The flashbang bug that occurred in FURIA vs. FaZe Clan’s match yesterday at IEM Rio 2023 isn’t related to server issues as a part of the community thought.
ESL told Dot Esports in a statement today that it was in fact a game bug. “So there was indeed a bug in the game when FaZe Clan threw their flash, due to which FURIA’s players didn’t get blinded,” ESL said. If this is true, this same bug could happen in your regular CS:GO games and tear up A bombsite retakes on Mirage.
This game-breaking bug happened in FURIA vs. FaZe’s first pistol round on Mirage yesterday. FaZe were on the CT side and going for a retake on the A bombsite. As part of standard protocol, FaZe’s captain karrigan threw a flashbang for ropz and broky to peek CT Stairs and Ticket. The flashbang was perfect, but Andrei “arT” Piovezan and André “drop” Abreu were never blinded.
ArT said after reviewing the demo that his character was deaf due to the flashbang a couple of seconds after, and we can see in his demo clip that he and drop’s character models put their hands on their faces as they would if they were blind because that’s the blind animation. This means the flashbang somehow didn’t properly register and it killed FaZe’s chances of retaking A and securing the first pistol round.
This sort of bug has never been seen in professional play, at least in recent times. If it’s a game bug and not a server one, Valve has to look into it as fast as possible, even with the launch of Counter-Strike 2 this summer, because it can affect the competitive integrity of other CS:GO tournaments and even casual Mirage games.
FaZe ended up losing yesterday’s series 2-0 to FURIA and dropped to the lower bracket, while the Brazilians secured a spot in the playoffs. Today, FaZe were eliminated at the hands of Vitality after another 2-0 loss, this time in the lower bracket.
