G2 exploit ruling continues the trend of inconsistency

The apparent trend of inconsistent rulings between different regions of the VALORANT Champions Tour continues. Europe's G2 Esports received a minor punishment of losing one map ban against Acend for using an in-game exploit.

Riot announced the minor punishment via Twitter, stating G2 Esports abused a well-known in-game exploit. Furthermore, this is the second infraction G2 has committed in 2022.

Head coach Daniil "pipsoN" Meshcheryakov was caught communicating with the team in-game in a loss to Vitality. G2 received a warning instead of being immediately disqualified like T1.

The exploit in question is a box jump on Haven's C-site. Jett players can access the larger box and platform without using her updraft ability. Former G2 Duelist Wassim "keloqz" Cista was found to be using this "exploit" to gain an advantage against SuperMassiveBlaze in VCT EMEA Challengers Group Stages. And considering this is their second infraction, G2 received a harsher punishment resulting in the map ban loss.

However, the exploit does come with a bizarre caveat that makes the ruling more controversial. Keep in mind, individual VCT regions are ran by different region based organizations. This could partially be a reason for the lack of transparency.

Nonetheless, it also points to certain rules and punishment being subjective judgements. For example, Sentinels Jett main Tyson "TenZ" Ngo said on his stream that the box jump is legal if it is achieved without using her passive float ability.

"If you're Jett and want to do this jump, you have to do it without the passive and then it's allowed," said TenZ on his stream. "But, if you use her passive in any way shape or form, then it's illegal. I don't know how that makes any sense at all."

Under these circumstances, the lack of transparency is concerning. Granted, keloqz is no longer on G2, but that shouldn't matter if it was done during an official VCT match. Riot hasn't explicitly stated which exploit was used, but connecting the dots of the game points to the keloqz box jump. Even more, the tweet did cite rule 7.2.6 that states intentionally using any in-game bug to gain an advantage is prohibited.

Moving forward, G2 will now face the former VALORANT World Champions Acend without an extra map ban. Even more unfortunate, is Acend having one of the best map pools in all of Valorant.