The Closed Qualifiers for the Six Invitational ended this past weekend. It was a great event with good matches and SSG going to SI23. That said, one topic that was “discussed” by players on social media was the potential abuse of tech timeouts. The claim goes that a certain team was using tech timeouts to extend their tactical timeout and gain extra time to discuss. Should the claims be true, this is obviously unfair and in breach of competitive integrity. However, this is a hard claim to prove and the nature of tech timeouts and online play makes it hard to address and hard to prevent.
Why do technical timeouts exist
Tech timeouts exist to preserve the competitive integrity of the game. If a player experiences a bug between or at the start of a round, it is something that can and should be addressed. A graphical glitch or game crash is an outside factor interfering with the match, and thus should not be ignored.
Things get a little muddier in the middle of a match, hence the rule that any crashes/bugs/whatever that occur after the first 15 seconds of the action phase will be ignored and the round continues. Even if a player crashes in a 2v2 in the dying seconds of the round, that round will not be rerun due to the crash. This is also to preserve competitive integrity.
Tech timeouts have to be sacrosanct. They exist to ensure fair play and should be used only for that purpose.
Of course just because something should be used for a single purpose doesn’t mean it will.
Tech Timeouts have a history of being abused
The claims that tech timeouts have been abused by down and out teams isn’t new. Back in the day, NaVi’s CS team was notorious for playing all sorts of tricks to get an edge.
A story Richard Lewis and Thorin often call back to is how the Russian IGL had once kicked a PC. They also talk of Brazilian legend Fallen talking during tech timeouts, something that CS rulebooks do not allow.
Prevention is harder than it seems
Of course, the CS circuit was historically offline when these incidents occurred. The Closed Quals were online. It’s hard to prove any foul play in this setting. After the coaching scandal in CSGO, Tournament Organizers and teams had to put in extensive measures to prove coaches were not having an undue influence on matches. This not only meant that there were the usual player cams, but TOs like BLAST, ESL, and FACEIT had to ship out extra cameras to watch the coach and everyone’s screens, all coming at a high price.
While Ubisoft likely has the money to make that kind of effort, it’s not one they would willingly make. Hell, it only happened in CSGO because the coaching scandal was such a big deal they couldn’t afford to not take measures against such behaviour. For Ubisoft to take such drastic measures for every online qualifier they run would rack up quite the cost very quickly isn’t realistic at this stage. They have no reason to. So in an online environment, we don’t have the information to say for sure that these tech timeouts are foul play.
And this makes the discussion around tech timeout abuse hard. Much like match fixing, just knowing it’s happening isn’t enough. You need undeniable proof, otherwise the accusations can damage the reputations of innocent people. We must operate on the principles of innocent until proven guilty, and “They always do this” isn’t enough proof.
The nature of tech timeouts and their importance to competitive integrity means that you cannot lightly accuse teams of abusing them. This of course makes them the prime target of teams trying to abuse them. What’s the safest way to abuse the rules but by taking advantage of something so important it cannot be questioned? But without undeniable proof, we must assume innocence. If we try to prevent tech timeout abuse and assume guilt without proper evidence, the circuit will break down in paranoia. We can’t prevent all tech timeout abuse. It’s an unfortunate sacrifice made so that matches keep running.
This is all without trying to figure out if the team did abuse tech pauses in the first place. They just as likely could have had legitimate problems that forced rehosts. We can’t know that. We shouldn’t make assumptions either. As far as I care, unless someone slides an envelope across my desk with irrefutable proof against a team, those tech pauses were legitimate and always will be.