On Wednesday, an ESL Pro League S16 Playoff match between Natus Vincere and Heroic went past midnight in Malta due to tech delays and a horrible amount of lag that affected several players, especially Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev who wasn’t happy with the situation.
The two teams sat in a tech pause on map three of a close series that already went the distance. The first two maps of the series both went to a full 30 rounds of regulation, with s1mple and company taking their own map pick of Mirage 16-14, before Heroic answered back on Inferno with a 14-16 win.
Highlights: Yesterday’s epic series between NAVI and Heroic!
Just a few rounds into the third map, Overpass, connection problems began to surface on the server and players from NAVI’s team began experiencing lag spikes.
Despite the match taking place on LAN, and officials trying to fix the issues during breaks, the problem still persisted. During a 1v2 situation in the sixth round, the Ukrainian beast started to lag so hard and got really frustrated, which clearly can be seen in this clip:
Another break followed, but the problems continued, with computers starting to freeze and lose connection on the NAVI side. Here, in this clip, it can be seen that just a few rounds after, the lag started to hit again, and s1mple could be spotted only laughing at the situation as the match went to yet another tech break.
The ESL Pro League Season 16 event had already been a stressful experience for NAVI’s superstar, s1mple, who earlier in the week had been involved in an incident involving the tournament organizer and a hotel room plagued by insects and mold.
s1mple complains about hotel: I never ever complained about this
