PUBG Asia Stars 2026: How Two Players’ Stream Sniping Became Vietnam’s Own Goal — The Full Timeline

TL;DR — On 2026-09-17, during the first day of Krafton’s invitational PUBG Asia Stars 2026, Vietnam-region pros HIMASS and TANVUU used the live broadcasts of Korean players to find them in matches. Eight days later both had been banned from PUBG for life. HIMASS has retired, TANVUU’s team has left the game, the Vietnamese league has been postponed indefinitely, and PUBG’s Vietnamese channels have gone dark. What turned one cheating incident into a national dispute was not the cheating. It was the week that followed on the Vietnamese side: an apology that admitted only the lesser offence, a fabricated counter-accusation pinned against the victim, copyright takedowns of the evidence, a harassment campaign that ran to doctored images of her, and a defence built on the claim that nobody had said stream sniping was banned — when PUBG’s own code of conduct has said so since 2017.

A dated, sourced record in the style of a wiki entry. Where a detail comes only from Korean community documentation — chiefly the Korean-language Namuwiki entry on the incident — it is labelled as such. The criticism here is of conduct: of two players, their camp, and an online campaign. It is not a verdict on Vietnamese people, many of whom said so themselves. Ordinary users’ names in screenshots are blurred, and the victim’s face and the doctored images of her are not shown.

1. Overview

Event	PUBG Asia Stars 2026, organised by Krafton
Scheduled	2026-09-17 to 2026-09-20
Format	Invitational team event for pros and partner streamers from six regions: Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, Chinese Taipei and Vietnam; 48 participants
Prize pool	USD 70,000
Offenders	HIMASS (Anyone’s Legend) and TANVUU (The Expendables), both on Vietnam’s team (“Team VIE”)
Victim	Korean streamer Soopi (수피)
Finding	Both players obtained, through other participants’ live broadcasts or outside sources, information that normal play would not reveal, and used it in their decisions and tactics
Sanction	Permanent PUBG account bans; permanently barred from every official league in every region, PGC, PGS and PNC included, and from any esports event Krafton organises or approves
Outcome	Event cancelled after day two; Korean sponsors withdrew; HIMASS retired; TANVUU’s team left PUBG; the Vietnamese league was postponed indefinitely

Stream sniping (Korean: 방플, Vietnamese slang: đá stream) means watching an opponent’s live broadcast during a match to learn where they are or what they plan. Chat sniping is the lesser version: viewers relay that information through the sniper’s own chat.

[PUBG official notice] [Gameple] [Inside Vina]

2. Timeline

2.1 Before the event

Asia Stars was sold as a light, streamer-friendly showcase. According to the Namuwiki entry, the rosters were not balanced like for like: other regions fielded active pros, while Korea’s current pros were busy with the domestic PUBG Weekly Series, so its team was mostly former pros and streamers. Vietnam brought two of its best-known active players. HIMASS was MVP of the 2025 PUBG Nations Cup, Vietnam’s first title there; TANVUU had won the 2024 PUBG Global Championship with The Expendables. [Tuổi Trẻ]

2.2 17 September — Day 1: the incident

During a Day 1 match, HIMASS located Soopi behind cover with no audio cue that could explain it. [PenN Mike] Korean viewers who went through the replays documented more. According to the Namuwiki entry, HIMASS placed a ping on Soopi’s exact position before any information could have reached him, and kept turning his head to one side as if checking another screen. TANVUU called out the positions of two other Korean players in real time in the same way. Clips spread across Reddit and Korean communities that evening.

Soopi raised it with the organisers that night. According to the Namuwiki entry, the answer was that some players had looked at chat, but there was no evidence they had watched broadcasts.

2.3 18–19 September — The half-apology and the boycott

Both players posted apologies admitting to reading chat and receiving outside information — not to watching broadcasts. On whether it helped them, the wording stayed conditional: it may have unintentionally given them an advantage. [PenN Mike] In effect, they confessed to the smaller offence and denied the larger one.

Korean participant Kim Sung-tae (킴성태) said Krafton had assured the Korean side beforehand that the apology would admit stream sniping. It did not. Krafton’s own first notice referred only to “some regions”, naming nobody. [Inside Vina]

HIMASS and TANVUU sat out Day 2, on 19 September, replaced by Taikonn and Hoangf. [Liquipedia] [PenN Mike] According to the Namuwiki entry, HIMASS presented his absence on social media as taking a day off to relax and asked for a friend to be put in instead, as if the lineup were his to arrange. The same entry says the official PUBG Vietnam Instagram account posted an image of Soopi that Korean fans read as mockery, while Vietnamese users began filling her YouTube channel with abuse. She eventually closed its comments. [Artive News]

Krafton’s second notice removed both players from the event and revoked their PUBG partner status, acknowledging that its failure to set out its operating standards was the organisers’ responsibility. [Inside Vina] All eight Korean participants, Kim Sung-tae and Ida (이다) among them, refused to play on, and Day 2 went ahead without Korea. According to the Namuwiki entry, overseas broadcasts described Korea’s absence as due to “internal reasons”.

