This was supposed to be a fun column. SluG made his grand return to the national spotlight by winning Creed IV. EduPorp won his first ever Mass Madness. 404Cray is suddenly a Top 30 player, and Seven was one edgeguard away from a huge upset over Aklo to continue his great losers run at Creed. Those things are what I love to write about: Melee results. Unfortunately, I am not going to write about any of that today. Instead, I’m writing about how Melee’s biggest top player went viral for sexually harassing multiple women at another event.
I’ve spent a large point of this year thinking about player bans, some of which ended about as badly as possible. At the very least, it’s important to properly manage high profile cases. And for a long time, I’ve taken the easy way out in terms of seeing player bans as a topic beyond my pay grade to share my opinion beyond maybe a tweet here and there. Not any more though. In today’s column, I’m going to talk about player bans: what they mean, their purpose, the types of things that players get banned for, precedent for bans, and more.
What is the purpose of a ban?
Player bans are ultimately supposed to exclude offending players from community spaces and minimize the likelihood of harm being committed toward someone else. They also communicate to the offender that their actions carry a consequence that could further escalate if they don’t stop ban-worthy behavior. For the most part, if a player cannot conduct themselves accordingly, they will get banned. If a tournament organizer believes that a player cannot ever conduct themselves accordingly, or that they have violated a cardinal value within their community, then they will be permanently banned.
To paint with a broad brush, I’ve noticed one particular sentiment that comes up a lot: that entering tournaments is a privilege and that nobody has a right to play a video game with another group of people. I largely understand and agree with this sentiment. It is absolutely anyone’s right to allow whomever they want into a private space for any reason. If you take the time to run events and someone else is really that much of a vibe killer, feel free to ban them.
With that said though, verbally affirming this right does not actually tell anyone else anything useful about how to evaluate misconduct. While it’s an effective rhetorical counterpoint to the absurd idea that bans are somehow cruel and unusual forms of punishment, I think it’s deployed as a reflexive conversation-ender rather than an honest examination of why someone should be banned or not. A more reasonable approach is to examine rules, values reflected in them, whether a player’s actions align with those rules and values, and whether or not legitimacy of those rules and values properly represent the community the event is trying to represent.
Ultimately, it’s up to the tournament organizer whether these factors apply in any given case. But it’s also up to their prospective attendees whether or not they support a tournament organizer’s decision. Ultimately, nobody has a monopoly on getting a group of people together to play video games or on having other people attend their events. If a tournament organizer makes a decision that everybody else feels strongly enough, they can run their own events with their own rulings and there is nothing anyone else can do about it.
What counts as a community space?
Tournament venues are clearly under community jurisdiction. If you assault someone else at an event, chances are that you will be kicked out of the venue and banned from that tournament. Any other tournament would similarly likely ban you for doing that because it violates a clear value of “do not beat the shit out of people.” With that said, tournament venues are largely not the places where conduct infractions occur.
In 2017, New England Melee dealt with the case of Mafia, a top player who was accused of sexually assaulting another community member in a private setting. Without litigating all the twists and turns of a case from eight years ago that involves someone who’s now largely disappeared from the competitive scene, the takeaway here is that any space with a community member is an extension of a community space. Within that idea, in my opinion, is an implicit belief that community members have an obligation to act in accordance with community values as best as possible wherever they go. A convicted sex criminal like Hyprid, for example, is permanently banned from tournaments despite his actions technically occurring outside of them. Nobody reasonable would have a problem with this because his actions break a core value of basically every tournament
Are digital spaces extensions of a community? Hax’s case, as well as NoFluxes, Mekk, and Zion, certainly seems to prove it. When it comes to Hax, most people would agree that his initial actions in releasing the evidence.zip videos constitute a bannable offense because of the nature of what he did and the scale to which he publicly escalated it. Everything else afterward is another combination of disagreements, and extremely regrettable procedural failures on the part of major tournament organizers, but that’s a topic for another time. If you don’t like Hax as an example, feel free to use a player like DaShizWiz, who has essentially been soft-banned from all major Melee tournaments for spewing vile nonsense about LGBTQ people online multiple times without recourse.
Not all digital or physical spaces are the same. In fact, there are cases where someone’s actions may only warrant an intervention when they’re public. A leaked Discord DM containing edgy banter between friends or an off-color remark made in a hotel room would likely not get someone banned on their own. But if a player involved went on to harm another community member or break conduct rules in relevant fashion, their reported behavior might provide context to their likelihood of committing another offense or their trustworthiness.
Arguably more important the actual location of a player’s actions is the process of how they become a community matter. Put simply, the rule of thumb is once a tournament organizer knows about it, they have an obligation to act in good faith. Whether or not this means pursuing a ban, private mediation, warning, or even doing nothing depends on the specific circumstances of what information they have.
To bring this back to Mang0, the actions happened at an in-person event run by another community member. Furthermore, it was streamed and recorded. According to people who were there, his behavior was certainly not constrained to instances of sexual harassment caught on camera either. Based on precedent and the reasons detailed above, tournament organizers have no excuse to not act on this soon, as in within the week.
