On 2 March 2025, ESL announced that game 4 of the Grand Finals of DreamLeague Season 25 is postponed to the next day. This is due to technical issues experienced by Team Spirit players, that led to them not being able to reconnect into their game. The likely culprits were excessive DDoS attacks. The final is set to continue today, March 4th at 16:00 CET, hopefully without DDoS attacks happening.
Credit: ESL Dota
Recap on DreamLeague S25 Grand Finals
The score was 1-2 in favor of Team Spirit as they are playing the fourth game of the grand final series. However, in game 4, Magomed “Collapse” Khalilov and Denis “Larl” Sigitov disconnected at the 18-minute mark, and couldn’t reconnect.
Team Spirit has attempted to sort the issue out by using alternate accounts, but it didn’t take long before those accounts were also attacked. After a 3-hour attempt to sort the issue out, it was to no avail and ESL had to remake game 4 and postpone the rest of DreamLeague S25 Grand Finals.
Both teams are frustrated with the situation, especially Martin “Saksa” Sazdov, who commented that “Team Spirit should make sure their players have DDOS protection”. Meanwhile Team Spirit is calling DDOS attack, “possible due to a vulnerability inside Steam/Dota 2“.
Team Spirit players disconnected during Game 4 – Grand Finals of DreamLeague S25 (Image credit: ESL)
What happened at DreamLeague S25 Grand Finals?
Saksa and Team Spirit‘s social media page have described the incident to be a DDOS attack, which prevents the players from reconnecting to their Steam account.
The incident is likely a party sending too many login attempt requests on Steam using the Team Spirit players’ Steam ID, which exceeded the typical rate limit for a single Steam account. As such, this is a preventive measure from Steam’s service is to limit too many requests being made to their server, that could have caused a much severe issue than a single player’s inability to log into their Steam account.
Grand Finals of DreamLeague S25 postponed (Image credit: ESL)
ESL’s policy on DDOS attacks
Many Dota 2 fans have called out ESL for not adhering to their own rulebook’s policy on DDOS attacks. As according to that, if a player drops or is lagging due to a DDOS attack, the Pause Rule and Player Drops rule are applied. There are no exceptions for DDOS attacks, as it is the players’ responsibility to protect themselves against DDOS attacks.
Yet, here we are, with ESL accommodating to the incident, where the grand finals can be postponed. Not only does this cause the event to go beyond schedule, but it ruined the momentum and pressure of a best-of-five grand finals.
Although Team Spirit had a slight lead while it’s still early-to-mid game duration at game 4, it is still disadvantageous for Tundra Esports, which had to re-pick a different strategy and draft. In hindsight, it’s a miserable situation to be in, but ESL should have adhere to their rule book and allowed Team Spirit to take on the consequences of the DDOS attack.