2.4 After Day 2 — The pinned lie

Then the camp around HIMASS went after the victim. A post claiming “Soopi also stream-sniped” was pinned in HIMASS’s stream chat — with, according to the Namuwiki entry, a link to her channel. The claim was fabricated, and it set off a wave of harassment against her. [Inside Vina] HIMASS later said some of his channel’s moderators may have made things worse. [Artive News]

Soopi’s own account, in a notice to her viewers: she had been removing people from her chat for slurs against Vietnamese people, and what came back was a fabricated accusation pinned by the player who had sniped her. Her gaming PC has a single monitor. She asked Krafton to take away her partner status, since it could not protect her. [Artive News] According to the Namuwiki entry, she also described comment raids, DM floods and an attempt to break into her messages.

2.5 20 September — Day 3 cancelled

Krafton cancelled the rest of the event and split the USD 70,000 prize equally across all regions, regardless of conduct. [Artive News] According to the Namuwiki entry, the cancellation notice went up about an hour after Day 3 had been due to start, and the equal split meant Vietnam, fourth at the time, collected the same as everyone else.

Three Korean sponsors suspended their involvement that day: 백억커피 (Baekeok Coffee), 깐부치킨 (Kkanbu Chicken) and 노기어 (NoGear). [Inside Vina]

2.6 21 September — Krafton admits it; RAMBO widens it

Krafton published a formal apology under the name of its head of publishing, Yoon Soo-jin (윤수진). It confirmed that HIMASS and TANVUU had both checked outside information through chat and stream-sniped — three days after their apology said only chat. It admitted Krafton had no preventive measures, no criteria for judging violations and no defined sanctions, that its Korean and Vietnamese announcements were inconsistent, and that it had failed to protect participants from attacks on one individual. [e-Korea News] [Gameple]

The same day, the victim was put on trial a second time. RAMBO, a Vietnamese streamer on the same Team VIE roster, shared what he presented as evidence that Soopi had the tournament stream open in a browser tab during play. [Kenh14] Around the same time, on stream, he said she had chosen to “invite Korean streamers and players to make videos attacking our players”, and that “everything that has happened up to now is because of that girl…”, in Press The Game’s translation. [Press The Game] Korean users accuse him of pointing his audience at her SOOP replay; that part is a community accusation.

By the early hours of 21 September the evidence had also begun to disappear. Two of Soopi’s YouTube videos on the incident went offline with YouTube’s notice that they had been removed following a copyright takedown request by Himass.

FMKorea, 2026-09-21 03:32 KST, 526,341 views. Thumbnails showing faces are cropped out.

2.7 22 September — “Delete PUBG”

Vietnamese creators turned the case into a boycott. DjChip said he would remove PUBG from his stream. Độ Mixi said he would pull it from an upcoming showmatch, and PewPew urged viewers to press Krafton to publish its findings. [Press The Game] RAMBO said he would stop playing PUBG and look for another game.

FMKorea, 2026-09-22 22:22 KST, 940,660 views.

That night TANVUU told his stream that viewers would know “by tomorrow” whether the news was good or bad and that he was not allowed to say more, then uninstalled PUBG on camera, after a meeting with his team. [Thanh Niên] According to the Namuwiki entry, a direct message briefly visible on his stream, from a manager at Anyone’s Legend, HIMASS’s team, read “Nick bị ban vv đó” — “the account is permanently banned”.

FMKorea, 2026-09-23 00:35 KST, 386,428 views.

2.8 23 September — Lifetime bans, and the victim’s lawyers

Krafton published its findings on the official PUBG site. After reviewing the official broadcast, participant footage, in-game data and replays, it banned both players’ PUBG accounts permanently and barred them for life from every official league and every esports event it organises or approves. It said professional players are held to a higher standard of fairness, responsibility and dignity than other participants, and that the standard applies regardless of prize money, the nature of the event or who is taking part. It added that it had never officially permitted watching other participants’ broadcasts or using outside information, and had not applied different standards to different regions. Both players keep the right to contest the decision. [PUBG official notice] [Pointe] [Seoul Economic Daily]

In a separate apology Krafton named Soopi as the person most harmed. It said it would request the removal and blocking of false claims, ridicule and illegal composite posts about her, and would cooperate fully with her agency’s legal response. [DigitalToday]

Her agency, IM Brand, went further the same day:

IM Brand notice, as reproduced in a Ruliweb post, 2026-09-23.

