After a surprising Dota 2 transfer window on the books, rosters are officially locked in place, and the 2023 DPC season has kicked off with the open qualifiers tournaments. Several promising youngsters and veterans alike have been looking to give it their all and make it to the Closed Qualifiers stage, however as usual some of them tried to cheat the system. Earlier this week, Valve started a process to take action against 10 professional players for account sharing. Within that list is a member of the brand-new Virtus Pro squad.
The announcement of the situation was posted through PGL’s official Twitter social media account, as the organizer showed the list of players who were officially banned from current and future Valve-sponsored events, effective immediately.
Kamil “Koma`” Biktimirov of Virtus Pro’s newly created roster, Aslan “Paradise” Vadilov of Felt, Sergey “[T]SA” Timchenko ex B8 and Team Empire, Danil “illusion” Grzhevka part of Ancient Tribe, and Viktor “SuperNova” Galichkin of HYDRA are just a couple of the high profile names that will no longer be able to participate in Dota 2 official tournaments.
On top of not being able to be part of any future Valve-hosted events, the players on this list will also be banned from any kind of PGL events. The 2 tournament organizers manage almost 95 percent of the entire Dota 2’s competitive environment, so technically the players we mentioned will only be able to participate in small tournaments that do not have any sort of connections with Valve or PGL if they even decide to continue their Dota 2 competitive career after the ban.
The players were punished due to account sharing and impersonating other professional players, meaning some were attempting to assist other teams to punch their ticket to the Open Qualifiers by illicitly playing under their roster names, while others were punished due to lending out their accounts for the whole charade.
Through the process, Valve also banned South American player, Gianluca “Migi” Mendoza, for an entirely different situation, match-fixing.
All DPC leagues are yet to officially fully start, as the Dota 2 scene is currently underway with the first step which are the qualifiers, and it looks like Valve is more than prepared to level the playing field into this season compared to the previous instances of the competition. The 11 total bans from the start of the investigation speak volumes in regard to Valve’s commitment to competitive integrity, as the developer is normally criticized as being detached from the community unless a huge scandal happens before they notice it.
We hope Valve continues to investigate their own competitive scene to the fullest, so situations like this are punished again in the future.
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