ESL finished their investigation into Smoke of Deceit bug abuse that occurred at Raleigh 2025 Closed Qualifiers. The TO upheld the NAVI Junior disqualification and penalized a few more teams. The results were published at the official website.
The punishment depended on number of instances of the bug abuse. In terms of the qualifier results, nothing changed after the initial ban of NAVI Junior. The other banned teams, 9Pandas and Aurora, didn't qualify at all.
ESL admitted they made a mistake: they warned against bug usage at previous events but forgot to remind the teams about it at Raleigh qualifiers.
It was a mistake to not re-state that the bug was still banned to all participants in the qualifiers and this has to be taken into account when looking at appropriate sanctions.
This fits Denis "Larl" Sigitov's story. Few days earlier, during the investigation, he mentioned trying to clarify the status of the bug. According to his words, since there was no reminder, he wanted to check if the glitch was still active.
The TO also reportedly encountered another bug. Thus is how they explained why initially only NAVI Junior were banned. The demo reviewer didn't properly show player's perspective. They said that the bugs found by the community helped to reopen the investigation.
Unfortunately, one of the people responsible for checking other qualified teams experienced a bug where his client could not properly recreate the POV of the players he was spectating. Due to this, incidents from other teams were missed.
Believing that only NAVI Junior had used the bug, they were disqualified from the event on Wednesday 22nd January. In the following 24 hours, the community helped to identify other uses of the bug that our team had missed at the time. This is what led to our team discovering the replay bug, and showed us that we needed to create a more robust checking system with multiple checks.
Smoke of Deceit bug allowed players to see if the other team activated it since last time you saw their items. This was possible via dragging the Smoke from an opponent's inventory and checking for a chat message. In the ESL One Raleigh qualifiers, AVULUS filed a protest against NAVI Junior, which led to their disqualification for "multiple abuses." The TO disqualified the team, but opened a new investigation shortly after community reaction.