A player played the MOBA DotA 2 together with an employee of developer Valve. However, as he ignored the instructions of the employee, he was banned as a “punishment”. The matter created waves and had far-reaching consequences.
What happened? A player known on reddit under the name Minijuanjohndoe had the honor of being on a team with a Valve employee named Sean “Vanaman” Vanaman. But this turned out to be a disadvantage.
Because Minijuanjohndoe stated that the team should go for “Mid-Tower”. Vanaman saw it differently, but apparently his instructions were not followed.
This in turn led to the Valve employee quickly “punishing” Minijuanjohndoe with a ban to the low-priority list after the match. This is where players end up who either intentionally leave games or are negatively reported multiple times.
But Minijuanjohndoe was unaware of any wrongdoing and posted the case on reddit. This had several consequences afterward.
Valve employee apologizes and developers take consequences
How did the matter end? A day later, Vanaman came forward and officially apologized to Minijuanjohndoe. He reacted incorrectly and the ban against Minijuanjohndoe was in no case justified:
The team investigated this case and concluded that the user clearly did not deserve the ban. But even if the user had deserved a ban, we all agree that it is clear that it is not a good idea to manually ban users, because it is so difficult to be objective in the DotA games you are in. My mistake in this case was a good example. As employees, we should not have special privileges when playing DotA.
This has been the informal policy of the team in the past, but in this case, it clearly failed. It will not remain informal in the future – manual bans like this will not be allowed at all anymore. And a sincere apology to user Minijuanjohndoe.
Sean Vanaman via reddit
The misconduct of Sean Vanaman has likely far-reaching consequences for the entire dev team, who until now could manually ban people at their discretion. But as it tends to get very emotional in heated battles in MOBAs like DotA, this option has now been abolished for all employees according to Vanaman.
Who is Vanaman anyway? Sean Vanaman has been in the spotlight before, having clashed with YouTube streamer PewDiePie and his fans. As the YouTuber unabashedly used racist terms in the stream of Firewatch in 2017, Vanaman ensured that PewDiePie received copyright strikes on YouTube due to the game Fire Watch.
The studio behind Firewatch was co-founded by Vanaman and is now part of Valve. However, at that time, the matter with the strikes led to PewDiePie’s fans bombarding the game with negative reviews on Steam. You can read the whole story on our partner site GameStar.
Are you interested in a new game genre that you have never tried before? Our MeinMMO author Maik Schneider has an idea for you: Try playing a MOBA! You will learn why this is the case and what the advantages of MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are in our extensive article on MeinMMO.
