A game breaking bug that leads you into abandoning an ongoing game still exists in Dota 2 although it has already occurred numerous times in the past. This bug was recently encountered when famous Dota 2 Twitch streamer, Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski, wanted to restart his game due to lag issues, but accidentally ended up abandoning it. The problem is that when you click the "Red Power" option on the top right corner of the screen after you have disconnected from a game, instead of showing the "Quit Game" option, you will see the "Abandon Game" prompt. Most players tend to click the "Yes, Abandon Game." option out of habit and flow.
Gorgc’s Dota 2 game gets abandoned due to a long-lasting Dota 2 bug
During his livestream on 23rd July, 2021, Gorgc experienced lag issues and packet loss while playing a carry Terrorblade in a Dota 2 ranked game. It has recently been reported that these lag issues frequently occur and are usually fixed by restarting the game.
Thus, Gorgc disconnected from the game so he could restart. Unfortunately, he encountered the Abandon Bug when attempting to quit the game. In the next moment, he was knocked out of the Terrorblade game, and was afflicted with a 30-minute play cooldown.
This bug might not be very common, but it was bizarre that Gorgc was affected by it again after he resumed playing on his stream. A couple of hours later, he was playing as an offlane Venomancer. Wanting to restart the game, he cautiously clicked the disconnect button and then the “Quit Game” one but was left nonplussed to see the "Yes Abandon Game" option once again. He, however, canceled it and then repeated the step to successfully restart the game.
The bug isn't a new one, as one of the first reported cases dates back to April 2020, which is more than a year ago. Troels "syndereN" Nielsen had accidentally abandoned his Dota 2 game at that time.
The bug appears to affect lobby matches as well since players have abandoned official matches as well in the past. Rodrigo "Lelis" Santos accidentally abandoned a game during ESL One Thailand 2020: Americas in August 2020 while playing for Quincy Crew versus CR4ZY. While playing for Gambit Esports vs Ninjas in Pyjamas during EPIC League Division 2 in November 2020, Albert "eine" Garaev accidentally abandoned a game.
In spite of the high likelihood that these players abandoned the games due to the bug, it is still impossible to prove that the abandonment was a result of the bug because of the absence of a live screen during online tournaments.
Nevertheless, this bug has the potential to cause a lot of problems in any situation involving high stakes. This has been around for a long time, and Valve needs to take action to eliminate it.
