Valve patches smoke exploit just hours before the start of the IEM Katowice Major

A small game update went live in CS:GO just in time for the IEM Katowice Major.

Game developer Valve put out an update earlier today to fix an exploit where players could spot people through smoke on their radar. This patch comes less than 12 hours before the start of the New Challengers stage at IEM Katowice.

“Fixed the ‘radar spotting enemies through smoke’ mechanic to behave the same regardless of the game server tickrate, and to not reveal enemies on the opposite side of the smoke until the smoke effect dissipates,” Valve said in today’s patch notes.

Related: What to expect at the IEM Katowice CS:GO Major

In the exploit, player could see enemies through smokes by looking into the smoke and waiting for it to dissipate enough for a red dot to show on their client’s radar. This would occur before the smoke fully dissipates, allowing players to spam rifle sprays into smokes before their enemies could react. It benefitted players with zoomed-in radars and key binds to adjust their radars for more accurate spams into smoke (e.g. bind “c” “incrementvar cl_radarscale 0.30 0.75 0.45”).

The exploit initially gained attention at the ECS Season Six Finals, when Astralis allegedly used it vs. MIBR. FaZe Clan star Nikola “NiKo” Kovac called out Astralis’ Andreas “Xyp9x” Hojsleth for successfully spamming a smoke and getting a kill when it hadn’t fully dissipated. The Danish team was at the center of attention in the controversy, because players like Xyp9x and Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander had become notorious for racking up frags through smoke.

For some reason, pros began complaining about it one day before the start of the Major, taking to Twitter with their concerns, even though it had been a known problem for months. MIBR’s Epitacio “TACO” de Melo and Fnatic’s Jesper “JW” Wecksell got into a heated exchange regarding the smoke, and many other pros like Ninjas in Pyjamas’ Jonas “Lekr0” Olofsson joked about it as well.

Now there won’t be any asterisks being put on teams at this Major, especially on Astralis. This is because problems that arise during a Major cycle can taint the legitimacy of a team’s tournament run in the eyes of many fans and pros alike.