Three Reflections on a Glass: The Permanent Ban and the Fracture Inside PUBG Esports

On the night of September 24, a user on the Hupu forum posted a still frame from a livestream. In the image was a glass of water beside a keyboard, and on the curved surface of the glass, three streaks of light arranged in a row. Three streaks. Not two. Not one. For thousands of PUBG followers across Asia, those three streaks were enough to build an accusation: three monitors, three viewpoints, one player seeing more than the rules allow.

People called it evidence. I call it a mirror held up to ourselves.

After many years sitting in front of a screen watching tournaments, I have learned one thing: football and esports differ in speed, but they are alike in that people always want a conclusion faster than the truth permits. On a pitch, a referee blows a whistle and the stands roar within three seconds. Online, a screenshot can do exactly the same thing — except the roar lasts longer, travels further, and no whistle is loud enough to stop it.

Esports is a mirror held up to modern football: faster, younger, and lonelier. And on that night of September 24, the mirror reflected something nobody wanted to look at directly.

The story, in its rawest form, involves four names. KRAFTON — the publisher of PUBG, the one who writes the rules and hands down the sentences. Himass and TanVuu — two Vietnamese players, members of AG.AL, the team that had just won an international tournament held in Paris. And Soopi — the one who made the accusation.

According to circulating reports, KRAFTON locked the accounts and permanently banned Himass and TanVuu. The central accusation revolves around what the community calls stream-sniping: during a match, a player watches the opponent's live stream to learn their positions and intentions. This is the most serious class of violation in online competition — it is not cheating inside the game, it is cheating with information, and information is the very thing a battle royale match is built upon.

But this is the point where I want to pause longer than usual.

The context of the incident was not an official tournament. It was a friendly match. There, according to the shared reports, the alleged violation by the two Vietnamese players took place. And the price was permanence. Not a three-month suspension, not a one-season ban, but forever — the end of one person's professional career, and of another's.

During the same period, the community raised a comparison that made the story impossible to close. Gyumin, a player for team DNS, was alleged to have committed a similar act — but not in a friendly match, rather throughout an entire official domestic season. In the report I read, no punishment whatsoever was mentioned for this case.

Let me place the two lines side by side, without further comment.

On one side: an alleged violation in a friendly match, no trophy, no international slot, no major prize money — a permanent ban.

On the other side: an alleged violation throughout an official season — no punishment mentioned at all.

This is the point I consider the true centre of the whole affair, and it does not lie in the three streaks on the glass.

KRAFTON's problem is not that they ban people. The problem is that they do not ban evenly.

In any system of law — sport, jurisprudence, or a video game with million-dollar prizes — legitimacy does not come from severity. It comes from consistency. A harsh verdict can be accepted if every comparable case receives a harsh verdict. A harsh verdict placed beside a silence is no longer a verdict — it becomes a choice.

And when a choice is made between two players from two different countries, public opinion will automatically translate it into another language: the language of differential treatment.

I am not saying KRAFTON treated them differently because of nationality. I am saying they left a gap large enough for others to fill with the worst possible interpretation. In media, that gap is always filled. And it is always filled with the most dramatic version available.

I witnessed this once in my life, in a stadium with 58,000 empty seats. The applause in an empty stadium is the most humane lie football has ever created — and on social media, a publisher's silence carries exactly the same power.

There is a second aspect that is less discussed, and I consider it no less important. It concerns the quality of the evidence.

Three streaks of light on a glass. In the world of digital image forensics, this is the class of evidence most prone to error. Light reflected through the curved surface of glass is distorted. A single monitor can produce multiple streaks if a window behind, a desk lamp, or another device in the room reflects at the right angle. A screenshot that is then compressed, shared, enlarged, and analysed by people without professional software — that is not a forensic process. That is a guessing game.

The circulating content itself indirectly admits this: it does not claim to be proof of cheating, only a suspicious signal, something that should draw attention.

Yet within the community, a suspicious signal became a verdict. Within hours, three streaks became three monitors; three monitors became organised cheating; and organised cheating became grounds for convicting the accuser of hypocrisy.

This is a phenomenon I recognise very clearly after years of writing about sport. In football, fans have VAR to complain about, slow-motion frames to argue over, a referee in the middle of the pitch to blame. In esports, none of that exists in standardised form. There is a publisher making decisions, and there is a community building its own courtroom. The two systems never match.

If Soopi is suspected of using multiple monitors, then yes — that accusation deserves investigation under the same evidentiary standard applied to Himass and TanVuu. Otherwise, so-called competitive integrity is just a stick held at one end.

But I do not want to stop there, because it is too easy. There is a deeper layer in this story that I find far more worth thinking about.

In the comment stream on Hupu, one fan wrote that investors pour millions of dollars into tournaments, that they will lose money if the ecosystem collapses, that this is a problem for an entire industry. Another raised the question of streamers now having followings that surpass professional players, suggesting this might be an internal competition between revenue streams inside the publisher itself.

