Dota 2: MinD_ContRoL publicly apologizes for discriminating against Russians

Drama hit Team Liquid over the weekend, when a screenshot of sensitive comments from offlaner MinD_ContRoL surfaced online. After receiving a response from the Dota 2 community in general and the CIS community in particular, Mind_Control publicly apologized on Twitter, followed by a dispatch from Liquid CEO Victor Goosens. Goosens said the player will be punished for his actions.

The photo above, originally posted on r/Dota2 Reddit, shows Mind_Control discriminating against Russians in a pub game. The response from the community was strong, and some people demanded that he be disqualified from TI or removed from the team. Community members also expressed their feelings on Twitter directly to him.

In a post on Twitlonger a day later, Mind_Control accepted responsibility for its actions and asked for forgiveness from the community.

Today, I did something very stupid, I told my teammates in the game something terrible, unacceptable and I have no excuse for this behavior.

At first, I didn’t realize what I just said, but when I saw it on reddit, I felt nervous and embarrassed. Today and the game I just played today makes me self-assess how I will behave in the game from now on. I promise I won’t let you see this from me again. I understand my responsibility to the Dota community, and I admit I’ve said and done bad things about this beautiful game (which I don’t deserve). I will try my best to be a better person in my games, instead of a ‘villain’ like me today.

Apologies to everyone, and especially the Russian community. I hope you will continue to post articles about this behavior. I will try my best to change and always keep a positive attitude in my games. I want to be a worthy role model for the community.

This article was later prompted by CEO Victor Goosens. In it, Goosens said that Liquid will give the penalty to Mind_Control and that the fine will be chosen by everyone to donate to which charity. Goosens ends like this:

The changes required more than just a gesture, and we focused on educating each player about being role models and the impact their words could have on the community around them. We hope we can make the positive change that our fans deserve.

Both of the above posts have received positive praise from the community, but there are still some people asking for Mind_Control: either to be disqualified from The International, or to be suspended from the competition by Team Liquid. However, this is unlikely, as Liquid has made it clear that they will work with the MC to educate him, rather than suspend him. As for the disqualification from TI, this is unprecedented from Valve, but they have yet to do anything about the players about the comments that are not ‘acceptable’. In April, iceiceice was banned on Twitch for making racist comments on the stream. Since then, he has attended many LAN tournaments sponsored by Valve without any consequences from the developer.

Some people in the community said they don’t understand why people are making such a big deal out of it. To understand why the Russian community reacted like this, you need to look back at Russian history. Russia was one of the countries that suffered the most during World War II, and it is estimated that more than 26 million Russians died as a result of the war. To this day, some Russians still can’t forget it, and every year Russia remembers the war with those affected by it.

When reading the responses of Mind_Control and Victor Goosens, some will have the feeling that the player still doesn’t really understand how seriously offensive his comment is. In Twitlonger, it gives the impression that someone has accepted forgiveness for his behavior – he begins by saying that there is no reason to justify his behavior. Often you will see the words “no reason” to deliberately justify your actions. And we don’t see any obvious repentance in it yet. But in general, he will be punished for his actions, which may not stop at just losing money. MC and Team Liquid are very popular in the CIS community, but with this incident, we can’t foresee the damage the team’s brand and this player’s reputation will suffer.