What role do the offender and victim play in determining ban severity?
Let’s grant for a moment that Mang0 apologizes to the women he wronged. In this case, take a step further and say that everyone immediately squashes their beef and moves on. Even if this were to happen, tournament organizers have to consider the community they’re trying to represent first and foremost: not the offending or wronged parties. If anything, the belief that a victim’s wishes should be paramount to an actual ruling is placing way too much of a burden on them to make a decision for the whole community.
It is very well possible that other people will not want to go to a tournament where a former offender is attending because there’s a higher than median chance, even if it’s slim, that they will do the same thing again. What each tournament organizer’s personal threshold for a slim chance being “bannable” and “not bannable,” obviously differs, but everyone who runs a tournament has to accept that their personal threshold may not match the standards of the directly involved parties. Making a decision involves accepting the risk that some people, including the ones involved in misconduct cases that you handle, will not want to be part of your community.
In my experience, “believe women” (or broadly speaking “believe victims”) is one of the most frustratingly misunderstood phrases. Rather than assessing its legitimacy through the lens of taking it literally, it’s important to understand the real idea being conveyed here, which is that wronged parties in a dispute with serious accusations deserve to have their concerns affirmed and addressed rather than immediately dismissed. Crucially, this not the same thing as saying an accusation or suggested punishment from an accuser should be shown total deference. Of course it shouldn’t; the moment someone’s actions break a core value within a social space or become of relevance to multiple people, it immediately becomes everyone else’s problem (as it should).
I’ve spent most of this column talking about what players do wrong and what the process of them getting banned looks like. However, I’ve yet to talk about the uncomfortable reality of temporary player bans: the question of what to do when a ban ends and what temporary bans look like.
What do forgiveness and reconciliation actually look like?
When someone is granted forgiveness, they don’t get to wield it as a get-out-of-jail-free card to enter tournaments. Instead, it marks the beginning of change for all parties involved: the offender, the people they hurt, and everyone else who attends events with them. However, maintaining forgiveness is a whole other process: reconciliation. Reconciliation is more than saying “my bad” or “I’m sorry.” It means changed behavior, accountability, and, most importantly, accepting time away from the space you committed an offense in. It doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to make mistakes any more, but bare minimum, you have to adequately demonstrate that you will not make the same exact category of mistake that you got banned for.
Do events have a role in assisting banned players for potential reintegration? Initially, I thought the answer was ‘absolutely not,’ but with the Hax case in mind, this belief has warranted an honest re-examination. While I still don’t believe that all events should bend over backwards for a former offender, there has to be a show of good faith from tournament organizers that they are open to the possibility of reformation and change as it’s relevant to the initial ban-worthy action. What this looks like is clearly subjective from person to person, but a good starting point is that anyone who doesn’t commit a grave violent or sexual offense deserves to be heard out at least once.
The other side to this is that the player has to show good faith too. It could be through routine contact with tournament organizers or a note from a therapist or a third party; whatever the player provides has to be sufficient proof that they won’t make the same mistake again, and that they have changed. In Mang0’s case, it could be as simple as not drinking at tournaments and documented sobriety. Granted, a tournament organizer’s ability to actually enforce this is pretty limited and not something that they could enforce beyond something being brought to their attention, so it’s maybe not the best example. But it’s one possible starting suggestion for sufficient proof of change.
Regardless, once a player comes back, their return should not feel like a celebratory event. Instead, it should feel like watchful probation, where the onus is on the player themself to demonstrate a proper effort in being a good community member and grace. This involves accepting that not everyone is going to be okay with them coming back. There are very few instances of reformation actually working in Smash, but they do exist, with the most obvious example being Ryan Ford. Following a ban for domestic abuse in 2013, he was reintegrated into his regional scene a couple years later. While I’m not certain that tournament organizers today would apply this same level of leniency, to my knowledge, the person he wronged actively advocated for his re-entry into the scene, and his presence largely came with no further issues.
What’s trickier, however, is when a player publicly says one thing, but privately says another about their ban or their actions. Should you reasonably ban someone for being insufficiently apologetic? The Hax case seems to tell us that the answer is not an instant “yes,” but that a player’s follow up actions can harm the sufficiency of the proof that they may provide as evidence that they changed. At the same time though, I’m really not sure. It goes back to my previous question of what purposes that players bans serve. Is it to stop the initial offense from happening again or is it to change the offender into a different community member? In my opinion, part of what extremely wrong with how tournament organizers at the major and national level managed Hax’s case is that they never had a transparent, clear, consistent or frankly adequate answer to this question. It doesn’t have to be like that for handling other cases in the future, Mang0’s included.
