Back in 2013 I was playing Dota 2 and discovered an exploit that would allow you to create accounts that could play ranked very fast.
To unlock ranked, you needed to reach level 13, which took around 80-100 unranked games on average, each lasting 35-40 minutes. So it was a bit of a grind to unlock it. They also offered XP boosters which you could buy from the shop to increase the amount of XP you earn by 75% for the next 3 days. XP boosters also increased the XP earned of all the players in your game, including the enemy team by 20% of the boost it gives to you. So with a 75% booster equipped, everyone in your game would get a 15% boost. During holiday events they would sell special boosters that increased XP by up to 500%, but lasted 500 in-game minutes instead of lasting for a set amount of days. Once activated, they would last until you've played for 500 minutes, even if the holiday event ended in the meantime and the boosters were no longer purchasable. You could also buy boosters when available and use them at a later time. The 20% bonus to other players applied to these big boosters as well, giving everyone in the game an 80% boost, and this stacked so if multiple players had it, you could get 160/240% etc. boost.
Dota 2 also had a "coaching" feature, where you could invite one guy to your party who would be the coach. He would not control any units but would otherwise be like every other player on the team, seeing everything on the map, pinging and chatting with the team. There was no limit on how many coaches could be on a team. Technically if every player played solo and brought a coach, there could be up to 10 coaches in the game. Coaches did not get XP for playing as coaches, and if they had a booster equipped, it would not get depleted. But the secondary bonus from the booster would still be active and everyone in the game would get the 80% boost if the coach had the big booster active.
Dota's matchmaking at the time was pretty simple. You had 3 options to pick - the game mode, server and language. You had around 7-8 game modes, 7-8 servers and 6 languages. The matchmaker would only match you with players who had all 3 set to the same ones as yours, regardless of how long you searched for a match. It would never widen the search to the options that you didn't select. This made it possible to select a combination that literally no other person selected at the time. Pick the least popular game mode, south African server and Portuguese language, and you'd be stuck looking for a match forever. Unless of course, you were running 10 dotas simultaneously and started search with the same settings.
In April 2014, I decided to "invest" in this undiscovered business and went and bought a cheap but still decently powerful quad core PC which I've upgraded with another 4GB ram for a total of 8. I didn't have an extra monitor for it so I connected it to my HDTV that my main PC used and switch between them by changing source. Both my main PC and the new one were able to run about 8 copies of Steam + Dota before crashing. They would become so slow and it would take me around 25 minutes to start up all 8, but they worked. I had to run each in 640x480 windows with abysmally minimal settings that weren't even available in-game and could only be activated with configs containing lots of console commands. The game looked like minecraft and each instance could do around 15 fps. I would keep one instance running in a larger resolution where I would play. Dota had the option where you could share control of your hero with a teammate, who could then control you, which is how I was able to play with all 5 heroes through this one instance. I needed 20 instances though and I could only run 16. Luckily, my mom had some work laptop that she weren't using, which happened to barely be able to run 4 dotas. FPS was 7-8 and it were unplayable, but I could just share control of those 4 to the fifth that was on one of the PCs and still be able to play as that team too. Here's an old photo of the setup:
http://eh.rs/images/mrnUZYaCoe.jpg
So I went and created 20 Steam accounts, 10 being the players, each having their own coach (another 10), that would have the big booster purchased and enabled. Now I had an 800% XP boost that would never expire. I loaded up the 20 dotas, added a coach to each player and started searching with a combination that I thought no one was using. After like 7-8 minutes BAM, 20 match found dialogs, that were actually a bit tricky to all click accept during the 20 second time limit. I clicked accept and they all started loading for who knows how long. Some would crash so I would have to pause the game until they reconnect. Dota allowed you to pause for 30 seconds during which leaver timers wouldn't tick, so someone could take 20 mins to come back and if the game was paused the whole time he still wouldn't be flagged as leaver. And since there was no one to unpause after 30 seconds like in a real game, I could keep it paused for as long as needed. Once everyone was in and not crashing, I would finally start the game. The first game after computers are started could take me up to 40 mins to set up. Following games would load faster and have a much lower crash rate.
Now, I had another challenge, which is to beat the afk detection system, which worked by checking when was the last time your hero gained XP. If more than 5 mins passed without XP, you would automatically abandon the match and be considered a leaver. I had to gather all 10 heroes on the same spot, then had one of them kill neutral creeps repeatedly (furion cliff) so that all 10 would get a small amount of XP and not be flagged as afk. This worked even though there was no input from most of the players. Now I thought I could just leave it like that and the game would last forever since there were no heroes to push. I was surprised to see that the game would actually end on it's own in just around 40 minutes. Creeps would push the whole lanes on their own and eventually enter the enemy base. This still gave me a lot of XP, like 8 regular games, but it was too much work to restart everything every 40 mins.
I changed my strategy a bit. I would take 3 heroes on each side and have them farm up the other 2 on the enemy team for a good 15-20 mins until they would get enough gold to become very strong and be able to hold a lane on their own. I would then position them on each of the 3 entrances for each of the bases and creeps could never enter, prolonging the game indefinitely. The other 4 heroes were positioned near them so that they would grab the XP and not be flagged afk.
