The Esports Integrity Coalition (ESIC) has closed all investigations into allegations of stream sniping against top tier Counter-Strike teams. In a statement on Wednesday, any action could result in an extremely adverse effect on CS:GO esports, said ESIC. The esports watchdog also said many of the allegations were impossible to prove or would require extensive resources.
What Were the Results of the ESIC’s Stream Sniping Investigation?
ESIC reinforces prohibition on stream sniping in CSGO with its notification of a zero tolerance policy.
“ESIC has received and assessed compelling evidence depicting that this behavior has been taking place on an alarmingly regular basis and at all levels of competition.” (1/2) pic.twitter.com/ExYLGUkh9S
— ESIC (@ESIC_Official) December 2, 2020
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ESIC received numerous allegations of coaches and teams ‘stream sniping’ between May and June 2020. The coronavirus pandemic forced multiple events to take place online, attracting new problems for organizers to maintain the integrity of the matches. Earlier this year, ESIC banned thirty-seven coaches after they were found guilty of exploiting a visual bug in competitive matches.
After gathering compelling evidence that stream sniping was prevalent across all levels of competition in CS:GO, ESIC was faced with the real prospect of banning a significant number of players, coaches and in some cases entire teams. Such an action would adversely impact the top tier of the Counter-Strike Global Offensive. ESIC’s commissioner, Ian Smith, feels this action would have been a disproportionate outcome to the actual harm done by the practice.
In addition, due to the domino effect of such an action, ESIC and our members would have been faced with weeks or even months of further investigations into these alleged offences, involving many hours of video footage (where available) and hundreds of hours of in-game team communications, all over the period of our investigation into the coach bugs, which already threatened to overwhelm our limited resources.
ESIC Recommendations to Tackle Stream Sniping
ESIC has a list of recommendations for organizations and TOs to tackle Stream Sniping.
- The stream broadcast delay should be set to a minimum of three minutes.
- During any technical pause during a match, the broadcast team should be amended to not show any current round information or current round caster or analyst commentary.
- Video feeds showing the rooms and participants should be stored for a minimum of 90 days.
While these recommendations may be helpful moving forward, many people in the industry were disappointed with ESIC’s handling of cases that have already happened, citing clear issues with competitive integrity.
Super disappointed TOs and ESIC decided not to punish those caught stream sniping.
How does one get away with what’s essentially cheating? How is it fair on those who played fair and potentially lost money, ranking points or even their jobs?! https://t.co/U0RNSfd0GP
— Michal Slowinski (@michau9_) December 2, 2020
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Do you want people to not care or worry about your little regulatory body? Because this is how you get people to not care or worry about your little regulatory body. https://t.co/gacOFvJrZl
— Scott Smith (@SirScoots) December 2, 2020
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ESIC’s Surprising Decision Raises More Questions
After a stringent rule-set banning thirty-seven CS:GO coaches for visual bug abuse, ESIC’s recent decision raises many questions. Stream sniping has become an extremely common-place amongst tier 1 teams in online matches. Teams can obtain crucial information about the opponent’s economy, their approach as well as utility via the official stream.
Moreover, the lack of punishment for guilty teams will be a hard pill to swallow for teams that refrained from sniping streams to get an advantage. Enforcing bans on several tier 1 players, coaches and in some cases, teams would be difficult to enforce for ESIC and tournament organizers.
The ESIC Commissioner argued that the massive changes to the existing system that would be needed to fix this issue would cause a disproportionate amount of harm compared to the actual harm done by these allegations. The ESIC is a private, for profit entity and claims to be the esports watchdog.
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