The first few days of the Challengers Stage of the IEM Rio CS:GO Major have not lacked in excitement, thanks to an abundance of closely contested matches and incredible energy coming from the Brazilian crowd.
But it’s not all been smooth sailing, and that’s not just in reference to the Brazilian teams that were eliminated in front of a raucous home crowd. A plethora of tech issues has slowed down the event, most of which involved players freezing or crashing completely.
One of the most noticeable and shocking examples was during Outsiders’ 16-1 rout of Fnatic on Overpass. In the sixth round, in a three-vs-three situation, all three Fnatic players crashed just as Outsiders were approaching the site for their retake. Thankfully, as the result of the round had not been determined yet, the round was replayed, although Fnatic would lose the round anyway during a completely one-sided map.
This wasn’t even the first time a crash occurred during this specific map. Outsiders’ Qikert disconnected while defending the B site in a different round. In that instance though, Outsiders already had the round won against a Fnatic team that hadn’t bought, and Qikert even had one of his teammates defending his immobilized character until the round ended, so the result of that round stood.
Crashes and freezes have happened a handful of other times as well over the first three days of the Challengers Stage. There have also been some disconnect issues as well, including ones that affected OG’s degster so much that three different PCs had to be brought in to replace his. Degster’s comments about the issues directed toward ESL drew some attention from the community.
ESL provided a statement to CS:GO news outlet Dust2 regarding the issues. ESL said it “already applied fixes for past issues and are continuously running through several tests with a dedicated team for anything new in order to diagnose and resolve it as soon as possible.”