In dota, creeps grow stronger every 5 mins. The amount is very little an unnoticeable in a real game, they gain like 2 dmg and 5hp, but this effect never stopped, so over 10 hours they would grow so strong that even the geared up heroes couldn't hold them and would eventually die, ending the game minutes after. Still, my games now lasted 10 or more hours and would give huge amount of player XP, multiplied by 8. That's like 80 hours of regular play and would fill out about half of what's needed to unlock ranked. I would do two of these games per day, one in the morning and another before bed. The next morning, the 10 accounts would have unlocked ranked and were ready to be sold. It was still a decent amount of work since I had to create 10 new Steam accounts every day and set everything up. I used the same 10 coaches with every batch.
Before starting all this, I have checked whether there's a market for these accounts and after a google search found about EpicNPC. When account were ready, I registered my account here and upgraded to Epic Member. I didn't actually think that I would be using the platform after selling all the account that I have, so I used a disposable email to register as well as a random username. At the time, I actually had no idea what the word Integrity meant. I was playing GTA 4 at the time and there was a radio station called Integrity 2.0, which is the first thing that came to mind while I was creating the account. For some reason I wanted to check whether the forum allowed spaces in username, so I put "The Integrity". It did, and my account was created. I got a pending ban after trying to buy epic member since I used a disposable email that anyone could access and this wasn't allowed. I talked with Mike and he changed the email to my main one that I'm still using today.
Got upgraded to Epic Member and started my
first thread for selling "Cheap level 13 accounts". I priced them at $15 each and they sold almost instantly. Nobody could beat my price since most people had to spend 80+ hours of game time to achieve the rank and it simply wasn't worth it to sell that low. Sold the first batch in just 2 days. After making some more in the next few days, I increased the price to $20 since they sold way too easy.
This went on for some time but it didn't last long. Valve started releasing patches that fixed parts of the exploit and made it harder and harder to do this. They fixed the XP boosters so that the part given to other players doesn't work if the player with the booster is a coach. I continued the botting without the coaches and instead bought the regular 3 day 75% booster on each account, bringing the XP rate to just 210%, down from 800%. This made the process 4 times longer. After a while they released another patch that limits the maximum amount of XP you could earn to 90 in-game minutes. So if the game lasted more than 90 minutes, you would still only get XP as if it lasted 90 mins. So doing two 10 hour long games per day was no longer an option. I reverted back to just being afk and letting the game end on it's own after about 40 mins. Now I had to start 7-8 games per day and would still only get like a quarter of the XP needed for ranked. But I didn't give up and continued like this for some time. They then made a patch that targeted sandboxers, so anyone using the program sandboxie to run 10 Steam accounts would get shadowbanned into a separate matchmaking pool where you could only get matched with other shadowbanned players. And since there weren't many of them, this meant that you could never actually find a match, regardless of your settings. I didn't figure this out until I completed a batch, since all 10 accounts would get shadowbanned and I would still find matches among them normally. But as soon as they were ready, they were pretty much useless.
I tried finding alternatives for sandboxie and to my surprise they were none. There was no software that worked in a similar way which could make the same thing possible. I switched to using virtual machines instead. They were a lot more demanding and I could only run about four on each of my two PCs and another two on the laptop. I only needed 10 instances now so this still worked out well. It worked until August that year (in total I was doing this for around 4 months) after which Valve started making further patches that would fight against bots so my accounts started getting shadowbanned again. I tried a few more batches but would get banned every time. I wasn't able to defeat the system this time and eventually gave up.
By this time I gained some decent feedback on my EpicNPC account, around 20-30 and decided that I would continue my business by reselling accounts instead of making botted ones. Decided to keep the username since I eventually found out what it meant and it turned out to be a really good choice for an online merchant. I would try and live up to the name by being honest and fair in every trade that I do. I opened my first
buy thread for buying Dota 2 accounts with specific requirements. Unfortunately, just a week later I also had to open my first
dispute thread, since the very first account that I've bought got recalled. This discouraged me a lot and the $80 loss hit me so hard at the time. I did some research about account recalls and risks when buying accounts and decided to keep buying. Looking back at it now, there were just so many huge red flags that I've missed. I've come a long way.
My future purchases were not as unlucky and I slowly started making some minor profits. I'd sell around 10 accounts per month, making $15 to $20 profits on each. It might seem a little, but at that time $200 in my country was enough to make a living, especially for a 20 year old. I also found a guy from my city who would make accounts for me every month. I knew those were 100% safe so I could charge extra by including generous warranties. My goal was to keep doing reselling until I hit 50 feedback, so that I could apply for the Middleman badge, which was basically just like the current trusted badge except that it also let you open a thread in the MM forums and call yourself a "verified" middleman. I don't know why, but for some reason I saw high potential in that business. And in hindsight I was damn right.
I hit 50 feedback but I still needed one year to pass to get the badge. On April 2015, exactly one year after my registration, I PMed Mike and got the MM badge. I left the Dota 2 market eventually and focused on developing the MM service. I later also had similar experiences with botting when Pokemon GO came out, and later in late 2017 with monetized Youtube channels. But that's a story for another day.
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