Legitimacy of IEM Brazil closed CS:GO qualifier at risk as major tech issues persist

The European closed qualifier for the $250,000 CS:GO tournament IEM Brazil remains plagued by persistent tech issues, affecting multiple teams like ENCE, Bad News Eagles, BIG, and Sprout yesterday, according to HLTV.

BIG, ENCE, and Sprout all lost matches to lesser-ranked teams amid reports that the qualifier servers were lagging and that the ESEA client was crashing. The technical issues in the BIG vs. Sprout matches were so persistent that the teams managed to play only six rounds in an hour. The community hoped ESEA would deploy fixes for these problems ahead of today’s matches, but the players are still having issues, according to ENCE’s rifler Pavle “maden” Bošković.

“Two days in a row getting huge lags on three guys because of ESEA client,” maden said on Twitter. “They don’t want to provide us good servers or fix this bug, and they also don’t let us play without the client, we lost full ecos, antiecos, [and] many other rounds because of it.”

Another professional player commented on maden’s Twitter thread that what makes the problems ever worse is that he believed ESEA will “never” make a public comment addressing the issues. ESEA, which is owned by ESL, apologized to ENCE’s captain Marco “Snappi” Pfeffer yesterday and said it was working on getting everything fixed “as soon as possible.”

So far, two of the three days of the European closed qualifier have been hit with tech issues related to ESEA’s client or servers. Two teams from this qualifier will confirm their spots at IEM Brazil, ESL’s next big event after the conclusion of ESL Pro League season 17 in March. Despite the event playing an important role in their CS:GO calendar for 2023, ESL has gone mostly radio silent about the tech issues happening in Europe.

Either HONORIS or 9INE will qualify for IEM Brazil today, while the second spot will be defined tomorrow, Feb. 10. The $250,000 event will run from April 17 to 23.

Dot Esports has reached out to ESL, who has yet to comment at time of publishing.

Update Feb. 10 8:21am CT: ESL set up a VPN for the affected players once it discovered what was causing the issues and said it understands the frustrations, but that such issues can affect online events like the closed qualifier, the tournament organizer told Dot Esports.