Competitive Ruling: Vivo Keyd (Update)

Dec 5, 2021

TL;DR:

Yesterday we issued a competitive ruling for a map exploit by Vivo Keyd and forfeited four round wins in their match against Acend, resulting in a 13-9 victory for Acend. After further review, we determined that they should have forfeited three rounds, which would make the score 12-10 in favor of Acend with no team having won the map. After discussion with Acend, we will be replaying the match at the start of today’s broadcast with Acend ahead 7-0 (to account for the six rounds that involved the exploit and a one round Econ penalty).

Context:

After the conclusion of the Vivo Keyd match against Acend, we became aware that Vivo Keyd used a Cypher camera exploit in the second half of Map 3. Given the implications for the future match schedule, we issued a ruling as quickly as possible to allow teams to properly prepare for their future opponents. Unfortunately, in our haste we incorrectly attributed four of Vivo Keyd’s rounds to this exploit, rather than the correct count of three.

Vivo Keyd originally won the match 13-8, while winning three of the six rounds in which they used the map exploit. We mistakenly overturned an additional unimpacted round (R21). Combined with the one round win awarded for the economic impact of the previous rounds, this made Acend the winner of the map with a score of 13-9. However, the revised score should have been 12-10.

Ruling:

Under the VALORANT rules, due to the recalculated map score of 12-10, neither team has reached the necessary number of rounds to win the map. Therefore, a winner cannot be declared, which is a new situation for VALORANT esports. Given that Acend were the disadvantaged team, we worked with them on a solution and ultimately decided to replay Map 3 starting with a 7-0 round score in favor of Acend to account for the total number of exploited rounds plus an additional round for economic impact.

The match will be played at the beginning of today’s broadcast, at 2:30 PM CET.

We sincerely apologize to both teams and all VALORANT esports fans for detracting from what is the highlight of the year for our sport. We are committed to reevaluating our approach to exploits in 2022 and will be making changes to improve detection, in-match adjudication, and post-match rulings.