Imagine if you dropped a weapon for your teammate on CT spawn of Mirage and the gun simply disappeared out of thin air. That’s upsetting, right? Well, this game-breaking bug actually exists, and it happened during the FURIA versus BIG series at IEM Katowice 2023 Play-In stage yesterday, Feb. 1.
FURIA had just won their first CT side round against BIG and during the freeze time of the next round, in-game leader Andrei “arT” Piovezan dropped his AK-47 to André “drop” Abreu so they could exchange weapons. While arT got drop’s M4A1-S, the youngster lost the AK-47 forever because it ended up under the map geometry and couldn’t be retrieved anymore. Drop was forced to buy an M4A1-S when the round had already started, which left him with just $50 left in his inventory.
Fortunately for FURIA and drop, they ended up winning that round, meaning that the economical damage caused by the bug didn’t affect FURIA’s plans as much. However, this bug should be fixed as soon as possible because it can really destroy a team’s economy and change the outcome of a match if the game is tight. It hurts even more because it happened in CT spawn, and the CTs always have to spend more than Terrorists to get their guns and utilities.
It’s unclear how long this bug has existed on Mirage’s CT spawn, but now that it has appeared at one of the flagship tournaments of CS:GO esports, it’s more likely that Valve will fix it eventually by changing the texture of the ground in that area. It’s also unclear if FURIA could have taken a tech pause and asked to replay the round because they lost one of their weapons due to a bug.
Dot Esports has reached out to ESL, who has yet to comment at time of publishing.
Update Feb. 3 7:06am CT: FURIA could have taken a technical pause but the Brazilian team were uncertain what happened in the match and ESL wasn’t aware of the bug either, the tournament organizer told Dot Esports.
