The Himass and TanVuu Penalties: VTV3 Raises the Question of PUBG's Rulebook and Governance System

A pitch has a whistle, and it also has forgotten voices waiting to be heard.

That night, on a live broadcast, a Vietnamese PUBG player cried and deleted the game from his machine. At the same moment, a petition demanding justice for two names — Himass and TanVuu — passed 4.1 million signatures. Then VTV3, the national broadcaster, spoke up.

For an internal penalty handed down by a game publisher, that is rare. I was in Guangzhou at one in the morning, rewatching the clip and writing into the notebook I have kept for seven years. I once thought I understood how power works in sport, until an esports ruling taught me that my understanding was missing an entire layer. Football has federations, disciplinary committees, independent arbitration courts. Esports has a publisher. One different word, an entirely different architecture.

What actually happened

Krafton, the publisher of PUBG, issued penalties against two Vietnamese players: Himass and TanVuu. The harshest sanction available short of a total ban: exclusion from all global PUBG tournaments backed by the publisher. No scoreboard, no match statistics, no video released alongside the ruling to explain the violation.

That is the point where the story escaped the boundaries of a fan community. VTV3 reported it, but how they reported it is the notable part: the broadcaster did not rule on whether the two players were guilty. They asked two different questions — what exactly did the players violate, and how was the process conducted. Both players' management teams have filed appeals. In the discussion, a showmatch tournament is mentioned, and the phrase "Vietnam-Korea PUBG drama" recurs frequently. National streamers such as Độ Mixi and PewPew also weighed in.

I wrote those lines into my notebook, then underlined one detail: esports has no unified governing body. The rule-maker, the tournament organiser and the penalising authority all sit in the same room. When a dispute erupts, there is no third party standing in the middle to adjudicate.

One clarification matters here. VTV3 did not demand the penalty be erased. They demanded to know what the penalty was based on. That is a large distinction, legally and journalistically. One side asks for an outcome, the other asks for a process. The second is far harder to answer, because it forces the publisher to prove its system functions correctly, rather than proving an individual is wrong.

Three roles in one hand

When a single organisation writes the rules, runs the tournaments and issues the penalties, trust is no longer guaranteed by mechanism — only by goodwill. That is the core of this story, and it is the point most easily missed when fans focus only on whether the two players were wronged.

In football, those three roles are separated. Federations write the laws, organising committees run competitions, disciplinary panels adjudicate, and above them sits a sports arbitration court with independent authority. That separation was not created to inconvenience anyone. It exists so that when a controversial sanction appears, fans can still believe the ruling was produced by an entity other than the one affected by the outcome.

In PUBG, those roles rest with Krafton. The publisher owns the title, operates the servers, funds the tournament system, issues competition licences and hands down penalties. This concentration has advantages: fast reaction, globally consistent enforcement, no fragmentation by national federation interests. It also produces a structure in which no internal mechanism can independently audit itself.

Based on my experience following disciplinary cases in esports over several years, I notice a repeating pattern. Whenever a controversial sanction appears, the debate never stops at what the player did. It always drifts toward a larger question: who controls the system, and who controls the controllers. In traditional sports, that question was answered institutionally decades ago. In esports, it remains open.

The scope of the penalty matters more than the penalty itself

Two technical details deserve to be placed side by side.

First, the sanction covers all global PUBG tournaments. That is the widest possible competitive restriction short of a permanent lifetime ban. It removes eligibility from every publisher-backed arena, regardless of tier, continent or competitive nature.

Second, the sequence of events includes a showmatch. This is a small detail with heavy weight. A showmatch is an exhibition, low in competitive stakes, sometimes staged purely for entertainment or charity. If the violation occurred in such a setting while the penalty is calibrated to world-championship standards, there is a gap in proportionality.

I am not saying the penalty is wrong. I am saying that which tier of competition the disciplinary standard was designed for, and which tier the actual event belonged to, are two questions left unanswered. For fans, this is emotional. For professionals, it is institutional architecture.

What 4.1 million signatures actually measure

4.1 million signatures is a notable data point, and one that requires careful reading. It does not prove the two players are innocent. A large community signing a petition does not manufacture evidence. But it measures three other things.

It measures the scale of Vietnam's PUBG fanbase — a collective force large enough to draw the attention of a national broadcaster. It measures the bond between fans and players, a commercial value entirely independent of competitive results. And it measures the community's tolerance for risk when it places collective trust on one side without complete information.

