OpTic H3CZ slams Call of Duty devs treating competitive CoD as an “afterthought”
President of the OpTic Texas CDL franchise, Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez, claims the Call of Duty devs’ decisions and the lack of league play at launch is ruining competitive CoD, claiming the competitive scene is an “afterthought”.
As we’re heading into the third year of the franchised CDL with the launch of Call of Duty: Vanguard, promises made by the devs to franchise owners have not been fulfilled.
The lack of league play at launch year after year and game-changing additions being added to the game are examples that are negatively affecting the popularity of the CDL and competitive CoD generally.
Halo Infinite’s launch was more successful than many imagined, and during episode 55 of the OpTic podcast on December 26, H3CZ went off on a tangent when comparing the successful Halo to Call of Duty.
“You would not say Halo was going to have that good of a f**king launch. But what happened? Good product, good competitive settings, whatever the pro players are playing is something you can play when you launch the game with no problems,” said H3CZ.
“Call of Duty has private lobbies with the f**king Krampus? We are a f**king second thought. I will lead again by saying that everybody at league level wants Call of Duty competitive to work,” H3CZ expressed, before hitting out at the developers for their lack of effort. “It’s the developers that are falling way behind and letting us down, period.”
(Timestamp at 15:14)
League play has been missing at Call of Duty’s launch for the last few years, which hinders professional players’ ability to practice before the start of the season. H3CZ touched on the issue: “I’m going to tell you what’s a problem. The game launched in November. Our first game is in January, in two months,” he raged. “No league play at launch either after year after year after year of people saying it’s coming – it’s never coming!”
“Organizations are paying 10’s of millions of dollars to fund this thing, and there’s no end in sight of when we’re getting what they told us. Two years ago when this thing launched, I was told we’re going to have league play because it’s important! Three years in, season three of CDL is about to start and there’s no league play.”
There’s less than a month to go until season three of the CDL kicks off. Hopefully, the devs don’t make any more game-changing decisions that’ll hurt competitive play before then.
