For professional CS:GO players, scrims are a chance to practice the game at a high level, but they’ve also turned into a way for opposing teams to use some underhanded practices.
On October 8th, Liquid’s Jonathan ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski took to Twitter to call out one such organization.
With CS:GO being such a technical, frame-perfect game, recording opponents POVs can give a team a significant advantage.
PSA for teams: Make sure you check status on console before scrims to make sure the other team isn’t recording your POVs without your consent 🙂 Pretty shady to do and so annoying teams are still doing this shit
— Jonathan Jablonowski (@EliGE) October 8, 2018
When told to @ who he is talking about, EliGE obliges and calls out Rogue.
But it doesn’t seem like Rogue is the only organization who may be using this trick.
Tarik, a player for Made in Brazil, responded to the tweet. He remembered a time an organization “had trouble connecting” to his team’s server only to find a screen-recording set up when they switched to the opposing team’s server.
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Had an instance where the other team said their 5th couldn’t join our server, then once we played them again we realized their sever had GOTV. Super shady.
— tarik (@tarik) October 8, 2018
Tarik neglected to name the organization in question.
To discover if an opposing team is recording a scrim is actually pretty simple.
All it requires is turning on GOTV, the in-game viewing service, for the server being used to host the scrims.
The ease of use of GOTV, coupled with the solid advantage a team using the service receives, makes this a valid worry for professional CS:GO teams.
Luckily, it is easy to identify teams using this trick, and calling out the organization in question – like EliGE – should stop major organizations from risking their reputation for a little bit of intel.