Three StarCraft players have been suspended from StarCraft’s World Championship Series (WCS) Europe for the remainder of Season 1 in 2015 for violating Blizzard’s WCS Player Handbook and Battle.net Account conduct policies.
The first two being “GunGFuBanDa” and “jeysen”, who were suspended for “discussing potential match fixing”, and are now out for the remainder of WCS Europe – Season 1.
Blizzard suspended both players even though they “did not come to an agreement and portions of the conversation may have been in jest, it is clear that both players negotiated potential match fixing.” GunGFuBanDa debatably got off lightly, as he was the one who initiated the deal, while jeysen was the one who forwarded the full conversation and proof to the admins.
The situation does remain a little grey though, as the conversation still shows jeysen participating in negotiations, meaning there is a chance that had GunG dropped the $1,000, there would have been potential match fixing. A fair judgment call from Blizzard, and a very (very) small amount of credit to jeysen for at least bringing it to an admin’s attention – regardless of the reasoning.
The likely more prominent suspension was handed down to Terran player Steffen “Lillekanin” Hovmand.
Lillekanin was disqualified from the qualifiers for, according to Blizzard, “violating multiple policies”. The word ‘multiple’ there being rather loose on details, as Blizzard merely stated the code sections he broke from the official WCS Player Handbook (Online Event and Equipment Settings (12.0), Online Tournament Rules (13.0), and Player Code of Conduct (16.0)) but not specific instances.
Some are reporting the core reason is he attempted, and succeeded, to stall the match (which would wind up being over four hours long) by using an early mass Raven build to keep the Zerg opponent at bay, and then floating the Terran buildings away once his supply had been drained.
However, during this incredibly lengthy match against “ZhuGeLiang” (who was not suspended), Lillekanin would tab out of the game and read Twitter and Twitch chat – breaking WCS’ rules on leaving a game in progress – which was said to contain information about his opponent’s stream. After this some viewers of Lillekanin’s stream reported he had his donations set to be automatically read out, with some clearly giving him advice/hints on ZhuGeLiang’s stream via the donation messages.
As if that weren’t enough, there is a moment when Lillekanin chose to throw his entire army at the enemy while typing into the in-game text chat: “I’M A TERRORIST” followed by “jihad”, which definitely breaks the code stating the ban of “profanity and/or racist comments in game chat”, as well as a disgusting and disgraceful display by Lillekanin.
Personally, I believe Steffen got what was coming to him. The stalling could be argued to be more of a game balancing issue than a fault of his, but the flagrant breaking of the other codes of conduct is stupid and at times downright unacceptable in WCS.
All three suspended players will remain on disciplinary probation for the remainder of the 2015 WCS Seasons.
Official suspension from Blizzard: http://wcs.battle.net/sc2/en/articles/wcs-europe-disciplinary-action-jan-13-2015