It’s a looong day for Team Spirit. During game 4 of the DreamLeague Season 25 grand finals, members of Team Spirit paused the game to deal with a “tech issue”, which then went on to last over two hours until the game was eventually rolled back to the beginning. During the pause, Spirit announced on their X that both Collapse and Larl have experienced DDOS attacks on their Steam accounts.

What is a DDOS attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack is where someone floods a website or property with abnormal traffic in an attempt to make the service unavailable to those who intend to use them. This means that according to Team Spirit, Collapse and Larl are victims of a malicious attempt to disrupt their taking part in the DreamLeague Season 25 finals.

It seems that Spirit weren’t exactly able to fix the problem in such a short amount of time but instead, were allowed to play on other accounts. Collapse loaded into game 4 as “Silent” to play Enigma from the offlance, whereas Larl loaded in as “Cheshir” to take on bzm in the midlane.

The throw must go on

ESL’s decision to rollback game four calls into question the entire integrity of the game. According to the official DreamLeague ruleset, each team is only permitted 10 minutes of pause time per map to fix technical issues but it’s hard to see what other solution there could be. The draft was also rolled back, meaning the game would have been played entirely played from minute 0 in an effort to ensure the team’s strategies remained in tact.

Loading back into that game, the true test of their resilience began for both Team Spirit and Tundra Esports. I’ve seen a fair few extended pauses in Dota in my time and in my experience, the team on the verge of victory has the most trouble keeping their mental strong.

Having already played a best of 3 in the lower bracket finals, it really has been the longest of days of Team Spirit. At 11:30pm CET, they’re still potentially 2 games away from winning their first tournament of the year, or losing another.

DreamLeague Season 25 Finals: Latest Update

Not long after the remade game 4 began again, Team Spirit were once again forced to pause due to Miposhka’s account being hit with a DDOS attack. Now, Spirit have officially confirmed that the grand finals have been postponed and will now take place on March 4th at 4pm CET.

Honestly, while this is disappointing and a pretty obvious violation of the official ruleset, it does seem to be the fairest outcome for all. While ESL have confirmed that the games have been postponed, we haven’t received any further commentary about the effect this has on future ESL tournaments, including ESL One Raleigh, due to begin on April 7th.