Company policy no longer allows manual bans.
Valve is changing its policy on manual bans after a Dota2 match left one Valve employee more than salty and a player with a low priority matchmaking ban. The story was posted over the weekend by Reddit user minijuanjohndoe who reported that he had been banned to low priority matchmaking due to “abandoning games or receiving excessive reports.”
The source of the ban however was a Valve employee playing in the match who apparently simply did not appreciate his suggested tactics. The employee reportedly pulled the “don’t you know who I am” card on the Reddit user and after the match ended he found himself with a matchmaking ban.
When we were pickering with each other about mid. He got tired of fighting with me and told me do you know who your talking to. Check my profile I’m a steam employee.
The employee in question is none other than Sean Vanaman. People may recognize Vanaman as the co-founder of Campo Santo, developer of Firewatch and the company that Valve acquired back in 2018. Vanaman posted an apology admitting that the ban was undeserved and overturned by Valve higher-ups. In addition as a result of this incident Valve will no longer allow employees to apply manual bans period.
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 u/minijuanjohndoe.
This isn’t the first time Sean Vanaman has attempted to leverage his position. In 2017 Vanaman weaponized the DMCA system against streamer Pewdiepie due to racist language used in a PUBG gameplay stream.
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