B8 coach Mag is now pleading for a reprieve.
Valve has banned countless players in the most recent wave, and there’s no free pass for one pro Dota 2 coach. B8 coach Andrey "Mag" Chipenko is now banned from the game as a result of using Overplus. Most players are celebrating the ban wave and laughing at its deserving victims. However, his particular situation might not be so clear-cut.
Valve has finally banned Overplus, a third-party Dota 2 draft assistant that was right on the edge of cheating. The program instantly analyzed opponents’ accounts and could identify their best heroes so the user could ban them. It could also peg players as boosters, smurfs, and account buyers. Overplus would even tell which players were on win and loss streaks. All of this information gave a clear unfair advantage, and Valve has previously banned similar programs like Stratz+.
Pros and personalities alike called for a ban for weeks, and Dota 2’s developer has finally followed through. This resulted in an undisclosed number of banned accounts, with multiple pro Dota 2 players and at least one coach affected. One of the highest-profile victims is B8’s Mag, which currently fields superstar Danil "Dendi" Ishutin.
The coach isn’t the only big name caught in the ban wave. Here’s a short list from Ben “Noxville” Steenhuisen of some pro players caught in the sweep.
- Yegor ".Ark" Zhabotinskii
- Mirlan "Le don" Kozhombaev
- Yaroslav "Limitless" Parshin
- Yukatheo "you_K" Widjaja
- Bekzhan "b1kA" Jandirov
- Jiang "HuiHui" Yixin
- Musthofa “jikroy” Pamungkas
- Lei "SangSang" Yipei
- Chen "imitator" Ren
- Maykol "MonHty" Ramos
- Juan "Timo" Cruz
- Aldair “James” Montoya
- Wen “TOKIDO” Chengzhi
- Azamat "Samsam" Baitasov
- Dmitry “zenica” Pluzhnyk
- Tsogtjargal “valky~” Oyunbaatar
- Vyacheslav “asdekor_r” Ignatiev
B8 Dota 2 coach Mag banned, asks for pardon from Valve
While it's easy to point and laugh at most of the banned players, one has stepped forward to apologize and ask for his ban to be overturned.
On January 10, the day after his ban, B8 coach Mag issued a social media post explaining the situation. He claimed that he only downloaded the program to see what it could do. Mag claims to have never played a single match with the software, only using it to scope out enemy pro teams during practice games.
Mag claims to have over 50,000 hours in Dota 2, making him one of the most active players of all time. He also has an impressive professional career, winning ESL One New York 2015 with Vega Squadron and attending The Frankfurt Major the same year. While he did not specifically ask Valve to overturn the ban, time will tell if the company chooses to respond to this special case.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for the latest updates on all things Dota 2.