The code of conduct & ban length
The 2020 Code of Conduct is not perfect. However, it is a decent guideline for understanding the general values we have as a community and the type of behavior we try to encourage and discourage at tournaments. Broadly speaking, there are four types of offenses: warning-worthy offenses (Level 1), short-term offenses (Level 2), long-term offenses (Level 3), and permanent ban-worthy offenses (Level 4). The most serious offenses related to someone’s future participation in the community typically have to do with acts of violence (physical or sexual) or serious crimes, although as I mentioned with DaShizWiz, they’re hardly the only infractions that lead to permanent bans.
Based on this resource, Mang0’s actions fall within the category of unwanted sexual advances toward another person, making it a Level 2 offense. With the three public clips of his actions in mind, he’s done this in multiple instances toward multiple people, though it’s important to recognize that because they happened in the same incident, more or less, it would be treated as one offense. But that’s also just what’s on camera. For what it’s worth, any further instance would actually bring Mang0 to a recommendation of anywhere up to a one year or even up to a lifetime ban, although, it’s crucial to remember that “up to a” is not the same thing as “a,” and that the code of conduct recommends a statute of limitations between six to twelve months for Level 2 and 3 Offenses.
There is something I do want to acknowledge here though. What Mang0 did is unfortunately not too uncommon in the Melee scene, and I do not believe that it’s the first time he or another community member has ever done something like that. In my experience attending multiple tournaments over the last decade, this happens in private between people all the time, and the way inappropriate physical behavior can escalate does not always lead to a good outcome. More often than not, it typically defaults to the wronged party just trying to deescalate the situation as fast as possible for convenience. Then again, sometimes, it doesn’t; clearly this issue is becoming more prominent. As a result, I think the “up to a six month” status for any potential Level 2 offense on its own is probably not the correct decision for the scene in 2025.
While these problems include substance use, I don’t buy that the conversation ends there. I think there’s a much deeper issue of inappropriate frat boy culture in the scene, which entails larger issues of misogyny and homophobia, among other topics. This does not mean that every single instance of someone obnoxiously flirting or hitting on someone else or acting like a jerk over the last decade needs to be litigated by tournament organizers, but there’s clearly been behaviors we’ve let slide over the years for too long, and ones that are more common that we might currently think that lead to inappropriate conduct.
It’s here where I feel it’s important to mention Mang0’s status as a community leader. He has thousands of subscribers and countless fans in the scene. For years, he hasn’t been held up as a ‘role model’ necessarily, but his actions have laid the groundwork for scene-wide standards of acceptability. If Mang0 doesn’t do it, nobody else does it, but if Mang0 does it, then it’s somehow okay. With that said, this clearly isn’t the case any more. I’d like to think most Mang0 fans who see what he did feel disappointed that someone they looked up to acted in such an inappropriate fashion. I’m sure Mang0 sincerely understands that he’s now set a bad example for people looking up to him. But I would gently suggest that even when he didn’t overtly harm another person, it was possible that he had acted in other ways that enabled flawed elements of Melee culture – ones that led to him to eventually doing something he will forever regret and harming someone else. He’s not getting banned for making a bad joke or two on stream of course; it’s just context to recognize.
Given the details I’ve mentioned above regarding Mang0’s actions and status, I will be transparent and put my cards on the table. I broadly believe that he should be conditionally banned for a year. In that time period, it’s his responsibility to make good faith efforts toward tournament organizers – either directly or via friends – to update them on his personal progress and prove to them that his ban should not be extended. Because he seems to be a baseline level of remorseful, even if his apologies have not been very good, he deserves a chance for forgiveness, reconciliation, and to holding himself to a higher standard. As a result, the ban could primarily succeed in punishing sexual harassment, and it could secondarily succeed in having him now set a new, better example for everyone else.
As mentioned before though, that does not mean having his hand held throughout the process. The ball is in Mang0’s court to prove that he can atone for his mistakes and set a good example for others. Part of accepting that is also understanding that not everyone will believe you and that you’re not entitled to their tolerance; that what you did will never go away and that others will see you as they deem fit, but that you can change people’s minds through good behavior too. I want to believe that Mang0 can do this. I would want to believe that anyone could do this because it’s the standard that I believe everyone who plays Melee should follow.
“The Melee Community”
Ideally, I do not have to write about serious things. I could have decided to write about something else; in fact, while thinking about what to write about, I considered just ignoring this. But I think that would have been the wrong thing to do, so I didn’t do that. Frankly, I don’t care about “optics” or what “the Melee community” looks like to other people, because the truth is that there is no Melee community. Instead, there are only groups of friends and acquaintances that happen to share the same hobby, happen to sometimes have intersecting standards of how people navigate that hobby, and occasionally happen to have big disagreements.
Once you realize this, a lot of what constitutes the ‘community’ in your mind, both the things you love and the things you hate about it, will be put into perspective. Whatever idea you may have in mind about the Melee community doing this or that, it’s not monolithic. And yet, with this consideration in mind, I do think the bigger tournaments have a moral obligation to set a better standard for other tournaments, because it’s ultimately better for everyone. What community do we want to be? What community do you want to participate in? To me, I think our community should be one that evolves its moral standards over time, makes players take accountability, protects its most vulnerable people, and yet allows for people to grow and change from the past.