A Valve employee accused of abusing his privileges has apologized to the Dota 2 player he manually banned over a gameplay disagreement. Sean Vanaman, a co-creator of Firewatch who transitioned to Valve when his company, Campo Santo, was acquired in June 2018, isn't listed as a developer for Dota 2; but it's clear that he has admin privileges in the popular MOBA - maybe even one too many.

Dota 2 uses a matchmaking metric depending on a player's behavior score, a system built in response to the game's high number of problematic accounts, and prioritizes players with a high score for non-disruptive behavior. Players who score low on the metric are sent to a low-priority pool, which restricts the player to Single Draft game mode, and prevents the player from earning item drops, achievements, quests, battle points, and seasonal rewards. Players normally get sent to the low-priority pool for disruptive behavior including abandoning or not participating in an active game, or being reported by teammates for negative in-game behavior.

Related: DOTA 2: Over 40,000 Accounts Banned By Valve For Matchmaking Abuse

The player Vanaman sent to the pool, minijuanjohndoe, reported their ban on Reddit, with the receipts to prove their otherwise consistently high behavior score, and the offending match ID. They further alleged that they were sent to low priority over a disagreement with Vanaman over in-game tactics. Vanaman later issued an apology to minijuanjohndoe on their original Reddit post, and acknowledges that the ban was unwarranted and that even if it were justified, manual banning is "not a good idea."

 

This isn't the first time Vanaman has been embroiled in controversy surrounding bans. In 2017, after streamer PewDiePie dropped a racial slur during a livestream of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Vanaman issued DMCA copyright takedowns on any of the streamer's videos that contained footage from Firewatch, while urging other developers to follow. While Vanaman's heart was definitely in the right place, the community viewed the action as an abuse of the DMCA, and the resulting blowback was swift. So while it's clear that Vanaman values player integrity within the community, his recent tiff with minijuanjohndoe may demonstrate that power corrupts.

It's impossible to ascertain how many, if any, other players received manual bans in Dota 2 in the past from admins or devs with admin privileges, or if this is an issue limited to Valve titles or beyond. Dota 2 doesn't have the best history in dealing with toxicity, which may be why the manual ban system exists in the first place. But minijuanjohndoe's post may bring other wrongfully banned players out of the woodwork, especially since the response they received directly from Vanaman proves that the developers do pay attention to what goes down on Reddit and other major gaming forums. But even if the Dota 2 team has given them up as Vanaman promised, the idea of admins and devs having manual banning privileges in MOBAs that go largely unchecked is certainly one that should raise some community eyebrows.

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Source: minijuanjohndoe/Reddit