Black^ complains that Reddit ruined his Dota 2 career

Dominic “Black^” Reitmeier, the famous Dota 2 analyst and pro player, recently said that Reddit killed his career because people complained about his decision to smurf while live streaming.

Arguably, this was a bad decision on his part considering Valve’s most recent rules, which state that smurfing is a sufficient reason to get your account banned.

Being part of the high-level Dota 2 community, Black^ was expected to conform to the rules and give people a good example. Instead, he broke the rules without considering the consequences. But should tournament organizers go as far as to completely ignore someone who’s been around for many years and is very knowledgeable about the game?

Probably not.

Black^’s career

Black^’s Dota 2 career started in 2011. Over the years, he played for teams like mousesports, Team Tinker, Vici Gaming, Fnatic, Team Faceless, Infamous, and even T1 for a few weeks.

By far, his most important results were the second place he got at Dota 2 Asia Championships 2015 while playing for Vici Gaming and the fifth-eight place he got at The Kiev Major while representing Team Faceless.

Most of his career was spent playing in small tournaments but he became a respected analyst in 2016. Since then, he was invited to around a dozen S-tier competitions, including several Majors and several editions of The International.

Black^’s declarations

The player’s declarations about what got him blacklisted by tournament organizers represent an attempt to explain his reasons for using a smurf account. According to his own words, he was having problems finding games at his original MMR, which is above 10.000, and decided to switch to his smurf account.

This is a terrible idea in the current circumstances, but he did it without thinking that it would have such dire consequences. Five years ago, nobody would have cared. Pro players were smurfing all the time, on Twitch, and thing ever happened. But in recent years, the practice of smurfing became almost equivalent to cheating.

Ruining games for others just to have fun is no longer viewed as an acceptable practice. Naturally, some of Black^’s viewers complained on Reddit and TOs took notice of the incident.

According to the player, his career was ruined because everyone cares about Reddit these days. Whether or not that’s true, we don’t know. But he clearly hasn’t gotten invited to any significant event in a long time.

Header: Black^