A major CS:GO bug came to light on Feb. 1 during the first day of IEM Katowice 2023, one of the flagship events of Counter-Strike esports. FURIA were playing BIG on Mirage and one of their weapons vanished out of thin air when Andrei “arT” Piovezan dropped his AK-47 to André “drop” Abreu. The players later found out the weapon ended up under the soil.
The bug wasn’t caught by the broadcast and everyone realized what happened on Feb. 2 after drop shared the moment the bug happened via the match’s demo. After seeing the clip, fans were left wondering why the match wasn’t paused. ESL has clarified the protocol for such cases and why FURIA didn’t pause under the circumstances.
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“In this exact situation, teams can indeed call for a tech pause, and then the round would be restarted,” ESL told Dot Esports. “During this specific round, FURIA were unsure what happened, and hence they did not call for a tech pause, nor did they communicate the issue to our admin. Therefore, the match continued without any interruptions. After the game ended, FURIA were still uncertain about what happened and did not inform us. We only became aware of the situation after seeing the tweet.”
Now that ESL is aware this bug exists in Mirage’s CT spawn, the tournament organizer told Dot Esports it will relay the information to Valve. It’s unclear, however, if the developer of CS:GO will fix this bug while IEM Katowice 2023 is underway. The $1 million tournament will run until Feb. 12.
