third party

[Misanthrope]

Isn't it the point of competition to have skill-only, non-assisted competition?

 

I'm surprised some are even entertaining that this kind of thing would be ok to do: this is why we watch: to watch some Korean guys play at 300+ APM not to watch some guy endorse Razer cheating products.