A game-breaking bug created havoc at during a TI12 game between Azure Ray and Thunder Awaken, but was solved by Valve intervention.
It’s a nightmare scenario for any esports game: A bug affecting a match on the biggest stage of your event and potentially ruining a match. But that’s just what happened during a group stage clash between Azure Ray and Thunder Awaken on October 12, the first day of The International.
The bug in question saw Lu “Somnus” Yao’s Earth Spirit stuck in an invulnerable state after boarding Centaur Warrunner’s cart from his Aghanim’s Scepter ability. This bug obviously caused a pause, but the game was bizarrely unpaused for several seconds in an apparent truce to try to unstick the Earth Spirit.
When this failed, the game was paused again, and Valve went to work. After a surprisingly short pause of around 20 minutes, the bug was fixed. And within the hour Valve had rolled out (pun intended) a quick patch to fix the Rolling Boulder bug, and save the day.
As a result, we finally got a question to: “What happens if a game-breaking bug happens at TI?” As it turns out, the answer was “Valve fixes it in a surprisingly short amount of time.” It’s unknown if they patch fixed the bug, or if some command admin commands had to be used.
One potential way to fix this bug would have been to manually remove Earth Spirit from the game using console commands before adding him back in with the same items under the same player's control.
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TI12 bug fix patch notes
Below we’ve listed all the bugs that Valve fixed in their off-the-cuff update, including the bizarre Earth Spirit bug:
- Fixed Earth Spirit being stuck in Rolling Boulder if Centaur Warrunner casts Work Horse while Earth Spirit is transforming
- Fixed a bad interaction between Kunkka X Marks the Spot and Impale
- Fixed some cases where players were unable to watch matches via DotaTV
- Fixed cases where in-game predictions weren’t working
- Fixed Bingo square progress not being visible on client
- Fixed visual artifacts on some talent photos and stickers
- Fixed an issue where Roshan could go walkabout again
- Fixed Centaur Hoof Stomp wind-up being dispellable
- Fixed Invoker not restoring his own mana from EMP
- Fixed an issue where Kunkka X Marks the Spot could fail to return a unit with very high Status Resistance
- Fixed Lone Druid Spirit Bear receiving experience when using Midas
- Fixed Marci Sidekick not displaying correctly on client
- Fixed a server crash when using Muerta Parting Shot on a hero that is leashed to Lone Druid Spirit Bear with Grimstroke Soulbind
- Fixed Techies Mines triggering for but not damaging flying units
- Added a filter option for saved sets in the Armory
- Fixed two rare client crashes with dropped items
- Fixed retrieval of neutral items from stash sometimes returning another player’s item
- Changed a number of settings including “Use Extra Large Minimap”, “Quick Attack”, etc. to be saved in Steam Cloud
- Fixed being unable to assign neutral slot and TP quickcast when using Advanced Quickcast Hotkeys
- Fixed “Dynamically Scale Hero Icons” option causing icons to flicker in size
- Fixed an issue where hero icons on the minimap could jitter
- Fixed various Predictions and Fantasy issues
It sounds like none of the other bugs are as game-breaking as the Rolling Boulder issue, but it would have been bad for any of them to happen during TI12. There were also a lot of quality of life fixes for Bingo, Fantasy, and Predictions from the Battle Pass. With the patch at the least, we can hope for no more bugs at TI12.
