A week after the Toronto Ultra won the Call of Duty League’s Stage 2 Major, OpTic Chicago’s Scump, FormaL and the squad are criticizing the CDL for allowing teams to play from certain locations.
The CDL Stage 2 Major shocked a lot of people, as the underdog Ultra stormed through the bracket, taking out top-tier teams — including OpTic — en route to a first-place finish and $200,000. While the league announced that LAN events are finally coming, OpTic still had some choice words for the regional issues with online play during an episode of their podcast.
In the Stage 2 Major, Toronto bested OpTic 3-1, lost to the Atlanta FaZe 1-3, then proceeded to beat the LA Thieves, Minnesota ROKKR, Dallas Empire, and FaZe consecutively (with a cumulative 14-5 map count).
Pointing out that practically every team bested by the Ultra were located in Dallas, Texas, OpTic CEO Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez spurred a conversation about regional connectivity issues that his players were more than happy to address.
In response to concerns over OpTic’s performance, H3CZ introduces the topic of online play by expressing excitement to take things offline: “I think that all of this will be solved the second that we get back to LAN.”
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This leads to Matthew ‘FormaL’ Piper bringing up what appears to be an elephant in the room regarding the Ultra’s location: “We shouldn’t be letting another team play us from another country. I’m being serious. They shouldn’t be allowed to compete from Toronto … I think it’s unfair.”
Among echoes of agreement, Seth ‘Scump’ Abner points out that the Florida Mutineers present a similarly difficult situation — as their players are spread out across different areas. In sum, the team seems to agree that a team playing too far from the majority of the league, or too far from each other, presents too much connectivity inconsistency.
As Scump summarizes the complaints, Toronto and Florida are the chief concerns: “You shouldn’t be allowed to be spread out. You shouldn’t be allowed to be in another country. That’s even worse than being spread out.”
The point is amplified by OpTic proceeding to list out all of the teams located outside of Dallas, which are only five of the league’s 12: the Los Angeles Guerrillas, FaZe, Florida, the London Royal Ravens, and Toronto.
- Read more: Ultra in control of CDL ‘Group of Death’
Ultimately, these concerns over online connectivity are ideally subject to temporary circumstances. While OpTic may criticize Toronto and Florida for regional issues, the CDL hopes to move to LAN in the future and teams are likely hoping that will solve all problems caused by this era of online play.
