ESL explains reason for stripping NAVI JUNIOR's again..

ESL explained again on Saturday through its official X (Twitter) account about NAVI JUNIOR being stripped of ESL ONE Raleigh 2025 for abusing the Smoke of Deceit Bug.

According to ESL's tweet, they have restarted the investigation into this controversial incident, and the investigation report is now basically completed, and they severely criticized the players for abusing this bug to cheat and win.

ESL explained that they are very grateful for the active help of fans, which enabled this investigation to be concluded so quickly after the restart.

Upon verification, they have re-watched the ESL ONE Raleigh 2025 qualifiers matches and has distinguished each team suspected of abusing the Smoke of Deceit Bug by the number of abuses.

Among the reported teams, 9Pandas abused this bug 160 times, they are the team that have abused the Smoke of Deceit Bug the most in this tournament.

The much-criticized NAVI JUNIOR abused this bug 115 times.

Malaysian team Aurora Gaming abused this bug 50 times.

In order to punish these teams, ESL will maintain the decision to disqualify NAVI JUNIOR. If no local team successfully advances to ESL ONE Raleigh 2025, 9Pandas and Aurora will also be prohibited from qualifying for this tournament as substitutes.

In addition, Passion UA, One Move, Virtus.Pro, Winter Bear, Tundra Esport, Team Spirit and Team Secret, who are also criticized by many people, will not be banned, but will be fined for moderate abuse of this bug.

ESL also stated that this bug has been completely removed, and the PGL Wallachia Season 3 event will also use the same punishment mechanism to prevent participating teams from abusing the bug.

NAVI JUNIOR has expressed dissatisfaction with ESL's latest explanation, and questioned why Tundra Esport, whose allegations are also very serious, can still escape heavy punishment, so they questioned whether ESL is biased towards the latter.

About the Smoke of Deceit Bug

The Smoke of Deceit Bug is a new bug that has swept the entire Dota 2 competitive e-sport circle recently.

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 Deceit has been used. Since the game will not pop up a warning to inform players whether the opponent's Smoke of Deceit 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 Deceit.