DOTA 2

Top Teams Disqualified from ESL One Raleigh Due to Smoke of Deceit Bug

By Ramon Domingo - February 04, 2025

Other teams were not spared from the controversial use of the bug as well.

Things got messy for the final qualifiers for ESL One Raleigh as multiple teams were caught exploiting a Smoke of Deceit bug. 9Pandas, Aurora Gaming, and NAVI Junior have now been disqualified from the event after an extensive investigation from the organizers.

Top Teams Disqualified from ESL One Raleigh Due to Smoke of Deceit Bug
It’s some unfortunate news for Southeast Asian hopefuls. (Photo from Aurora Dota 2)

The exploit involves a weird interaction between items and Dota 2’s fog of war mechanics. When you select an enemy hero in the game, you get to see what’s in their inventory. When you have that enemy selected when they’re hiding in the fog of war, you see what’s in their inventory the last time you saw them. Normally, you cannot interact with your enemy’s inventory. Trying to select an item in their inventory will usually get you an error message. However, there was a bug where if you didn’t get an error message while selecting an item in an enemy’s inventory, that means it’s no longer there.

That’s essentially how the Smoke of Deceit bug works. Smoke of Deceit is a consumable item that turns you and nearby allies invisible. It’s a critical item for getting the jump on your enemies and teams are constantly tracking each other to know if they have the item available. So, if you see that an enemy hero holding a Smoke of Deceit, you’d be constantly using this bug to make sure you know if they’re preparing an ambush.

A Massive Fallout

This started when NAVI Junior took the second qualifying slot against AVULUS in the West European qualifiers last January 20. AVULUS however suspected that NAVI Junior was using the Smoke of Deceit bug and raised a complaint to ESL. This resulted in ESL disqualifying NAVI Junior and giving the qualifying slot to AVULUS instead.

Unsurprisingly, this opened a whole can of worms as complaints about other teams using the exploit began surfacing. After launching a more thorough investigation lasting over a week, ESL released a statement detailing their timeline of events and the full extent of their punishments. 9Pandas and Aurora Gaming were found to be chief abusers of this bug and have been disqualified as well. While these two teams originally failed to qualify for ESL One Raleigh, this means that they can’t take a team’s place if they drop out of the tournament. 

Others were hit with fines and warnings as their use of the Smoke of Deceit bug was not as severe. This includes teams who have already qualified such as Tundra Esports and Shopify Rebellion. In total, 13 teams were hit with sanctions for using the exploit during the ESL One Raleigh qualifiers.

A Clear Need for Communication

What made this whole situation ugly was that the Smoke of Deceit bug had been known for months and was even used in other major tournaments. Now, using bugs is not necessarily the problem here. Exploiting bugs has been a thing in the Dota esports scene since its inception. Some of them have even been turned into actual in-game mechanics. But it’s ultimately up to the tournament organizers if they’ll allow the use of known bugs.

That’s where criticism against ESL has been directed at. They’ve banned the use of this bug in their previous tournaments but didn’t expressly communicate that for this one. Some players, such as Aurora’s team captain Anucha “Jabz” Jirawong, felt like they were blindsided by this ruling since they didn’t participate in those tournaments.

ESL admitted in their statement that they dropped the ball in terms of clarifying the rules for the qualifiers. They’ve promised that they’ll be clearer on their stance on bug abuse for their future tournaments.

The Smoke of Deceit bug has been patched out of the game on January 29.

Banner photo from Aurora Dota 2.

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