News about LGD.Ruru scandal is now growing exponentially that it is now affecting the whole community including its platform, Steam and its lead game designer, Icefrog. In order to grasp the whole issue, let's take a look at the summary of the whole incident.
LGD.Ruru Scandal
According to one of the cofounders and former employee of VPGAME, Pan "Ruru" Jie had allegedly stolen a unique API-KEY that enables her to access restricted files such as private games and directly transfer items from one account to another. The unnamed poster, said that Ruru used the stolen API-KEY to help teams such as LGD, LFY and CDEC - to which she allegedly owns in order to help them in various tournaments albeit the poster said that the players didn't personally used the KEY and that it was only meant to help with their stats man.
For those of you that didn't know, a normal API-KEY is only able to view public matches which is used on various betting sites to see the match results of any online tournament. But with the use of the stolen API-KEY, VPGAME has access on all private matches in which Ruru and her teams allegedly used to figure out their opponent's drafts, strategies and ways to counter them.
The poster has even provided proof about his claim which you can see here. According to him, this was a scrim between IG.V and IG which was meant to be private just like any other professional scrims as the results of these games should be kept secret.
Involvement of Valve and Icefrog
The poster also said that Ruru also used this KEY to create chaos by transferring items from one betting site to another one. LGD.Ruru allegedly told them to move 200 Arcanas from 大力菠菜 (another Chinese betting site) to DOTAMAX in order to make the latter (their main competitor) seem to have scammed the former. This incident wasn't the first as there are several occasions that they've contacted Valve about an alleged "scam" by DOTAMAX. The poster then showed this as a proof of his claim.
Amidst the recent chaos of LGD.Ruru scandal, a former Valve employee, Langelic has confirmed the existence of the KEY. He said that he reported the incident to Icefrog way back in November during which the drama has started to germinate. Here's the translated version of their conversation: Message, Message1.
If everything about this issue is true then it's frightening to know that despite Icefrog and Valve's awareness about the situation, LGD's organization has continued to function and even made it out to Boston Major after replacing Execration due to the team's failure to comply with their Visa Application.
As of the time of this writing, neither one of the names involve has issued an official statement regarding the matter. You can check the original context (in Chinese) here.
