ESL Ban Coaches of Heroic, MIBR and Hard Legion for Bug Exploiting

ESL have announced that they detected three coaches – Nicolai "HUNDEN" Petersen from Heroic, Ricardo "dead" Sinigaglia from MIBR, and Aleksandr "MechanoGun" Bogatiryev from Hard Legion – knowingly exploiting a bug that allowed them to get a free camera/observer position. Each of these coaches received a ban depending on the amount of exploits, while the teams were penalized.

For the last three weeks ESL’s staff have been analyzing all matches from tier-1 ESL and DreamHack competitions which were played in the past months. Throughout the process, the company was in close contact with VALVE. They will review yet another 1000 demos from tier2-3 events. Meanwhile, they have found out that:

• MechanoGun from Hard Legion used the bug at ESL One Road to Rio on 6 maps in 3 matches
• Hunden from Heroic used the bug at DreamHack Masters Spring in 10 rounds on 1 map
• dead from MIBR used the bug at ESL One Road to Rio in 1 round on 1 map

Based on that, ESL decided to ban dead for 6 months, Hunden for 12 months and MechanoGun for 24 months. For the time of the ban, they will not be allowed to play or coach in ESL/DreamHack competitions.

Besides that, the teams will be retroactively disqualified from the tournaments in question, as well as forfeit their prize money and ESL Pro Tour points. Thereby, Hard Legion will lose their 3rd place at ESL One Road to Rio CIS with $6,000 and 140 Pro Tour points, Heroic will lose the 9-12th place at DreamHack 2020 Spring Europe with $3,000 and 45 points, and MIBR will lose the 7-8th place at ESL One Road to Rio NA with $2,000 and 55 points.

Although the teams were forced to forfeit their prize money and ESL Pro Tour points, it looks like MIBR and Hard Legion may retain their RMR-points acquired from the Road to Rio event – according to Heroic’s statement, the organization forwarded the information on the issue to both ESIC and Valve, with the latter choosing not to act on it. Besides that, all affected organizations announced that they will conduct internal investigation. In addition to it, MIBR promised to immediately suspend their coach and manager.

ESL also noted that they introduced measures to prevent the exploit starting with ESL One Cologne 2020, which means that Heroic’s recent victory remains untainted. Meanwhile Valve reported that they fixed the bug in the update released on August 27th.