FACEIT bans Wildwing Ripper’s Tornado ability in the TI8 open qualifiers

The International 8 open qualifiers have gotten off to a rather ridiculous start.

Administrators from FACEIT, the official organizers of the open qualifiers, have discovered a game-breaking bug with the Wildwing Ripper neutral creep in Dota 2. The bug itself is manifested in the Wildwing Ripper’s Tornado ability, which summons a slow-moving whirlwind which can be directly controlled by whoever owns the unit. In this case, the Wildwing Ripper itself is taken control of by a hero with such capabilities, such as Chen or Enchantress.

Under normal circumstances, the tornado would not have a clickable hitbox surrounding it—at least, to players that are not on the same side as the one controlling the tornado. In this bug, however, it seems that the tornado’s hitbox has somehow become so large that it actually interferes with move commands once it’s onscreen and next to a player’s hero.

The result? Players are unable to move as intended. Instead, their heroes are taken in random directions depending on where the tornado is in relation to them. With the tornado actively following the hero, this can cause heroes to walk straight into the enemy in an extremely compromising position.

Though the bug can be countered by moving the player’s field of view away from the tornado and issuing a move command on another part of the map, it seems to have caught teams by surprise anyway. A video of the glitch in action was captured by FACEIT admin “Omicron” earlier today, and posted by Redditors on the Dota 2 subreddit.

In response to this, FACEIT has banned all use of the Tornado ability in the open qualifiers, until a hotfix is implemented by Valve. Any teams caught abusing the glitch will be disqualified immediately, and will be banned from all future qualifier tournaments run by FACEIT.

At the time of writing, however, Valve has not issued an update to the Dota 2 client in order to fix the issue.