Team Spirit Players get DDoS'ed In DreamLeague Season 25

Dota 2

Eric Oliveira

DreamLeague Season 25 got even wilder during the Grand Finals between Team Spirit and Tundra Esports. After getting a lead of 2-1 Team Spirit players got DDoS'ed and the remaining matches were postponed by ESL.

ESL came to Twitter (@ESLDota2) and announced that due to severe technical issues they were unable to proceed with the DreamLeague Season 25 Grand Finals. The remaining games will take place on 16:00 CET on Tuesday, March 4th.

ESL announcement of the time and date of the postponed match between Team Spirit and Tundra Esports.

Mark on you calendar and let's see what happens next. (Credit: Twitter - @ESLDota2)

Team Spirit has an unexpected "guest"

Right after getting ahead on the score with a 2-1 score, Team Spirit saw their very advantageous 4th game go bad. At 18:12 of the 4th game in the Grand Finals of DreamLeague Season 25, Larl and Collapse disconnected.

On the 40 minutes and 32 seconds mark, we see them both leaving the match unexpectedly. At this point in the game, Team Spirit had a 14-5 kill score advantage. They also knocked down all of Tundra's tier 1 towers.

The pause that took place lasted around 3 hours. During the pause, Team Spirit and ESL tried to solve the problem to no avail. Finally, ESL decided to call it a day and what came next was the tweet we saw in the beginning of the article.

Collapse explains what happened

Later, after everything calmed down a little, Collapse talked about what happened on his Telegram channel. According to an image posted on r/Dota2, a Steam used DDoS'ed him using Steam's own devices.

Usually a DDoS attack is simply put as hundreds or thousands of access attempts to a certain link. Likewise, an unknown Steam user sent hundreds of party invites, chats and similar invites to Collapse during the game.

Google translation of the Telegram messages sent by Collapse.

The attack basically spamming Steam invites and crashing Dota 2. (Credit: Reddit - r/Dota2)

As to what happened to Larl, there are no details publicly available but it's fair to assume the same thing happened. Team Spirit made it's own announcement on Twitter shortly after what happened.

Team Spirit calling Valve out

As we can see below, Team Spirit announced the DDoS during the Grand Finals and mention a vulnerability inside Steam and Dota 2. Now that we know how everything happened, it's paramount that this gets fixed.

One user holding the power to shut down a tournament spamming invites is a very concerning breach. Specially considering we already have proof that it works and that anyone with access to the player profiles might be able to do it again.

Team Spirit twitter announcement after DDoS attack.

As expected, Valve is on a tough spot after people found out that they can DDoS pro players. (Credit: Twitter - @TSpirit_Dota2)

Interactions during the pause

As usual, Dota 2 makes the best of the worst situations and that is the same for players. During the long pause, Saksa took the opportunity to dish a jab on Team Spirit. He asked why Spirit doesn't have DDoS protection in 2025.

Although eventually we found out about the Steam invite vulnerability, at that point I suppose he didn't know the attacks came from within the client.

Turns out you can't foresee something that's in the client. Gotcha Saksa. (Credit: Reddit - r/Dota2)

On the other hand, 33 tried to playfully joke about how DDoS was the only way to stop "Larl Prime". Since Team Spirit was on edge, Larl didn't seem to wanna play along and just clarified that Collapse was the one getting attacked.

Larl got a little worried at the moment.

Sometimes even with the best of intentions, a joke might not be the way to go. (Credit: hawk.live)

Time waits for no one

After all these problems and a postponed match, there's still the fact that both teams need to prepare for Season 3 of the PGL Wallachia. The tournament is offline and going to Romania might mess up the schedule with dire consequences to the performance on both teams.

If the teams are already in Romania, this is a mild inconvenience. On the other hand, if they still need to get a flight things get complicated. The PGL Wallachia starts on March 8th and assuming they leave on the 4th there are just 3 days to deal with any other unforeseen problems.

PGL has already commited to the 8th on Twitter.

Even if it is not a problem, travelling tends to exert influence on teams. (Credit: Twitter - @pglesports)

Either way, just as Collapse said in his telegram post, DreamLeague Season 25 seems like a tournament that lasted forever. Right now we need to put it behind us and look forward to the next PGL Wallachia. This time teams will face again starting and finishing the tournament on the same patch and we will have a better look on the new metagame.

If you wanna keep updated with the latest news about Team Spirit, professional Dota 2 and the upcoming tournaments, read out news page on the Strafe website!