At the end of last month Avangar narrowly won the PUBG Invitational at the Intel Extreme Masters event in Katowice, Poland, with OpTic Gaming coming in close behind, but now a new post on the IEM website has ruled that OpTic are disqualified from Game 8 of the competition, resulting in a nullification of points.
A clip on Twitch shows OpTic player Bahawaka coming close to a wall to see through the building, which can only be done by following a specific pattern of not having a weapon and making a certain movement. As such, it can't be done by accident, and was judged to be purposefully exploiting a bug.
"To keep tournaments as efficient as possible, ESL reserves the right to disqualify teams. This will only be done in cases where a team purposefully stalls or attempts to block the tournament from starting," point 5.6 of section 'Usage of Bugs, Glitches & Exploits' in the rulebook reads, which also includes the following two points:
- Intentionally changing your character's angle to look through a texture or object is prohibited.
- The intentional use of any bugs, glitches, or errors in the game is strictly forbidden and will be penalised. Any team found to be using any known exploit will forfeit their game upon the first occurrence of the exploit.
"Given the bug can only be abused by following a certain pattern, the league administration have found OpTic Bahawaka guilty according to 5.6 of the rules. Followingly, the league administration have decided to disqualify OpTic Gaming for game 8 and therefore remove all of their points for that round. All teams placing worse than OpTic Gaming in game 8 have moved up one position for game 8 accordingly," IEM writes.
For the updated scoreboard take a look at the official post. Do you think this is a fair ruling?