Valve has banned more than 40 pro Dota 2 players from China and Southeast Asia, and removed five teams from the upcoming Dota Pro Circuit, in response to accusations of cheating and match-fixing during the Winter Tour. The bans have thrown the Chinese Dota scene into turmoil, as the rest of the Dota 2 world was just waking up.
Many professional players and community figures from the west were shocked by the news, while others didn’t seem to be overly surprised to see this happening in the region.
One of the first respondents to the news was Dota 2 host Neal “Tsunami” Khandheria, who was live on Twitch at the time of the announcement.
As Tsunami went over the list of Banned players on Liquipedia, the page continued to get updated with new entries. One team in particular, LBZS, caught Tsunami’s eye since the host had suspected them of match-fixing long before their ban.
Tsunami then went for looking for the infamous players of Knights and let out a big “ooof” upon seeing that they were permanently banned while evaluating whether any of the players with one- or two-year punishments had a chance at coming back.
Later in the day, Janne “Gorgc” Stefanovski turned on his stream and received the news from Reddit. The division two player went over the list of banned players, recognizing some of the names before moving on to which teams were removed from the Chinese DPC teams.
“Holy shit, they match fix like crazy in China,” Gorgc said. He was also startled by the fact that two of the banned teams were competing in the Lima Major just a week ago, and seemed surprised by the fact that so much match-fixing could have been going on within the Chinese Dota 2 scene.