In summary, IM Brand said it was:

• collecting material on malicious false claims, slander and illegal productions circulating in Vietnam, and preparing legal action through a local law firm;
• reviewing with Korean counsel what action the law allows if people involved in threats, false claims or illegal content enter Korea;
• working with Krafton on the safety and rights of its creators.

It also asked the public not to spread unverified claims and to avoid excessive slander. Korean communities call the doctored images deepfakes; the official wording is “illegal composite posts” and “illegal productions”.

The Vietnamese side’s answer was not remorse. GAM x TE did not deny that TANVUU had opened his own stream chat during matches, but called a lifetime ban excessive and demanded a transparent appeal. Anyone’s Legend said it would support HIMASS’s appeal. [Inven Global] HIMASS posted “Chính thức thất nghiệp” — “officially unemployed”. TANVUU wrote that he should have focused on streaming rather than entering competitive events: a regret about entering, not about what he did there. [Dân Trí]

A widely shared FMKorea post shows TANVUU’s Facebook page on his own stream, a post menu open, with the poster saying he deleted his apology right after reading Krafton’s notice. No news report has confirmed it.

FMKorea, 2026-09-23 18:35 KST, 528,155 views. The original title contains an insult and is cropped out.

The same evening, Thanh Niên reported that Vietnamese authorities were considering action against unlicensed PUBG PC. The PC game has never had an official release licence in Vietnam, unlike PUBG Mobile, which has a local distributor. [Thanh Niên]

2.9 24 September — PUBG goes dark in Vietnam

• The league stopped. PUBG Esports postponed the remaining matches of the PUBG Vietnam Series 2026 Phase 2 indefinitely and removed the schedule. [Znews]
• The channels went. The official “PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Việt Nam” pages on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook became inaccessible. Krafton gave no explanation. [Dân Trí]
• The language had already gone. Vietnamese had disappeared from the game’s supported languages on Steam, Thanh Niên reported the day before. [Thanh Niên]

Shared on FMKorea, 2026-09-24 23:55 KST, 374,776 views.

The campaign against the victim, meanwhile, reached AI. An image of Soopi circulated on social media with an insulting caption, showing her making a mocking hand gesture. Korean users matched it to the original frame of her replay: same background, same chat position and colours, but the chat and timestamp had been blurred and the hand added with AI. [FMKorea] It is exactly the kind of “illegal composite post” Krafton and IM Brand had named the day before. It is not reproduced here.

The same day a Vietnamese player launched a petition site, Justice for PUBG VN, and TANVUU uploaded a video titled roughly “The path a PUBG pro walked”, with a thumbnail reading “I lay in bed and cried alone”. [FMKorea] Korean users also reported that HIMASS’s and TANVUU’s main accounts were showing as unbanned, with only their event accounts still suspended; Krafton has not commented, and this is unverified. [FMKorea]

2.10 25 September — Retirement

• HIMASS quit. He wrote that PUBG had been nearly six years of his youth and that he would stop from today, then posted a video titled Mình chính thức bỏ PUBG! — “I’m officially quitting PUBG!”. [Thể thao & Văn hóa]
• TANVUU’s team left PUBG. GAM The Expendables closed its PUBG chapter the same day. [Thể thao & Văn hóa]
• PC cafés pulled the game. Win.D Gaming removed PUBG PC from all its venues, and many other cafés followed. [Dân Trí]
• The petition claimed 4 million signatures by the morning, by its own count. [Ghiền Bóng Đá]

Korean users, for their part, went back through HIMASS’s old streams (section 3.3).

3. The Vietnamese side’s defences — and why they fail

3.1 “There was no rule against it”

This is the argument the whole campaign rests on, and it is the weakest. PUBG’s code of conduct, published in its first year, says it plainly: “Do not stream snipe: this is a form of cheating and you will be banned if you do it.” It adds that its rules are “neither final nor exhaustive”. [Player.One, 2017] Nine years later, Krafton’s 2026 finding says the same: it never permitted watching other participants’ broadcasts in any league or event. [PUBG official notice]

Even without a written rule, no professional needs one to know that looking at an opponent’s screen is cheating. The players’ own first apology suggests they knew. People who believe they did nothing wrong don’t confess to the smaller offence to avoid the larger one.

