Crowd control measures revealed for IEM Katowice 2020

IEM Katowice 2020 will see CS:GO fans have to follow specific 'etiquette' while in the Spodek Arena audience as ESL seeks to prevent a repeat of last year that saw 'poor sportsmanship' from the crowd.

PSA videos will be played within the arena and the stage MC will give information to educate fans on what ESL thinks is appropriate and what isn’t. This includes moments that should see fans remain quiet before they happen such as knife kills and kills through smoke.

In the full statement posted to Reddit, the punishment for the crowd not obeying will result in the disabling of x-ray vision in the arena for 20+ minutes for every infraction. It was also made clear that offenders can and will be removed if they breach the rules.

This comes after a lot of debate within the CS:GO community at the end of 2019 as to the best method of dealing with the audience 'ghosting' for their favourite teams. Players have often described how the LAN environment can allow for certain tactics to bait crowd reactions and make plays or keep the microphone channels open to allow crowd and caster noise to be heard by teammates.

Many pushed for booths to become standard at all LAN events but many, including ESL, felt that this creates too much of a significant barrier literally and figuratively between players and the crowd.

IEM Katowice starts on 25th February with the playoffs in front of the live audience at the Spodek Arena from 28th February.

Astralis, Fnatic and mousesports all earned direct invites due to strong performances at previous ESL events, with mouz now the best team in the world according to the tournament organiser's own ranking versus HLTV.org's top team Astralis.

Fnatic are the only team that secured their place in Katowice that did not play in either the ICE Challenge or BLAST Premier Spring Season in London to start the year. 13 other teams will be looking to take the title to start 2020 as a whole and get a head start in the race to ESL One Cologne in July.