Disqualification from the ITES | Hator Games tournament: Public Statement @IntoTheEsports, a Ukrainian Tournament Organizer, decided to kick us out of the ITES | Hator Games Counter-Strike 2 tournament sponsored by hator.gg. The qualifier took place on FACEIT. On Thursday, 14th December 2023, my team and I decided to participate in a FACEIT qualifier with our Counter-Strike line-up and with a stand-in. Here are the players that took part in the qualifier: xReal: hltv.org/player/16349/xreal Diviii: hltv.org/player/19937/diviii… Razzmo: hltv.org/player/21523/razzmo Wonderful_Y: hltv.org/player/20506/wonder… P3RR3IRA (stand-in): hltv.org/player/20750/p3r3ii… We ended up winning the qualifier after defeating “The glecs”, a Ukrainian team, in the finals. The next day at 19:08 CET we were notified on the FACEIT match page that we were disqualified from the tournament “following information received from the community”. Here is the full message we received: “bentu-19:08 @everyone @here We are disqualifying eHawks due to integrity safety concerns following information received from the community. Team “The glecs” are pass to the tournament.” We have been trying to get into contact with the tournament organizers and the admins ever since, asking them on what basis they were taking this decision and how they justify it (i.e., what is the information they claim to have received, and who exactly “the community” is and if they do have concrete evidence to support their accusations), but are yet to receive an answer. Before expressing myself on this matter, I would like to add that this is not the first time we have been disqualified from an event. To this regard, here is a short summary of the past events: In July we have been disqualified from the play-offs of the United21 tournament. The circumstances were more or less the same: no explanation / no justification from the people responsible for the decision, besides “suspicion of unfair play”. Here is the statement I released at the time: xitter.cf/xReal_CS/status/… Back then, we had a lot of accusations on one of our players, an Estonian AWPer called 1nstah. We carried out an investigation and watched many demos of our matches with him. We also confronted several people blaming him for alleged wrongdoings. We did not find clear evidence of unfair behaviours on his side while he was part of our team. Nevertheless, we still decided to part ways with him. This is the statement that announced it: xitter.cf/ehawkscs/status/… Later, we were also disqualified from an online event called Winline. We did not, however, release a statement about this specific event. Based on these accusations, several well-known professional Counter-Strike players or influencers blamed us publicly, suggesting that we had been involved in cheating for several months. Those accusations took place on social medias or livestreams. Most of the time, they were directed towards a specific player, but not necessarily always the same one. While we understand that people may care about integrity concerns and want to make sure that the Counter-Strike scene stays fair, we deeply regret that groundless accusations are being supported by influent actors on the CS scene. Indeed, it is to be noted that this whole snow-ball effect is only based on initial suspicions that have never been proved in any way whatsoever. The above mentioned issues and matters are verifiable facts. Hereafter is my opinion on this situation: We have made tremendous efforts to ensure that all our players are playing fair, investigating the games they played while in our team. I am convinced that the integrity of the games we have played together has never been compromised in any way by any of our players. We have been accused of cheating as a team. Yet, some of our players were more specifically targeted by the community. The first one was 1nstah. After deciding to part ways with him, a major part of the previous accusations were redirected towards arbnorz. However, as we can see, even when now qualifying to tournaments without him, we are still being targeted and punished based on mere opinions of the Counter-Strike community. This shows that those accusations do not have any solid basis, as they are randomly shifted towards other members of our team whenever we make a change in the line-up. Several public persons in the Counter-Strike scene have been using social medias or livestreams to accuse us of cheating without providing proof. This has led to our players receiving hate messages and threats on the social media and has greatly damaged our reputation. We would like to point out that making comments that damage the reputation of a person or a team is defamation. Those accusations are a threat to the competitiveness of our team. Winning qualifiers and ending up kicked out of a tournament we qualified for means a massive waste of time and also prevents us from playing against better teams and climbing the competitive ladder. Moreover, tournament organizers kicking us “following information received by the community” without even clearly stating what we should be accused of and refusing to answer to us afterwards aggravates the issue as we cannot defend ourselves if they do not tell us what we are accused of. Furthermore we now suffer from a destructive snowball effect as new tournaments will base on earlier tournaments’ decisions to prevent us from playing in their own tournaments.