3.2 “It was only a friendly between creators”

RAMBO’s framing was that Asia Stars was an exchange between creators, with rules that did not clearly ban stream sniping. [Thể thao & Văn hóa] The facts say otherwise: USD 70,000 in prize money, sponsors, an official broadcast, and a first prize the Namuwiki entry puts at more than double the winner’s cheque in Vietnam’s own pro league. HIMASS and TANVUU were not there as casual guests. They were invited as professionals.

Streamers also cannot hide their screens: broadcasting is what they were invited to do. A pro who watches a streamer’s broadcast mid-match turns the event’s whole premise into a weapon against the people it invited.

3.3 “We asked, and nobody said no”

The most specific version of the defence, as documented on Namuwiki, is that the Vietnamese players asked someone on the local side whether sniping was allowed. They didn’t get a clear answer, and took the silence as tacit consent, because sniping for fun is common in Vietnamese streamer events. The entry says RAMBO himself has hosted event matches where mutual sniping is allowed for balance.

Silence is not permission, and a local streamer custom is not a Krafton rule. And the Vietnamese side’s own past is now being dug up. Korean users have posted material from HIMASS’s streams of earlier PUBG events: the 2024 PUBG APAC Streamer Showdown, whose Vietnamese lineup included HIMASS, and the 2025 PUBG Asia All Star event. [FMKorea] [FMKorea]

FMKorea, 2026-09-25 12:51 KST, 563,856 views. Viewer names in the stream chat are blurred.

In the poster’s translation of the 2025 captions, the team asks whether sniping is allowed, someone says it has been banned, and someone suggests doing it anyway. A line attributed to HIMASS warns viewers not to post spoilers in chat because they would get banned. If that holds, it destroys the “nobody told us” defence. But it rests on machine captions of fast Vietnamese voice chat, translated again into Korean, and nobody has checked it against the audio. The 2024 material is weaker still: an AI-filtered chat log that mostly shows viewers asking whether sniping is allowed.

FMKorea, 2026-09-25 19:00 KST, 212,970 views.

3.4 “Soopi did it too”

This claim was pinned in HIMASS’s chat, amplified by RAMBO, and repeated by the petition site, which asks whether she was investigated to the same standard. [Justice for PUBG VN] Krafton’s investigation reviewed the official broadcast, participant footage, in-game data and replays. It sanctioned two Vietnam-region players, apologised to Soopi as the person most harmed, and is asking for false claims about her to be removed. Her gaming PC has a single monitor. When the “evidence” against her ran out, somebody made some with AI.

3.5 “A lifetime ban is disproportionate”

This is the one argument that deserves an answer. The petition says it is “not a defense of cheating”, and asks for evidence per player, one standard, and a reason why a time-limited ban would not do. GAM x TE argued that an admitted operational failure by Krafton should not end in the harshest penalty for the players. [Justice for PUBG VN] [Inven Global]

The appeal route exists for exactly that question. But proportionality works both ways: it counts what came after. A lighter sanction was imaginable for two players who owned up on day one. It is much harder to argue for two players whose camp spent the next week turning on the woman they had cheated against.

3.6 “Krafton just lost a market of 100 million”

The line spread on X: Krafton had given up Vietnam’s 100 million people because of one Korean streamer. [FMKorea] Two facts undercut it. PUBG PC has never had a Vietnamese release licence. [Thanh Niên] And Steam, through which Vietnamese players reach it, has been blocked by major Vietnamese ISPs since May 2024 for distributing unlicensed games. [VnExpress International] The “market” in the threat was never a licensed one, and the attention the dispute drew has now landed on exactly that.

4. Criticism

4.1 The players and their camp

• The half-apology. The first statement admitted chat sniping to escape the stream-sniping charge. Krafton confirmed both three days later.
• The counter-attack. A fabricated accusation against the victim was pinned in HIMASS’s chat with a link to her channel.
• The takedowns. Copyright claims removed videos documenting the incident while the case was still open.
• No remorse after the ruling. “Officially unemployed”, “I should have focused on streaming”, a team statement calling the ban excessive, and, if the screenshot is right, an apology deleted once the sanction arrived.

In fairness, HIMASS did at one point ask his supporters to stop attacking Soopi and any other players, streamers or communities. [Dân Trí] By then his chat had already done the damage.

