<
        >

          Call of Duty League roundtable: Delayed stream brings up new issues

          A stream delay of the Chicago Huntsmen's game against the New York Subliners on Friday became apparent after the results of the the first couple of maps appeared on the Call of Duty League's website before the match started. Stewart Volland for Activision Blizzard Entertainment
          Aug 21, 2020, 08:39 PM ET

          Not one day of the Call of Duty League Championship has gone by without some sort of hiccup. On Friday, instead of the disconnects we saw in the previous series, we saw a delayed stream with the results leaked by the CDL website itself.

          Here's another roundtable with highlights and lowlights from the third day of CDL Champs.

          It has been one day since we had a disconnect (because the matches were delayed Friday). What do we think of the decision to delay the stream, why didn't it happen sooner, and why no communication from the league?

          Emily Rand: I know people are automatically going to bring up the millions of dollars on the line and memes regarding the Call of Duty League, but I feel badly for the players more than any other people involved in this. More specifically, the players who played in matches during Days 1 and 2 of Champs.

          Imagine being the London Royal Ravens or OpTic Gaming Los Angeles and seeing that on Day 3 the streams of the games have been delayed to prevent people from booting players out of matches, as appeared to have happened to players on your team on the second and first days of competition, respectively. And imagine the league not communicating the reasoning for the fix or how this could (and should) have been prevented in the first place. I'm not in any way suggesting that it shouldn't have been fixed -- doing something is still better than continuing to let players get kicked out of competitive matches in your championship series -- but the fixes should have been communicated and the league should have taken responsibility for Days 1 and 2.

          Read more: Call of Duty League continues to have connectivity issues | Disconnections tarnish CDL playoff results

          The lack of communication and the subsequent stream delay also makes it apparent that this wasn't server hardware issues (which the league also suffered from earlier in the year when going fully online) but likely IP leaks that led to some intrepid people taking out certain players from the games. Lovely.

          I know that not all of this is on the CDL itself. Modern Warfare needed a pause feature when the game was in development. Infinity Ward has been notoriously difficult to work with regarding anything competitive that's not Warzone. The CDL has some really awesome individuals working on broadcast and behind the scenes, but the lack of communication from the league itself has been trying at best and actively callous at worst.

          Arda Ocal: I talked about a lot of this yesterday, and you can just take a look at our roundtable there to see my opinions. The possibility of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on players adds a new layer, however. Maybe there could have been foreshadowing. Maybe it was expected that bad actors would take advantage of vulnerabilities, if this is indeed what happened. Regardless, it feeds into the possibility that there is a glaring solution that would fix pretty much all of this (see "pause" feature above in Emily's answer and yesterday).

          The other unfortunate part of this is that, with Day 3 being played on delay so that bad actors could be prevented from interfering, that really makes Day 1 and 2 occurrences very unfortunate.

          On the communication front, the CDL has this season taken some moments to be open and forthcoming with information to the public, even granting us interviews with the commissioner on a couple of occasions to address certain issues. I imagine -- rather, I hope -- a statement and update will come. Better late than never.

          How much does it affect your viewing enjoyment when the matches can be spoiled and what should the league do to prevent spoilers if matches are being broadcast on delay?

          Rand: Not leak it on its website, for starters. It doesn't really affect my viewing enjoyment, but I find it hilarious that people were able to still bet on the matches when they knew the leaked results. It just adds another layer to the hilarity of this situation because if I'm not laughing at it, I'm crying with rage. (I'm only half-joking here.)

          That aside, I think this could have easily been fixed with stronger communication from the start of the day. Just say, "Hey, we're on a match delay" and communicate within the company and league itself so that everyone internally -- specifically, whoever is updating the website -- knows this. It's frustrating, and maybe I'm thinking of this too simply -- and if I am, please call me out on Twitter for my terrible opinions -- but it doesn't seem to be that difficult of a lift to ensure that everyone is informed.

          Ocal: Yeah, other than the website leak (which was probably just human error somewhere along the way), I'm not too concerned about matches being on delay. If that means better, cleaner competition, I don't think there's a COD fan on Earth who will mind it, if that's what we have to do. Would the matches be better live? Of course. But if this is the best option to avoid more online attacks to connectivity, then so be it. We're still getting the games and (as long as we can avoid spoilers and Jordan "JKap" Kaplan's Twitter feed before games) for a little while the excitement of watching them.

          ESPN Daily newsletter: Sign up now!

          Which top-two team has the tougher matchup Saturday, the Atlanta FaZe or the Dallas Empire?

          Rand: Spoilers, I picked the Dallas Empire to take it all, and I'm standing by that assessment for now. That being said, I'm a bit more scared of Toronto right now than I am of the Huntsmen, despite the fact that the Huntsmen looked better against an arguably stronger team (depending on how you feel about the current state of the Florida Mutineers versus that of the New York Subliners; I personally think the Subliners are better in their current form). At the New York home series, we finally had our highly anticipated FaZe-Huntsmen matchup, only to see the Huntsmen smash FaZe 3-0. I fully expect this second round to be a lot closer based on recent performances from both teams. With Toronto, I still feel like I haven't seen their ceiling yet, and with Tobias "CleanX" Juul Jønsson continuing to heat up, that makes them a dangerous team.

          Ocal: We got only one Atlanta vs. Chicago game, which the Huntsmen took 3-0. There's not too much to go off there, but I do wonder if experience will trump youth in this case. It has so far, with a veteran Chicago team edging out a younger New York squad. That trend could certainly continue for the Huntsmen against Atlanta. FaZe are always a tough matchup; they are one of the best teams, if not the best, in the league. Meanwhile, Dallas play a Toronto team who are looking like the best team in the league at this exact moment in time. The Ultra are riding a wave of momentum after winning the final regular-season home-series tournament, which they hosted and where they beat Dallas en route to earning the chip. This is a tough call, but I'll say Dallas has a tougher matchup, because Toronto are looking scary right now. But it's really, really close.

          Player or play of the day

          Rand: The casters have been talking about free burritos for days, and we finally got some today with a Search & Destroy Round 11. My play of the day is that Round 10 final defuse for the Subliners' Thomas "ZooMaa" Paparatto in a 1v1 against the Huntsmen's Matthew "FormaL" Piper. The Huntsmen might have ultimately won the map, but this was a nice run of play from ZooMaa to bring the series to Round 11.

          Ocal: I'll go with the final moments of the Toronto vs. Florida series on Hardpoint. Toronto were up 244-229, and the Mutineers' Colt "Havok" McLendon cleaned out the point to allow Florida to accumulate points, leading them to eventually grab a two-point lead. The teams battled on the site and traded points until Florida got to 249, but couldn't get one more point in time. The rotation happened at the perfect time, allowing the Ultra's Tobias "CleanX" Juul Jønsson and Anthony "Methodz" Zinni, who were closest to the new point off their spawn, to be able to capture the new site, while Florida's Havok couldn't get there fast enough to contest, allowing Toronto to win 250-249.

          Wow.

          Yes, I did take a shot of maple syrup after this win (a very small one -- there's still work to do). And no, I don't pour maple syrup over my face like Clint "Maven" Evans. That's illegal in Canada. I enjoyed my maple syrup responsibly.