HIMASS Quits PUBG, a Petition Claims 4 Million, and AI ‘Evidence’ Arrives on Both Sides

TL;DR — Eight days after the PUBG Asia Stars stream-sniping incident, 2026-09-25 is the day it stopped being about a match. HIMASS announced he was done with PUBG, and TANVUU’s team, GAM The Expendables, closed its PUBG chapter. In Vietnam, a “Justice for PUBG VN” petition that calls itself not a defense of cheating claimed 4 million signatures in under a day, PC-café chains pulled the game, and a Vietnamese newspaper has reported that authorities are weighing a block on PUBG PC, which has no local release licence. In Korea, the most-shared posts ran AI over HIMASS’s old streams looking for proof of earlier sniping — a day after Korean users caught an AI-edited image of the victim. Machine-made evidence is now arriving from both sides, and only the parts that trace back to an original source hold up.

This is a daily community roundup. The neutral, dated record is our timeline on Synortex, and the Korean-side argument is in Is Stream Sniping Ever OK for a Pro?. Ordinary users’ names in screenshots are blurred.

Where things stood on 25 September

FMKorea, posted 2026-09-25 18:53 KST, 317,484 views when captured. The video had 21,000 views 34 minutes after upload.

• HIMASS quit. On social media he wrote that PUBG was nearly six years of his youth, that he would stop from today, and signed off with “see you all in another place”. The same day he uploaded a 13-minute YouTube video titled Mình chính thức bỏ PUBG! — “I’m officially quitting PUBG!”. [Thể thao & Văn hóa]
• TANVUU’s team left the game. GAM The Expendables announced it was closing its PUBG chapter on the same day. [Thể thao & Văn hóa]
• PC cafés pulled PUBG PC. Dân Trí named Win.D Gaming, whose founder is himself a PUBG streamer, as removing the game from all its venues, and reported many other cafés posting similar notices. [Dân Trí]
• The regulator came into it (reported 2026-09-23). Thanh Niên reported that Vietnamese authorities are considering measures against unlicensed distribution of PUBG PC, which has no official release licence in Vietnam — unlike PUBG Mobile, which has a local distributor. The same report noted that Vietnamese had disappeared from the game’s supported languages on Steam and that the PUBG Vietnam Series (PVS) schedule had vanished from the official esports system, with no explanation from Krafton. [Thanh Niên]

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

The two players’ teams had already objected. GAM x TE did not deny that TANVUU opened his own stream chat during matches, but called a lifetime ban excessive and asked for a transparent appeal process. Anyone’s Legend, HIMASS’s team, said it would support an appeal through official procedures. Both asked people to stop personal attacks, hate aimed at nationality, and the spread of unverified information. [Inven Global]

Vietnam’s case, in its own petition’s words

The site as shared on FMKorea, 2026-09-25 00:14 KST, 249,982 views.

The campaign site, justiceforpubgvn.com, runs in several languages, Korean included. Its headline asks for fair treatment for the two players, and its subhead is the interesting part: not a defense of cheating, but a call for clear rules, transparent investigation and proportionate sanctions. It concedes that the players checked out-of-game information through their own streams. It says it is not affiliated with PUBG or Krafton. [Justice for PUBG VN]

What it asks Krafton for:

• the evidence against each player, set out individually;
• the same standard for every participant;
• an explanation of why a permanent ban fits, rather than a time-limited one;
• a real chance to see the evidence and respond.

It also asks whether Soopi was investigated to the same standard, and cites an earlier case involving a Korean pro as proof of inconsistency. I have not verified that earlier case, so I’m not repeating the name. On Soopi, the record so far is that Krafton sanctioned two Vietnam-region players and apologised to her as the person most harmed.

The petition was started on 2026-09-24 and showed 4 million signatures by the next morning. [Ghiền Bóng Đá] That count is the site’s own and hasn’t been independently audited.

The “100 million market” line

Shared on FMKorea, 2026-09-25 13:18 KST, 372,668 views. The graphic attached to the original post, which shows the victim, is cropped out.

A post on X claimed that Krafton had decided to give up Vietnam’s market of 100 million people because of one Korean streamer. It was shared to FMKorea, where the poster answered with a claim that Vietnam is 0.6% of Krafton’s revenue. [FMKorea] I couldn’t find either number in a primary source. Krafton reports revenue by broad region, not by country.

There is also a fact both sides skip. According to Thanh Niên, the PC game at the centre of this has never had an official release licence in Vietnam; Vietnamese players have reached it through Steam and Epic. [Thanh Niên] Whatever happens to that “market” may now be decided by a regulator rather than by either fanbase.

AI on both sides

The question of the day: how much of the new “evidence” holds up?