This is the point I find most interesting, and also the least proven.

People call it a market; I call it a garden where lives are planted. In that garden, two kinds of trees grow side by side. One is the professional player — someone who earns a living by winning tournaments. The other is the streamer — someone who earns a living by being watched. Over the past decade, the second tree has grown far faster. A famous streamer can have a following larger than a world-champion player.

When the structure of money changes, the structure of power changes with it. And when the structure of power changes, people begin to look at one another differently. A professional player looks at a streamer and sees someone who does not need to win in order to survive. A streamer looks at a professional and sees someone protected by rules he does not have. Between those two gazes, an incident like this ignites more easily than anything else.

I do not have enough data to conclude that a commercial motive lies behind the wave of criticism. But I have enough experience to know that in sport, scandals erupting exactly when a group is losing its position are rarely entirely coincidental.

There is one more thing I want to write down, even though it makes me uncomfortable.

A young player's career is built from training nights nobody sees. The sixty-million-pound whirlwind is only passing wind; what remains are the silent training nights. In esports, those nights are longer, quieter, and even less visible than in football. No stands, no chanting, no cameras. Only a room, a screen, and thousands of hours repeating the same reflexes.

Himass and TanVuu walked through those nights. They reached the peak of that sequence of days — a world championship in Paris for team AG.AL. And then, in a moment with no audience, no trophy, nothing at stake, that career stopped.

When an athlete is removed from the game by an administrative decision, what is taken is not only the future. It is the past. Because in sport, the past exists only if it is continued. What you have done only matters if you can still go on doing it. A career halted in the middle is a book torn at its most beautiful page.

This is not a tragedy to be mourned. It is a different kind of loss — the kind that those involved must explain to themselves for years afterward, when no one mentions their names anymore.

The boy who ran on a tightrope is now a guide for new dreams. But a guide can also be forced off the path. And when that happens, the question is no longer who was right and who was wrong. The question is: what did the system do to deserve those who placed their entire youth into it?

So then, from a counter-intuitive angle, I would argue the greatest mistake in this affair belongs to no individual.

Not Himass, if he truly violated the rules. Not TanVuu. Not Soopi, if his accusation has a basis. And not KRAFTON either, if they truly acted according to a rulebook issued in advance.

The mistake lies in the fact that this rulebook was never made public enough for the community to verify its fairness. A disciplinary system has value only when every player knows in advance the penalty for each act, and every case is measured against the same standard. When that standard rests in one hand and no one may see it, every verdict can be doubted — including the correct ones.

That is the price of opacity. And in esports, where most rules are written by the very organisers of the tournament, that price always arrives late but always arrives fully.

I have written about football for more than fifty years. I write the news, but I tell destinies. And the destiny of esports, at this moment, is being written in a way I am not sure its authors have fully anticipated.

Look at how the community responds. One fan calls on Chinese fans to "take action". Another speaks of letting the system collapse. Those statements are not analysis. But they are data. They show that trust is being relocated — from the publisher to the community, from rules to emotions.

And when trust moves, it rarely returns.

In the Euro final at Wembley, I interviewed an English supporter weeping after his team lost on penalties. He told me: we lost because we did not have enough luck, but the team gave us sleepless nights. I have thought about that sentence a great deal while reading the comments about this affair.

In football, fans can forgive a defeat. They can forgive a technical error, a misplaced pass, a saved penalty. What they find hardest to forgive is the feeling that the field is no longer level. Because fairness is the only thing that makes watching a match meaningful.

Esports is standing at exactly that threshold. Not a threshold of money, not a threshold of viewers, but a threshold of trust.

So what should happen next?

I do not wish for an apology. I wish for a document. A publicly published framework of sanctions stating clearly which acts are punished at which level, in which type of tournament, on which evidentiary standard. I wish for Gyumin's case to be reviewed under the same measure — not to add punishment, but to prove that the measure exists. I wish for the accusation against Soopi to be investigated as seriously as any other, because an accuser is not exempt from the very thing he accuses.

And I wish the community to remember that three streaks of light on a glass are not a verdict. They are a question.

The ball does not remember who kicked it; it only remembers the emotions around it. In esports, there is no ball to remember. There are only players, rules, and a community that remembers everything — including things never proven.

I will keep following this story. Not because I think I know who is right. But because I believe the way a sport treats its losers will decide whether it deserves its winners.

And at 67, I have learned that the smallest cracks are often where the light comes in — or where an entire wall begins to fall.

This generation passes on to the next, not technique, but the way to stand up after a defeat. What young PUBG players are learning right now is not how to aim better. It is how to believe in a system that has not yet proven itself worthy of belief.

That is the hardest lesson in any sport. And it has never been taught in any training room.