Chongqing authorities have announced the final words, banning 2 DOTA players from joining the Chongqing Major. The incident happened when the 2 made some racial remarks earlier this November.
Racist remarks in both public and competitive scene
Complexity (CoL) player “Skemberlu” Rolen Andrei Gabriel Ong appeared to make a racial comment towards the Chinese team RNG (Royal Never Give Up), competing against them in Dreamleague Minor season 10.
Also, “Kuku” Carlo Palad, a Pinoy player from TNC did the same thing in a public match.
While Complexity did punish Skemberlu, Valve didn’t have any response to this in a reasonable period. Because of that, the community of Chinese players became very upset. However, at the moment it appeared that both the organizers and the government have taken their own actions regarding this.
Further tweets on the racist incident
Skemberlu and Kuku received the ban issues, according to KBBQ (Jack Chen) and Cyborgmatt (Matthew Bailey), the manager of Forward Gaming and Team Secret’s Director of Operations, respectively.
“It's not a rumor, the municipal government met to discuss after outrage and anger grew over what people in China felt was an inadequate or delayed response and reportedly came to the organizer saying: "this event cannot have these two players," Jack said in a tweet 5 days ago.
Matthew also confirmed this hours later: “It's not a rumor. Kuku and Skemberlu are both banned from attending the Chongqing Major. Col and TNC were both contacted prior to the event and were asked if they wanted to kick the players.”
Therefore, the 2 players can’t participate in the upcoming major in Chongqing, whether their team qualifies or not. Recently, TNC has delivered the punishment for Kuku in a public statement. Although, it is likely the Chinese authorities would still keep their bans for both of them.
Valve’s response prior to the Chongqing Major
At the moment, we’re still not sure whether Valve would step in and deal with this situation or not. Valve, though, did a response to ‘BurNing‘ Xu Zhilei - a Chinese DOTA legend - instead of communicating with the whole community in China. This is probably due to the respected status of BurNing that allowed better interaction between the parties.
Last year, Valve did take a drastic measure where they disqualified Galaxy Battles’ major status when they failed to meet player’s privacy standard and additional concerns. Moreover, the community has expressed their concerns regarding should the Chinese authorities be able to disqualify players. This won’t be a surprise since The International 2019 – the largest tournament in 2019, will be in Shanghai, China. Right now, the Chongqing Major is going on according to the schedules.
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