Community reacts to EMIYA's second cheating ban

The day dawned in the North American CS community with the news of Damian "EMIYA" Boulware, formerly known as droid, receiving a second cheating ban on FACEIT, less than a year after being unbanned on that same platform for the same reasons, although the player always claimed to be innocent.

The ban comes less than two weeks before the start of the PGL Major Copenhagen Americas RMR, which Rocket, EMIYA's team, qualified for. As the news started spreading around social media, players, coaches, fans and other personalities started voicing their disappointment, albeit not surprised, given EMIYA's previous two years cheating ban.

As many fans did, Jadan "HexT" Postma is still hopeful that PGL and Valve will decide to punish Rocket for EMIYA's actions and invite the NRG squad to the Americas RMR, given they lost to Rocket in the qualification match.

Contrary to this, Danny "cxzi" Strzelczyk thinks there should be a three-way decider between all the 2-3 teams that didn't qualify for the event.

Some fans are asking for a permanent ban this time, since EMIYA has gotten a second chance and threw it all away by cheating again.

NRG's CGO, Jaime Cohenca, replying to a tweet regarding the VALORANT scene, stated that he would prefer to play two official matches in three months and get eliminated than playing against cheaters, echoing HexT's sentiment about NRG's loss to Rocket in the RMR qualification match.

Most interesting of all however, is a tweet from EMIYA's Rocket teammate, Ahmed "ayy" Mahmoud, who stated that he would opt out of playing the Americas RMR if EMIYA was proven to have cheated, seemingly taking a principled stance if PGL doesn't outright ban the team.

EMYIA's second cheating ban story is still ongoing, as it's not yet clear if PGL and Valve will remove Rocket from the RMR competition, despite ESL having already confirmed that the team won't be able to play this season's ECL and also revealed that Rocket has been disqualified from the ESL Challenger Melbourne Closed Qualifier taking place today.