The ban hammer in esports usually works just fine, but sometimes it works too automatically that it leaves some “unexpected” results.  Just recently, An Overwatch player in China got a permanent ban on his account. And all he did was just writing “Winnie the Pooh” in chat section during an Overwatch match.

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The ban hammer on the poor Chinese player

This Chinese Overwatch player, later on, posted his story of being banned for typing the forbidden phrase to Weibo, a massively popular Chinese social media. Luckily for us, a Reddit user “bata12” posted the translation of the post on Weibo for us to read on Overwatch subreddit:

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The original post from Weibo
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The screen cap of the chat

Based on the screenshots sent by user bata12 from Weibo, it looks like the ban system was an automatic procedure since the ban decision dropped just 3 seconds after the player typed the phrase “Winnie the Pooh” in the chat. This is a really strict policy of the Chinese government. Chine government has tried to block anything related to Winnie the Pooh because this is the source for many memes that related to Chinese president Xi Jinping

About Blizzard, all we can say is that they were just doing their job: strictly obey the law of the country where their gaming is operating. This player has made an appeal, we all hope that he can get his account back.