NAVI Junior disqualifed from participating in ESL ONE Raleigh 2025 due to the abuse of the Smoke of Deceit bug..

ESL ONE, the organizer of the Dota 2 e-sports event, announced on Sunday through its official Twitter account that it has decided to disqualify NAVI Junior from participating in ESL ONE Raleigh 2025 due to the abuse of the Smoke of Deceit bug during the tournament.

According to the ESL ONE official statement, they have received many video replays provided by fans, complaining that NAVI Junior abused the Smoke of Deceit bug during the MEU qualifiers match against AVULUS.

Upon verification, the abuser was Riddys, the captain of NAVI Junior.

Because this result caused unfair competition to AVULUS, they have decided to disqualify NAVI Junior from participating. Likewise, AVULUS will automatically replace them as one of the qualifying teams for ESL ONE Raleigh 2025.

At the same time, due to complaints from fans that Tundra and Spirit also abused the Smoke of Deception Bug to win, they have decided to intervene, make investigation and take measures to correct this bug. However, due to the huge work that are needed, this bug is expected to take several days to a week to be completely resolved. During this time, ESL ONE will actively discuss countermeasures to prevent this situation from happening again.

The Smoke of Deception Bug is a new bug that has swept the entire Dota 2 circle in recent times.

This bug allows players to hover the mouse to the opponent's inventory and press Alt + Right click to check whether the opponent's Smoke of Deception has been used. Since the game will not pop up a warning to inform players whether the opponent's Smoke of Deception has been used during the game, this allows players to retreat at any time to avoid the trap set by the opponent after using the Smoke of Deception.

In fact, this is the second time during the ESL ONE Raleigh 2025 qualifiers that a team was disqualified for cheating.

A few days ago, amateur team Cyberding suddenly paused the game during the North American qualifiers against Red Bulls, openly cheating by by hiring ringer to check the ping Red Bull players, but was caught and disqualified by ESL ONE.