After mould gate, the Benched Heroes debacle, and a stage for EPL that could easily have been from DreamHack Winter 2011, ESL could do with some good press.
Naturally, the universe doesn’t work that way. Late Wednesday night, as we entered map three of a Heroic-NAVI slugfest, s1mple started lagging. Yep, lag. On LAN.
The memes started rolling in. Were ESL running their server from Katowice as well as their production? s1mple was so upset he went full Italian on an admin. Reddit proposed that ESL should send a spy to BLAST to get some tips.
There was just one problem: It wasn’t even ESL’s fault. The issues were actually caused by everyone’s least favourite CS:GO community — the gamblers.
Most of you won’t remember when 75% of online games were DDOS’d a few times a map, but these guys have been at it for years. This new exploit, worryingly, works by sending 100s of Steam friend requests to professional players’ accounts which sends your PC into oblivion.
After a two hour tech pause, some new PCs, and probably fresh Steam accounts (we guess, since NAVI lost their skins) the game resumed, with a 1HP s1mple sealing the deal with a knife on sjuush. Don’t poke the bear.
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