Degster blames ESL for tech issues at IEM Rio CS:GO Major, faces backlash from talent and event crew

Abdulkhalik “degster” Gasanov’s recent comments about the tech issues at the IEM CS:GO Rio Major 2022 have caused quite a stir in the game’s community.

The OG player claimed that ESL isn’t doing “anything to help players and teams” at the tournament, which was quickly met with backlash from the broadcast talent and the ESL crew who claimed his comments were false.

“Is there a reason you are skewing the truth on social media?” Chad “SPUNJ” Burchill, one of the analysts working on the event, asked in response. Marc “Nix0n” Winther, the head of game ecosystems for CS:GO at ESL added, “This is not a fair representation of what happened and how we’ve worked with everyone to resolve the issues.”

The tech issues degster referred to occurred during OG’s first game at the tournament against Grayhound, for example. The match took more than three hours, according to HLTV, because of the issues that degster had with his PC and account, which crashed the game for him multiple times. The problems were ultimately resolved and OG managed to swiftly secure the win.

In Tuesday’s OG match against FURIA, his team also faced a few issues, like Maciej “F1KU” Miklas’ PC crashing during a pivotal round.

Besides those issues, there were some other tech problems during the Major, but they didn’t take as much time as the one degster was dealing with. One other occurred to Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov in Cloud9’s match against Grayhound. The player was bugged at a 17-17 scoreline, which led to C9 losing the round, and eventually the game with a 19-17 score.

Degster also criticized ESL for a lack of reaction and solutions. Although ESL commented on the bugs during the tournament following degster’s tweets to Dust2.us.

“We’ve already applied fixes for past issues and are continuously running through several tests with a dedicated team for anything new in order to diagnose and resolve it as soon as possible. […] These things shouldn’t happen but in a dynamic environment with multiple softwares in play, they can happen,” the company said.