Valve: «Manual bans won't be allowed anymore altogether»

Author: Hawk Live LLC

Last updated: 05:47, 22.12.2025

There was a big scandal on the English-language Reddit Dota 2. A user with the nickname minijuanjohndoe complained that he was in a ranked match with a Valve employee who plays under the nickname svanaman. At some point, svanaman got angry and, abusing his position, absolutely groundlessly sent the player account to Low Priority, due to the fact that they had different views on the game situation.

So can employees just send you to low priority for telling the team to let mid-tower go and he just thinks it's a bad idea.

After much discussion, Valve's representative svanaman, whom the player accused, confirmed in a post the truthfulness of minijuanjohndoe's words and apologized:

The team looked into this case, and concluded the user clearly did not deserve the ban. 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. That has been the team's informal policy in the past, but it has clearly failed in this case. It won't remain informal going forward -- manual bans like this won't be allowed anymore altogether. And sincere apologies to user minijuanjohndoe.