I just saw this on reddit. Apparently the head honcho of S2 games (going by the alias of Maliken) has been outed as a racist with a trend of power abuse. The evidence is not certain but it is pretty damning.

• This Teafragger character was playing with 4 other S2 employees but wasn’t an apparent S2 himself. That player has a history of playing with other S2 players, so it’s not a single coincidence of a pubbie.
• His previous gaming stats were the same as Malikens (i.e. same choice of heroes)
• Once he got upset by an opposing player, that player got mysteriously temp banned from the game.

Those by themselves are damning enough, buit the reaction of the company is the clincher. They have gone into full blown damage control. Threads mentioning this are being deleted. The name of the original player has been changed in the match stats. The Teafragger player has disappeared. It’s a fairly blatant attempt of DELETE FUCKING EVERYTHING!

Well, given their history of sexism, this isn’t such a great moral drop, but it is quite worrying that the manager of a whole gaming company would have no problems not only being a racist scumfuck, but use his power to cover up his tracks when he does. From what I saw before he’s fairly blatant in his homophobia as well so he seems to touch base on all bigotry.

Unfortunately given how this bigotry is not only tolerated by S2 staff, but actively perpetuated by their CEO, it’s no wonder that their community is full of the same bigotry. It’s fairly impossible to play Heroes of Newerth and not encounter insults (usually from teammates) that are at best ableist (“retard” or “tard” is extremely common) and at worst, racist (as you saw in the example above). S2 seems to be doing almost nothing about it and their “Report a Player” function seem to be kind of a joke as well (see second comment). Given the attitude from S2 senior staff themselves, this is not surprising.

At the moment, the only place you can discuss this is in reddit, given that threads on this subject are being deleted from their forums on-sight, so if you’re as dismayed by these acts as I am, come there to express it. I would also appreciate that you spread the news around, especially if you have any contacts within established gaming journalism. S2 needs to be called out on their shit and as long as it’s just a small subreddit that does it, S2 Games will ignore any dissent, delete all awareness in their own fora, and wait until the storm blows over. And then do it again and again. I hope we will not let this happen.

Aside from that, I’m seriously considering switching to DotA2 now because I refuse to support bigots. I don’t know if they will be better at it, but Valve has an OK history so I’m willing to take the chance. Sad things is that I am fairly happy with Heroes of Newerth as a game and wasn’t planning on switching, but I can’t just let this behaviour stand.