Krafton Bans Two Players After PUBG Asia Stars Collapse

Krafton has permanently suspended the PUBG: Battlegrounds accounts of two Vietnamese players and stripped them of the right to enter any esports event the company hosts or sanctions. The decision, published through PUBG's official channels on 23 September, closes the competitive side of a dispute that began six days earlier and ended with an invitational abandoned midway through its schedule.

The players are Himars, of Anyone's Legend, and Thanbu, of The Expendables. Both were pulled from the tournament on its opening day after competitors accused them of reading information from viewer chat while a match was still live — stream sniping, in the vocabulary of the scene. Krafton said it reached its conclusion after reviewing broadcast footage, the participants' own streams, in-game data and match replays, and that professionals are "held to higher standards of fairness, responsibility and conduct than ordinary participants." The bans cover the PUBG Global Championship, the PUBG Global Series and the PUBG Nations Cup. An appeal route remains open.

The event had been built as a friendly. Forty-eight players, streamers and personalities from six regions — Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam — were due to play PUBG Asia Stars 2026 across 17, 19 and 20 September. The accusations surfaced on day one. Krafton's first notice said only that it would exclude the two Vietnamese participants "to ensure fair competition," and listed a broadcast delay among new measures for day two, which told everyone watching that day one had gone out with no delay at all.

That wording did more damage than silence would have. Korean participants said they had been told the pair would publish an apology admitting to stream sniping, and that the apology which actually appeared did not say that. All eight sat out day two. Sponsors stepped back and Krafton cancelled the remaining matches. On 21 September, Yoon Su-jin, who heads PUBG publishing, apologised for "the confusion and distress caused during the tournament's operation and in our subsequent response," and accepted that the company had failed to set out preventative rules and sanction criteria before play began.

In Vietnam the argument did not stay inside the game. Creators with large followings — DjChip, Do Mixi, PewPew, RAMBO — addressed it on stream, several of them dropping PUBG from planned content. Anyone's Legend and The Expendables published statements backing their players and asking that any ruling rest on verified evidence rather than clips circulating on social platforms.

The sharpest turn involved Supi, the streamer who had played against the pair and whose footage fed the accusations. Vietnamese users targeted him online. Krafton said it "feels a heavy responsibility for failing to adequately protect a participant," promised to request the removal and blocking of posts spreading false information, and said it would consult Supi's agency and cooperate with his legal action.

Two failures sit underneath all of this, and only one of them belongs to the players. An exhibition carrying sponsors, national pride and six regional audiences was run without a stream delay and without written sanction criteria, which left Krafton improvising penalties in public while the story moved faster than its statements. The company has now conceded that much itself, which is more than most publishers manage.

What remains unsettled is everything outside the rulebook. Romanisation of the two names still differs between Korean and Vietnamese outlets — Himass or Himars, TanVuu or Thanbu — a small sign of how little verified detail travelled between the two audiences while the story ran hottest. The bans answer the competitive question. They do not answer what a publisher owes a participant when its own event turns him into a target, nor what it owes an audience it left guessing for four days.