Esports tournament organizer ESL have announced that they are taking action regarding Dota 2 bug abuse in the ESL One Raleigh regional qualifiers, through an official post on their website.
In the statement, ESL declared that teams Na’Vi Junior, 9Pandas, and Aurora Gaming will be disqualified from ESL One Raleigh entirely as punishment for said bug abuse, and that other squads found to be abusing the bug “less” would be fined and reprimanded.
What is the Dota 2 Smoke bug?
The bug in question involves three major components in Dota 2: the item Smoke of Deceit, the feature that allows players to alert their teammates to certain things by alt-clicking them, and the feature that allows players to check enemy heroes’ inventories even when they aren’t within their team’s field of vision.
In this case, alt-clicking Smoke of Deceit as it shows up on an enemy hero’s inventory causes the player doing the alt-clicking to automatically send a chat message to their teammates and their teammates alone, alerting them to the fact that the enemy team might plan a Smoke of Deceit play sometime in the immediate future.
The above covers the first two components. The third component comes in when players try to alt-click Smoke of Deceit on a hero that has since gone out of vision, but used the item since they were last seen. The game would fail to display the correct message at all at this point, the absence of which gives the player and their team information that the Smoke in question has indeed been used.
This is of course extremely valuable in a game of limited information like Dota 2. Armed with this knowledge, teams can adjust what they’re doing according to the idea that they might get ganked within the next 20 to 30 seconds by playing more defensively or conservatively. Note that this is all without letting the other team know either, so they will naturally operate under the assumption that they haven’t been made in this case.
The bug has since been patched out of Dota 2, and the expected behavior now occurs properly.
Which teams abused this bug?
According to ESL, there are 13 teams across all Raleigh regional qualifier tournaments that abused the Smoke bug. ESL divided them into categories according to “severity”, which is based on how many instances of bug abuse they tallied for each team after watching their replays. For example, Na’Vi Junior, who exploited the bug around 115 times according to ESL’s count, fell under the “systematic abuse” category.
Copyright: Adela Sznajder, ESL FACEIT Group
“At points in gameplay, at least one member of the team is consistently using the bug in an attempt to gain an advantage,” said ESL in the statement. “It appears to be a constituent part of the team’s general approach to Dota.”
9Pandas (around 160 instances) and Aurora Gaming (around 50 instances) were also included in this category. All three teams were therefore disqualified for what ESL deems egregious bug abuse.
Lower down on the totem pole are the “moderate abuse” and “minor abuse” categories. The former involves “occasional” use of the bug, while the latter involves only one or two instances. The teams under these two categories are as follows:
Moderate abuse
One Move
Passion UA
Team Secret
Team Spirit
Tundra Esports
Virtus.pro
Winter Bear
Minor abuse
Natus Vincere
Shopify Rebellion
Wildcard
There’s also auxiliary categories like “accidental use” and “not suspected”. Squads like Nigma Galaxy and Gaimin Gladiators fell under the former, as the instances were found to be inconclusive according to ESL. The remaining 40 teams from the rest of the qualifiers were found to not be using the bug.
So how did this all come to light, anyway?
In the same statement, ESL mentioned that the first official complaint regarding any of this came from AVULUS, who reported Na’Vi Junior for abusing the bug in their lower bracket final match in the Western European qualifiers for the event originally pegged to take place in Europe.
ESL went to work investigating their games, and found that Na’Vi Junior had indeed abused the bug to the degree mentioned in the section above. They were disqualified from ESL One Raleigh on January 22nd as a result of the investigation.
Image Credit: PGL
As for 9Pandas and Aurora Gaming, they were retroactively punished after further investigation of other teams. According to ESL, the reason that only Na’Vi Junior had been disqualified at the time was because their investigation process had run into difficulties concerning the replay viewer.
“Unfortunately, one of the people responsible for checking other qualified teams experienced a bug where his client could not properly recreate the POV of the players he was spectating,” said ESL. “Due to this, incidents from other teams were missed.“
This still ain’t it, chief
Okay, so now that we know all that, I have to say one thing: the way ESL handled this wasn’t fair. Essentially, they’re saying that breaking the rules “a little” is fine, but if you do it more often than they’d like, then you get disqualified. Teams under the moderate and minor abuse categories are just as guilty as Na’Vi Junior, 9Pandas, and Aurora Gaming.
Smokes provide the game winning fight or the clutch pickoff in a comeback. It is arguably THE MOST valuable item in Dota.
This was not the bug to punish teams based on volume of use but instead how they used it.
After all, it only takes one successful Smoke gank or one successful dodge thereof to change the outcome of a game with so many moving parts like Dota 2, and just because some teams abused the bug less than others doesn’t change the potential impact. It’s obvious that ESL just didn’t want to kill the hype for ESL One Raleigh by disqualifying fan favorite squads like Tundra and Secret, even if that comes at the cost of competitive integrity. This is the textbook definition of favoritism and bias, and it’s just the much worse option here.
I will recognize that they did admit that their failure to reiterate that abusing the Smoke bug was grounds for disciplinary action, saying that PGL explicitly banned the act for the PGL Wallachia Season 3 regional qualifiers — which happened concurrently with the ESL One Raleigh qualifiers. So, I’ll give them props for owning up to their mistakes, and that their omission creates a small gray area for this tournament in particular.
But even still, not disqualifying the other teams for doing the same thing after saying that they realize the bug gives such a huge competitive advantage is just plain crazy.
Patrick has been playing Dota since the dawn of time, having started with the original custom game for WarCraft III. He primarily plays safe lane and solo mid, preferring to leave the glorious task of playing support to others.
