Dota 2 and StarCraft II match-fixing rulings, by who issued them

Fifteen Dota 2 and StarCraft II integrity rulings, from six issuing bodies, checked against primary statements on 2026-09-22: StarLadder (1 ruling), Beyond the Summit (1), Valve/PGL (3), ESIC (6), Blizzard (2), and Korea’s Changwon prosecutors’ office jointly with KeSPA (2). Ten of the fifteen sanctions are still running. The shortest-lived “lifetime” ban is StarLadder’s 2013 ruling on Solo, later cut to one year; ESIC’s December 2025 adoption of Valve’s ban on Lilskrip had already expired by the time the statement went up. The longest-running sanction still in force is Valve’s 2021 permanent ban on Newbee and five players, now past five and a half years with no report of reversal. A longer Valve ban — on the 2015 Arrow Gaming members — is reported at roughly eleven and a half years, but the one primary account of it could not be reopened on recheck; see the note below the table.

The full table

The 2015 Arrow row is carried forward with a flag rather than dropped: earlier coverage of this case (Neoseeker, 2014–2015) dated Valve’s permanent ban to 28 March 2015 and named three of the five dismissed players — xianzai, MtR and MoZuN — as banned. Rechecking that source live on 2026-09-22 returned a Cloudflare interstitial rather than the article, and Liquipedia’s current Arrow Gaming page, while detailed on the October 2014 dismissals, does not mention Valve at all. The ruling itself is not in doubt — it is referenced independently in later Valve/ESIC coverage of unrelated cases — but its date and the completeness of its name list rest on a source this dataset could not reopen.

Rulings and outcomes, by issuer

Read the middle two columns together and the pattern from the earlier three-case version of this page holds at fifteen: every reduction or reversal on record belongs to a tournament organiser (StarLadder) or a federation working through its own appeal-adjacent process — never to Valve, and, so far, never to ESIC once a lifetime ban has actually been imposed rather than adopted from someone else’s. ESIC’s one “reduction” here is not a reduction on the merits at all — it is Article 7 of its own Code of Conduct capping a Valve ban ESIC had no part in writing, which is why it shows up expired on the day it was announced.

What the ESIC cases add that the older ones didn’t have

The three-case version of this table, published in September, only had Valve’s and StarLadder’s rulings to compare, and its conclusion — organisers revisit, platform holders don’t — still holds for those two. ESIC’s six Dota 2 and StarCraft II rulings add a third kind of body: an integrity commission that writes its own sanctions (Taiga, Vintage, DarkMago, Firefly, Jim Cao) but can also simply co-sign a publisher’s (Lilskrip). Its own sanctions run at ESIC’s own maximum for the seriousness ESIC assigns — lifetime for Taiga, Vintage and Firefly; a term of years, tied explicitly to cooperation, for DarkMago and Jim Cao. None of ESIC’s own-authored bans has been reduced or reversed in the cases collected here.

The Firefly and Jim Cao sanctions are the clearest illustration of that second variable — not who wrote the ruling, but who cooperated with it. Same case, same 21 breaches, same documented ¥97,800 in transfers: the player who lost the matches got life, the bettor who organised and paid for it got five years, because he supplied the payment records, betting slips and chat logs that built the case. Taiga’s ban sits at the opposite pole — ESIC states outright that his refusal to answer interrogatories or attend interviews was treated as an aggravating factor, not a mitigating absence of one.

What still doesn’t fit a clean table

• The full Arrow Gaming Valve ban list and date, flagged above — reported from a source we could not reopen, not independently confirmed on this pass.
• Whether any of the ten “in force” bans has quietly lapsed. No report of reinstatement was found for any of them; absence of a report is not proof either way.
• Whether ESIC applies a consistent standard between “adopting” a publisher ban and writing its own. The mechanism is documented case by case (see the Lilskrip statement); no general policy statement from ESIC was found describing when it uses one path over the other.
• A public accounting of any StarCraft II reinstatement. Blizzard’s two suspensions expired on their stated dates with no further coverage located; whether either player returned to competition at the level they held before is not addressed in the sources used here.

Sources

Reopened live and checked against the figures used above, 2026-09-22, unless noted:

• ESIC — Public Statement on Sanction Outcome for Bauyrzhan “Lilskrip” Bisembaev, 4 December 2025
• ESIC — Final Charge and Sanction Against Tommy “Taiga” Le, 23 April 2026
• ESIC — Provisional Suspensions for Vintage and DarkMago, 14 July 2026
• ESIC — Lifetime Ban on Vintage, Five-Year Ban on DarkMago, 10 September 2026
• ESIC — Lifetime Ban to Xue “Firefly” Tao, 8 July 2025
• ESIC — Public Report, Investigation into Firefly and Jim Cao, 7 July 2025 (PDF) — downloaded and read directly
• ESIC — Sanction Against Jinhui “Jim” Cao, 14 July 2025
• PGL on X, 18 December 2022
• Wykrhm Reddy on X, 3 January 2021
• Liquipedia — Arrow Gaming — the 2014 dismissal dates and roster; does not corroborate the 2015 Valve ban, see note above
• PCGamesN — Arrow Gaming disqualified from The Summit 2
• Neoseeker — match-fixing scandal hits Dota 2 — blocked by a Cloudflare check on recheck; source of the 2015 Valve ban date and name list, not independently reconfirmed
• GosuGamers — Solo’s StarLadder ban reduced to one year, 2013
• Wikipedia — Life (gamer)
• Blizzard Watch — 12 arrested in StarCraft 2 esports match-fixing scandal
• GosuGamers — WCS win-trading suspensions
• Gfinity Esports — three players suspended from StarCraft WCS Europe

Related

• Everything else we have on Dota 2
• Every ESIC, Valve and tournament CS sanction, in one table