Valorant SEA Games 2023 recently concluded, with a huge controversy erupting between Team Indonesia and Team Singapore during the SEA Games 2023 Grand Finals. The 32nd Southeast Asian Games was hosted in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Gradually, the tournament was gaining its hype for the finals, and everything was going fine until the match between Singapore and Indonesia, took a turn when Team Indonesia accused Team Singapore of abusing a Cypher camera bug that allowed them to see their opponents.
Indonesia was down by 4-10 on the second map, Split, when the game went into a technical pause that lasted hours, making it one of the longest technical pauses in the history of official Valorant tournaments.
What exactly happened in the Grand Finals?
When Team Singapore was holding a 1-0 map lead against Team Indonesia and was only three rounds left before the final victory, the Indonesian team claimed that a Cypher camera was illegally placed by the Singapore team.
The admins took a technical timeout to take a look at the issue. The game was paused till 4:00 AM, and later, the match in the Grand Finals was not resumed, and players were told to return in the morning to complete the games.
Much fuss was made due to the alleged Cypher camera bug used by Singapore against Indonesia on Split Map. Tidus “STYRON” Goh, a Valorant player for Enigma Gaming who was also part of SEA Games 2023, made a detailed post on Twitter to explain the situation from his perspective after this controversy. STYRON says the Cypher camera was quite common and legal at several VCT (Valorant Champions Tour) events. But STYRON claimed that the Cypher camera bug that Singapore used was different from the others. STYRON went on to say that rulebook penalties are determined by the impact of a particular bug on a round.
According to STYRON, the Singapore team waited for several hours and agreed to penalties for the “bugs” before returning to the hotel around 4:30 am and agreeing to return to the match at 8 am with a score of 5-5. Following that, Singapore received the update that Indonesia had determined to forfeit that game to support the national dignity and asked Singapore to give up the second map.
Later Singapore received another offer to choose between two outcomes: sharing the gold medal with Indonesia or being stuck in Cambodia for another week to await the final outcome of the controversy. Singapore went on and declared that they wanted to end up that event by splitting the gold medal.
After hours of discussion, Frengky Ong, Secretary General of the Indonesian Sports Center (PBESI), announced that both teams would receive a joint gold medal. In addition, it was also declared that Vietnam and the Philippines would also be presented with joint bronze medals.
