The winners of a significantCounter-Striketournament held in Finland have been banned and retroactively stripped of their title for cheating. The Finnish Red Bull Flick tournament wrapped up recently, with the team of woldes and jezayyyy taking the victory. Following accusations of cheating from theCounter-Strikecommunity following the tournament, organizer FACEIT has since confirmed that cheating took place and has punished woldez and jezayyyy appropriately.
FACIT claims that its anti-cheat during the tournament suffered from a technical issue. The issue temporarily prevented a “few types of cheat detection” from being accessible to FACEIT’santi-cheatteam. Only after the tournament was finished was FACEIT able to evaluate the situation and adequately punish the duo who won.
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The result is that, due to time constraints regarding the winning team moving on to theCounter-StrikeEU Closed Qualifier tournament, FACEIT and Red Bull can’t redo theesports tournament. Instead, the involved parties have decided to give the tournament’s second-place team, eNhAnCeD, the victory. They’ll represent Finland in the EU Closed Qualifier tournament.
It’s an unfortunate situation, because there have to be many teams that faced the cheating team who won’t be given a fair chance to prove themselves. No one in the tournament can say that eNhAnCeD truly was the best team in the tournament, as a result, though they’ll certainly better represent the region over a pair ofcheaters.
The situation does raise some eyebrows within theCounter-Strikecommunity, however. The community was vocally critical of the two cheaters' gameplay when video was produced. Accusations of cheating were relatively quick, though that’s not uncommon even when no cheating takes place. Some in the community believe FACEIT and Red Bull banned the winners based on community response, rather than actual cheat detection. Needless to say, it’s a bad situation and few are going to be happy with it.
It just goes to show that despite modern efforts to combat cheating in online games, whether it’sCounter-Strike,Overwatch, or even the newly releasedValorant, there’s only so much that can be done. Online tournaments especially are difficulty to run without any cheating, but that’s all that can be done in this era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone just has to make the best of the situation,Counter-Striketournament organizers and players included.
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