Dota 2 News

A Valve employee has apologised for misusing his power to manually suspend a Dota 2 player following an in-game disagreement.

As spotted by Dot Esports, Reddit user u/minijuanjohndoe posted yesterday claiming that he had been given to low-priority status by a Valve developer after the pair argued during a match. The employee then told minijuanjohndoe "do you know who you are talking to" before using his position at Valve to manually suspend him and list him as low-priority. It now transpires that the employee is Sean Vanaman, who works for the studio Campo Santo that was recently acquired by Valve. Vanaman has posted an apology to the player, reversed his suspension, and claims that Valve will now be removing the ability to manually ban players entirely following the incident.

"The team looked into this case, and concluded the user clearly did not deserve the ban," Vanaman writes. "Even if the user did deserve a ban however, we all think it's clear that manually banning users is not a good idea because of how hard it is to be objective in Dota games that you are in. My mistake in this case being a sterling example. As employees, we should have no special privilege when playing Dota."

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We've all been there - a match where something's gone wrong, or you end up frustrated with your teammates. But I doubt you've ever had the power to get someone banned over a gameplay disagreement, and it seems one Valve employee was unable to restrain themselves from doing so, as Firewatch co-creator Sean Vanaman has now apologised for giving out an unwarranted manual ban.

The situation began when Dota 2 player minijuanjohndoe posted on Reddit claiming they'd been sent to low priority - essentially a temporary matchmaking penalty - simply for suggesting a tactic the Valve employee didn't like (via Dot Esports). "So can employees just send you to low priority for telling the team to let mid tower go and he just thinks its a bad idea?," minijuanjohndoe asked, having discovered he'd been bickering with a Valve employee during their argument over tactics. minijuanjohndoe provided an image of their behaviour score to prove their innocence, and later gave the name of the player who had given them the penalty - Vanaman.

"The team looked into this case, and concluded the user clearly did not deserve the ban," Vanaman said in response to the post. "Even if the user did deserve a ban however, we all think it's clear that manually banning users is not a good idea because of how hard it is to be objective in Dota games that you are in. My mistake in this case being a sterling example. As employees, we should have no special privilege when playing Dota."

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