Crimsix hits out at “unplayable” servers ahead of CDL Chicago

Dallas Empire’s Ian ‘Crimsix’ Porter expressed concerns with the Call of Duty League’s situation for the upcoming Chicago homestand, calling the official servers unplayable – even for host teams who are located near them.

Due to the worldwide health crisis, the CDL, as well as prominent esports leagues, have transitioned to a fully-online format. While esports fans can still enjoy these top tier events in some capacity, the execution for the new format has been having natural setbacks along the way.

One of those issues was noticeable stutters during the recent Dallas Home Series, which weren’t attributed to the stream of the event but were actually instances of game lag for the hosts, according to Crimsix.

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This means that official CDL matches were being plagued with connection issues. While that’s to be expected from teams that are playing numerous states away from each other, Crim noted an added layer of difficulty for those located near one of these “neutrals servers.”

• Read more: $1 million Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship announced

“The servers are not playable,” Crimsix said. “Every lag spike that you saw on stream last weekend, was not connection-based problem with the stream. It was the actual game lagging on the host. Us & Huntsmen getting punished for being in the same location by these so-called ‘neutrals.’”

According to the longtime Call of Duty veteran, notifying the CDL about the problems during the Dallas online event didn’t yield an encouraging outlook for Chicago.

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“Went through proper channels and still nothing getting changed for CDL Chicago,” he said.

Crim showed a handy map of the servers across the U.S. Though teams like the Huntsmen and Empire are situated close to these locations, choosing to play on them during official matches “clearly isn’t neutral for [them, so it’s] not an option.”

• Read more: 6 players to watch during CDL Chicago

With the CDL adapting to online conditions as much as possible, one concern lies in the competitive integrity of event matches.

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One the one hand, it makes sense to make a team play on a distant, thus unreliable, server even though they’re situated next to one, relatively speaking. If not everyone can have a good connection, then no one does.

• Read more: Chicago Home Series schedule, brackets, more

But in the case of teams like Empire, the next available server is halfway across the country, both ways, if they’re not allowed to play on the local source.

It’ll be interesting to see how the league responds to the public complaints which had very real implications during CDL Dallas to avoid potential issues for the upcoming Chicago Home Series.