Dota 2 pros call for Overplus draft assistant to be banned

Overplus is the newest third-party program ruining your Dota 2 matches, and it's gotten to where players are explicitly asking for it to be banned. Multiple streamers to pro players have called out the program for its unfairness, citing its particularly strong impact in Immortal draft. With multiple people calling for bans, including the original DotaPlus developer, what is Valve to do?

Overplus is a third-party Dota 2 “draft assistant.” The program automatically searches your opponents’ accounts at the start of every draft. It then gives advice on which heroes to pick and ban. Overplus claims to be able to recognize boosted accounts, hero spammers, smurfs, and players on win and loss streaks. This kind of information is impossible for any players to learn before a match, leading to an unfair advantage. 

The latest call to ban Overplus comes from Alliance CEO and TI3 champion Jonathan "Loda" Berg. On Jan. 29, he issued a social media post calling the program “a serious problem” and called for Valve to disable it.

Loda is far from the only player who has beef with the third-party draft coach. Fellow Dota 2 personality Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski called for Overplus to be banned during a recent stream. Several social media posts have called for Overplus to be banned with no response from Valve as well.

The issue even attracted the original developer of DotaPlus, Tsury, who posted a rough timeline of events detailing the history of third-party draft assistants. Even he disavowed Overplus, referring to the program as a “cheat.” 

Most players can shrug their shoulders at the pay-to-win features of Dota Plus, but Overplus makes stack timers look like a joke.

Using Overplus is currently not a bannable offense in Dota 2. However, Valve has repeatedly stated its intent to obscure players’ profile information during the draft. The developer kneecapped similar service Stratz+ in a special update. Notably, the update did not ban players who had previously used it.

Now that Valve has clarified its position on draft assistants, using Overplus carries a serious risk of being banned. The company has used secret honeypot traps to root out cheaters before, and it could be collecting data on Overplus users at this very moment. The only way to keep your account 100% safe is to not use Overplus or similar programs at all.

As Gorgc pointed out in his stream, the true unfairness of the program is that some players have access to information that others don’t. Some players on social media have raised the idea of making Overplus’ features available to everyone by adding them to the client. Considering Valve’s previous actions against Stratz+, the company would probably ban Overplus rather than give it to everyone.

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