According to HLTV, the European closed qualifier for the $250,000 CS:GO tournament IEM Brazil is still plagued by persistent tech problems, affecting many teams such as ENCE, Bad News Eagles, BIG, and Sprout yesterday.
BIG, ENCE, and Sprout all lost matches to lesser-ranked teams due to concerns that the qualifier servers were lagging or that the ESEA client was crashing. The players were able to complete six rounds in an hour, according to ENCE's rifler Pavle "maden" Bokovi.
Maden said on Twitter that two days in a row, three players were experiencing severe delays due to an ESEA client. “They refuse to provide us good servers or fix this bug, and they also refuse to allow us to play without the client. We also lost full ecos, antiecos, and many other rounds because of it.”
Another professional player commented on maden's Twitter thread that ESEA would "never" make a public comment addressing the issues. Yesterday, ESEA apologized to ENCE's captain Marco "Snappi" Pfeffer and said it was attempting to fix everything "as soon as possible."
After the conclusion of ESL Pro League season 17, ESL has remained largely silent about the tech issues going on in Europe.
The second spot will be determined tomorrow, February 10, while HONORIS or 9INE will be selected. The $250,000 event will run from April 17 to 23.
Dot Esports has reached out to ESL, who has yet to make a comment at the time of publication.
Update February 10 8:21am CT: ESL set up a VPN for the affected players once it discovered what was causing the issues, and said it understands the frustrations, but that such issues can affect online events, like the closed qualifier, according to the tournament organizer.