Written by Dante Uzel on 03 February 2025 11:58
ESL has completed and shared the findings of its investigation into the bug exploitation that led to NAVI Junior’s disqualification from Dota 2’s ESL One Raleigh tournament.
Following the ESL One Raleigh qualifiers, the tournament organizers reviewed NAVI Junior’s matches and discovered that the team had exploited the Smoke of Deceit bug. This bug allowed teams to detect whether their opponents had used Smoke of Deceit since their last sighting. By dragging the enemy’s smoke, an error would appear if the smoke hadn’t been activated. However, if no message appeared, it indicated that the smoke had already been used.
Since ESL’s initial announcement on January 22nd, more details about the investigation have been revealed. This includes checks conducted on other teams.
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ESL stated "The bug that we investigated primarily manifests as a way to detect if the other team has used smoke whilst they’re in the fog.Assuming that your team had vision of an enemy hero whilst the smoke was in their inventory, you could alt-click/click and drag the item. Usually this would display a message - alt click in the chat, click/drag displays an error telling you you don’t control that unit. The bug in this situation is as follows: if the smoke has been used since the hero was last seen, then this message does not display, giving you that information without the other team being aware. Using this bug gives you valuable and otherwise unobtainable information, allowing you to avoid walking into bad fights, prepare yourselves for a teamfight, adapt farming patterns to avoid ganks, or use the information to avoid fighting altogether during opponent power spikes."
The investigation was reopened after the community helped identify additional instances of the bug being used. A special software tool was deployed to track any potential instances of the exploit.
After reviewing all qualifier matches, ESL classified teams based on the extent of the abuse. The investigation found that 9Pandas used the bug 160 times, NAVI Junior exploited it 115 times, and Aurora Gaming used it 50 times.
Tags: NAVI
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