What interests me is the separation between commercial value and competitive value. Himass and TanVuu are currently subjects of an administrative decision, no longer subjects of a competitive ranking. Yet the level of mobilisation shows their standing in the public eye has not fallen with the penalty. In a content economy, that stream of value can persist, even rise, when the competitive path is blocked.

I still keep the habit of counting what nobody bothers to count. In Doha in 2026, I surveyed the list of 73 accredited World Cup journalists and found only nine were women. I published that 12 percent figure and was accused of politicising sport. The lesson I took was not the number. It was the question: who is absent from this story.

In this PUBG case, we hear many male voices: players, streamers, commentators, team managers. Women working inside Vietnam's esports ecosystem are almost invisible in the coverage. That does not make the penalty wrong. It shows that even a debate about fairness is not necessarily fair in how it distributes voices.

Vietnam is running faster than its institutions

There is a paradox worth sitting with. Vietnam has just secured its first esports medal at an ASIAD. That milestone pulled esports out of the frame of a hobby and placed it alongside state-recognised sports.

At the same time, the governance system has not kept pace. This is a familiar pattern in emerging esports markets: competitive results and audience scale grow faster than institutional capacity. When the speed of the arena exceeds the speed of the apparatus, disputes stop being isolated incidents. They become periodic.

The framing of a "Vietnam-Korea drama" reveals another layer of tension. Vietnam is positioned as a regional counterpart to South Korea, a Tier-1 PUBG power. When an incident is framed nationally rather than procedurally, the pressure shifts off the publisher and onto the community. And a community framed that way reacts from collective instinct, not from evidence.

The appeal mechanism and the question of who adjudicates

Both players' management teams have filed appeals. This is the most important detail and the least discussed one.

The existence of an appeal mechanism shows Krafton's system has an internal review layer. The unanswered question is who sits on that panel. If the reviewers of the appeal are the same people who issued the original decision, the process technically has two steps but in principle has only one actor. In international sports law, this is treated as a serious deficiency: an appeal must be heard by a party without a direct interest in upholding the original ruling.

I do not know who sits on that panel. No source has published it. And precisely that non-disclosure — in a case with 4.1 million signatures and a national broadcaster watching — is the most telling fact of all.

Where the critics might be right

I want to give this section to those on the opposite side, because they deserve to be heard seriously.

Critics may be right on this: demands to publish all evidence can cause harm. In competitive-integrity violations, evidence is often tied to internal sources, private communication logs and people who cooperated with the investigation. Publishing everything could destroy the ability to investigate future cases and put whistleblowers in danger.

Critics may also be right on another point: a showmatch is still a competitive event, still carries prize money, still carries honour, and can still be manipulated. The argument that "it was only a showmatch, so the penalty must be lighter" opens a dangerous door, where any integrity breach can be excused by the exhibition status of the event.

And here is the point I consider most important. The community has largely concluded the two players were wronged, while the violation itself remains undisclosed. If the facts later show the penalty has solid grounding, the current collective reaction will be a loss for the very people who signed. Passion does not automatically become correctness.

I rebut myself once more, because I have learned that failure is also a language, if only we are brave enough to translate it. If Krafton discloses and the evidence is thinner than expected, the procedural critique becomes heavier than ever. If the evidence is solid, the community also needs a mechanism to admit error, because an ecosystem without self-correction will repeat its own mistakes in the next case.

Ignorance is not frightening. What is frightening is turning it into self-congratulation.

What is really on trial

A penalty does not define a generation, but how we read it does.

If this story ends with an appeal verdict and nothing changes, it becomes one more entry on a list of cases the community felt were unjust but could do nothing about. If it ends with Krafton disclosing the specific violation, the composition of the review panel and tier-specific disciplinary standards, then what is created is not a victory for one side. It is a framework that the next case must pass through.

What I am waiting for is not whether Himass and TanVuu return to competition. What I am waiting for is whether an esports market with an ASIAD medal, millions of viewers and players carrying real commercial value will accept that it needs an independent institutional layer.

Should esports follow football's path — separating the rule-maker, the organiser and the enforcer into three different places — or accept full publisher authority in exchange for absolute transparency? That is the question this case has placed on the table, and no appeal can answer it on anyone's behalf.