1. HIMASS’s 2024 live chat, filtered by AI. One Korean user fed the YouTube live-chat log from HIMASS’s stream of the 2024 PUBG APAC Streamer Showdown into an AI tool and asked it to pull out every mention of đá stream, the Vietnamese slang for stream sniping. [FMKorea]

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

Read the table rather than the headline. Almost every line is a viewer asking whether sniping is allowed, or urging it. That tells you about the chat, not about what the players did. The post’s title calls them habitual offenders; its own evidence doesn’t reach that far.

2. HIMASS’s 2025 Asia Stars stream, by its captions. A second post pairs frames from HIMASS’s stream of last year’s Asia Stars with Vietnamese subtitle lines. The lobby in the frames is labelled “PUBG ASIA ALL STAR S…”. [FMKorea] A third does the same for 2024. [FMKorea]

FMKorea, 2026-09-25 12:51 KST, 563,856 views — the most-viewed of the day’s PUBG posts I found. Viewer names in the stream chat are blurred.

This one would matter more, if it holds. In the poster’s translation, the team voice chat asks whether sniping is allowed, someone says it has been banned, and someone suggests doing it anyway. A line attributed to HIMASS tells viewers not to post spoilers in chat because they would get banned. That would cut against the argument that nobody knew the rule — while also showing him telling his chat not to relay information. But these are machine captions of fast, slangy Vietnamese voice chat, translated again into Korean. Nobody has checked them against the audio, and I found no outlet reporting them as of the evening of 2026-09-25. Krafton’s findings cover the 2026 event only.

3. The victim, edited by AI. On 2026-09-24 an image of Soopi circulated 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 were blurred and the hand had been added with AI. [FMKorea] I’m not reproducing it. It is exactly the kind of “illegal composite post” that Krafton said it would ask platforms to remove and that her agency is preparing legal action over.

So one side is using AI to dig and the other to fake, and neither kind of output is evidence on its own. What holds up is what traces back to an original: the official notice, the original replay, the teams’ own statements.

The rest of the day on Korean boards

• The comment war. A G식백과 (G-Sik Encyclopedia) video on the incident drew about 17,000 comments within a day, many of them the same arguments seen on FMKorea, in both directions. [FMKorea]
• TANVUU’s video. His latest upload is titled roughly “The path a PUBG pro walked”, with a thumbnail reading “I lay in bed and cried alone”, as translated on FMKorea (425,727 views). [FMKorea]
• More uninstalls. Levi, a League of Legends pro listed on Vietnam’s roster for the event, deleted PUBG on stream (405,586 views). [FMKorea]
• The ugly part. Some of the most-upvoted posts were jokes about Vietnamese people in general. Both teams have asked for an end to hate aimed at nationality, and Soopi’s agency asked people to stop spreading unverified claims and excessive slander.

What to watch

• Appeals. Anyone’s Legend says it will support one through official procedures; GAM x TE asked for a transparent process.
• Krafton’s answer to the petition. Its demands — evidence per player, one standard, a reason for “permanent” — are specific enough to answer.
• Vietnam’s regulator on unlicensed PUBG PC, and whether the PVS schedule comes back.
• The old-stream transcripts. Useful only if someone checks them against the audio.

FAQ

Did HIMASS retire? Yes. On 2026-09-25 he announced on social media that he was stopping, and uploaded a video titled “I’m officially quitting PUBG!”.

What is Justice for PUBG VN? An independent Vietnamese campaign site, not affiliated with PUBG or Krafton. Its petition claimed 4 million signatures by the morning of 2026-09-25. It says it is not defending cheating and asks for clear evidence, one standard and proportionate sanctions.

Is PUBG being banned in Vietnam? Not as of 2026-09-25. Thanh Niên reported that authorities are considering measures against unlicensed PUBG PC, which has no local release licence. No decision has been reported.

Did HIMASS stream-snipe at earlier events too? Unproven. Korean users posted AI-filtered chat logs and machine captions from his 2024 and 2025 streams. The chat logs mostly show viewers talking; the captions haven’t been checked against the audio. Krafton’s findings cover 2026 only.

Was the image of Soopi’s hand gesture real? No. Korean users matched it to the original frame of her replay, which shows no gesture; the hand was added with AI.

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Sources: Thể thao & Văn hóa, Dân Trí, Thanh Niên, Inven Global, Justice for PUBG VN, Ghiền Bóng Đá. Community posts: FMKorea 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Claims that appear only in community posts are labelled as such.

Images: cropped screenshots of the FMKorea posts linked in each caption. Ordinary users’ names are blurred; the doctored image of the victim is deliberately not shown.

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