Cover-Credits:
The Eastern European (EEU) region continues to make headlines during the off-season, as the ten recently banned players from the region including ex-Virtus.pro (VP) carry Kamil "Koma`" Biktimirov, released a conjoined statement admitting their mistakes. As of late, ten EEU players have been permanently banned by Valve due to account sharing and impersonating other teams during tournaments. Additionally, it was suspected that some of the players have been engaging in match-fixing or a 322 in Dota terms.
These actions undermine the competitive circuit's integrity and the audience’s experience, and are in violation of Valve's competitive regulations, which impose permanent bans on players that engage in such misconduct.
Players admitted that they had hired a programmer to deceive investigators & tournament officials
In a conjoined statement for Cyber.Sports.ru, the recently banned Dota 2 players from Luna Gaming and S9 explained how they avoided punishment following an initial investigation by D2CL (Dota 2 Champions League) admins back in October 2022. They also shed some light on other details of the account sharing, which led to the permanent ban by Valve.
Viktor "SuperNova" Galichkin, one of the banned players did most of the explaining as he started off by saying that their manager and former S9 teammate, Lilskrip was the mastermind behind the situation as the players were playing in the D2CL Season 15 back in October 2022.
“At that point, Luna Gaming had decent results in various tournaments, including a few previous seasons of D2CL. Lilskrip, both manager at Luna and S9 player, convinced D2CL admins that Luna Gaming would start from the playoffs and S9 would take their place in the group. That's how S9 got to the tournament.”
However due to problems inside and outside of the game, both of the mentioned teams decided to swap rosters for their future matches during the tournament with the mutual agreement of splitting the prize money. Former Luna Gaming & VP carry Kamil "Koma`" Biktimirov was initially against both teams’ decisions to swap rosters, however was persuaded otherwise.
"And when some of the guys from "S9" and Luna Gaming agreed, the guys wrote me an offer to set it all up. And I ****ing just reacted negatively. But the guys said not to rush the decision, persuaded with arguments that we have nothing to play for and we needed more practice, that we are friends and we will have nothing for it".
Once their opponents started to get tipped off that they were against other players from an anonymous source, Luna Gaming and S9 were suspected of unfair play in the match against NoSorry by D2CL staff officials.
“We logged into S9 accounts against NoSorry, won the first map, and during the draft of the second one, the opponents refused to play against us. That was because somebody DM'ed Y0nd [our opponent’s position 4] that we were using an observer [cheating method in which someone gets access to the observer feed, usually buys it]. Of course, there was no observer.” said Koma` when talking about being found out by D2CL staff.
Following the situation, D2CL staff officials started their own investigation on both S9 and Luna Gaming. While they wanted to come clean at first, all of the players involved were worried about being banned permanently to the point where they faked evidence of their involvement by hiring a programmer. D2CL didn't find any wrongdoings and officially confirmed that Luna Gaming and S9 weren't cheating or sharing accounts at the time.
“D2CL admins started to message us to check our logs and look at who logged into the accounts. We didn't know what to do. We were ready to receive a ban, but then someone got the idea to hire a programmer to change the webpage code and make it look like it were our logs. We decided to use that opportunity instead.” said Supernova.
However, two months later their past finally caught up with them as all ten players, that were previously from both Luna Gaming & S9, were banned by Valve. While most of the players apologized for their mistakes, they also urged other professional players to not repeat their mistakes in the future before calling out tournament organizers to enhance their security protocols.
“We want to help close the breaches and vulnerabilities of high-level competition defenses. D2CL is a regular league with a $50,000 prize pool. Doesn't seem like an underground event in the LAN cafe for a case of beer, does it? But, as you see, the players did share the accounts and evaded the check-outs. We hope that Epic Esports Events and other TOs (Tournament Organizers) will use this case as an example. It would be way harder to do if these events had more strict voice-checks, web cameras, and similar measures.”
[transcriptions via Cyber.Sports.ru, translations via DeepL]
Following the release of the statement, many believed that most of the bans were justified. However, many professional Dota 2 players including OG’s Artem "Yuragi" Golubiev & Team Spirit's Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk came to the defense of Koma` by saying that the player deserves a second chance.
Additionally, all of the banned players requested Valve to reconsider their punishment on Danil "illusion" Grzhevka as the player was unaware of the account sharing.