4.2 The online campaign

• Harassment of the victim. Comment raids on her channels, DM floods and, in the end, doctored images: the “illegal composite posts” Krafton now wants removed and IM Brand is preparing to take to court.
• Media framing. One of Vietnam’s leading English-language outlets headlined the lifetime bans as being “over Korean gamer’s stream-sniping accusation”. [VnExpress International] The bans followed Krafton’s review of the broadcast, footage, game data and replays. Framing them as one woman’s accusation put her at the centre of the anger.
• Pressure instead of argument. Mass uninstalls, PC-café removals and a “100 million market” threat were all aimed at making the ruling too costly, not at showing it was wrong.
• Spillover. According to the Namuwiki entry, Vietnamese accounts also spammed other PUBG broadcasts with anti-Korean comments and invented claims that Korean players had sniped too.

4.3 Krafton

None of this excuses the organiser, and Krafton said so first. It had no preventive measures, no criteria and no sanction levels. Its notices said different things in different languages. It let a victim be attacked for four days. It apologised under the name of its head of publishing, and it has not said who was responsible for the handling. [e-Korea News] [4th.kr]

4.4 The Korean side’s own line

Some Korean posts crossed from criticising conduct into mocking Vietnamese people in general. That helps no one. Soopi herself was removing anti-Vietnamese slurs from her chat while she was being targeted. Both teams asked for an end to hate aimed at nationality, and IM Brand asked people not to spread unverified claims. The case against HIMASS and TANVUU is strong enough without it.

5. Aftermath

	Status as of 2026-09-25
HIMASS	Banned for life from PUBG esports; retired from PUBG
TANVUU	Banned for life from PUBG esports; streaming other games; his team has left PUBG
Soopi	Harassed for a week, including with doctored images; her agency is preparing legal action in Vietnam and reviewing options in Korea
Vietnam’s PUBG scene	League postponed indefinitely; official channels offline; Vietnamese removed from the game on Steam; licensing under scrutiny
Korean sponsors	Three suspended their involvement on 2026-09-20
Krafton	Internal review announced, no result or accountability published

6. Still open

• Appeals. Anyone’s Legend says it will support one; GAM x TE wants a transparent process. No outcome has been published.
• The account question. Whether HIMASS’s and TANVUU’s main accounts are banned, as Krafton’s notice says, or only their event accounts, as Korean users report.
• The earlier events. The 2024 and 2025 transcripts need checking against the original audio before they can count as evidence.
• Vietnam’s regulator on unlicensed PUBG PC.
• IM Brand’s legal action against the people behind the false claims and doctored images.

7. FAQ

What did HIMASS and TANVUU do? During PUBG Asia Stars 2026 they used other participants’ live broadcasts, and outside information relayed through chat, to learn opponents’ positions. Krafton confirmed both.

Was stream sniping against the rules? Yes. PUBG’s code of conduct has named stream sniping as cheating since 2017, and Krafton says it never permitted it in any league or event.

Why was the punishment so heavy? Krafton cited the higher standard of fairness, responsibility and dignity it expects of professionals, and applied it regardless of the event’s format.

Did Soopi stream-snipe too? No finding says so. The claim was fabricated, pinned in HIMASS’s chat and amplified by RAMBO. Krafton apologised to her as the person most harmed.

Is PUBG banned in Vietnam now? Not formally, as of 2026-09-25. PUBG PC has never been licensed there, authorities are reported to be considering action, and PUBG’s Vietnamese league and channels have gone quiet.

Where can I read the shorter versions? The neutral record is on Synortex, the Korean-side argument is at Is Stream Sniping Ever OK for a Pro?, and the 25 September roundup is on Terapep.

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Sources: PUBG official notice, Gameple, Gameple, Pointe, Seoul Economic Daily, DigitalToday, 4th.kr, e-Korea News, PenN Mike, Inside Vina, Artive News, Inven Global, Player.One (PUBG code of conduct, 2017), Tuổi Trẻ, VnExpress International, VnExpress International (Steam, 2024), Kenh14, Press The Game, Thể thao & Văn hóa, Thể thao & Văn hóa, Thanh Niên, Thanh Niên, Dân Trí, Dân Trí, Dân Trí, Dân Trí, Znews, Justice for PUBG VN, Ghiền Bóng Đá, Namuwiki (Korean). Community posts: FMKorea 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; Ruliweb 1. Claims found only in community documentation are labelled as such in the text.

Images: cropped screenshots of the FMKorea and Ruliweb posts linked in each caption. Ordinary users’ names are blurred; the victim’s face and the doctored images of her are deliberately not shown.

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