Coach Spectating Bug
In professional Counter-Strike, integrity is of the utmost importance. Millions of dollars are put into these tournaments and organizations, and breaches of integrity can threaten the entire scene.
In order to understand the coach spectating bug, one must first understand the role of the coach in professional Counter-Strike. As I mentioned previously, each team has five players. The coach helps direct the team before each round begins and helps direct them in terms of game plan and strategy. Once each round begins, the coach can not communicate with the team. This limiting of the coach's communication with their team is only enforced at LAN tournaments, where the playing teams are physically present. For online tournaments, it is hard to enforce this as the coaches can stay in the teamspeak (or another third party software that allows players of a team to communicate). Due to this, it is only in online tournaments/matches where the exploitation of this bug can be observed.
The coach spectating bug is a bug in game where a coach's perspective may be a third person view of an area of the map instead of the coach's perspective being the first person view of their team. This allowed coaches to give information to their team which in many cases resulted in teams winning that shouldn't have won. By using the coach spectating bug, coaches are able to tell their players the whereabouts of the enemy team and the coach's team can adjust their positioning and playstyle to match this previously unknown information.
The bug was first brought to light in August of 2020, and an organization known as the eSports Integrity Comission (ESIC) has been the spearhead of the investigations launched as a result of this bug's discovery by mainstream media. Thousands of demos of matches have been observed and are continually being observed to find any instances where this bug has been employed to give a team an unfair advantage.
As a result of this bug, dozens of coaches have had sanctions imposed on them by the ESIC which are respected by tournament organizers such as ESL and ESEA. These coaches have been punished because not only did they use the bug to their advantage, but they also did not inform the tournament organizers nor VALVe of this bug's existence.
While many of the banned coaches truly did abuse the bug and deserve to be banned, there are some coaches who experienced the bug without using it to their advantage. These coaches, when they experienced the bug, did all they could think to do in order to maintain the competitive integrity of the game. Despite these efforts to get around the bug, they have still been unfairly banned.
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