Valve removed a user-created weapon from online battler Dota 2, an item directly copied to look like a mace from massively multiplayer online role-playing game Aion, the company announced today.

"A user submitted a mace for Dota 2, and based on strong community ratings, the mace was made available in the game as 'Timebreaker' in Sithil's Summer Chest. 24,603 users spent money on keys to open the chest and ultimately receive the mace. Recently it came to our attention that this mace was in fact a copy of a mace from the game Aion," Valve posted on the Steam Community website.

Players who bought the key were issued new weapons as replacements. The user who created the mace was banned and all proceeds from its sale were removed from the player's account.

"As expected, the vast majority of contributions to the Workshop are incredibly creative and fundamentally original. Where that hasn't been true, community reporting has led to the take-down of over 1,400 items from the Workshop to date," wrote Valve.

The company reminded users that IP infringement is unacceptable in the Steam Workshop and encouraged the community to be vigilant in reporting future incidents.

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