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Everything You Need To Know About This Weekend's Call of Duty Championship
This weekend, Major League Gaming and Activision are hosting the third annual Call of Duty Championship. Here's a quick cheat sheet for those of you planning to tune in.
What Is It?
The Call of Duty Championship are Activision's attempt to create a worldwide event around its popular shooting franchise, similar to games like Blizzard's Dota International and Riot Games' League of Legends World Championships. Although there have been large-scale Call of Duty tournaments for some time, this is only the third annual official championship. Thirty-two teams from across the globe have traveled to take part in the event. They will test their skill in Activision's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
Where And When Is It?
The Call of Duty Championship will be held this weekend, March 27-29, 2015 at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles (the facility is literally blocks from the L.A. Convention Center, where the industry's E3 convention is held).
Where Can I Watch It?
The event is a joint venture between Activision and the popular eSports tournament organization and online portal Major League Gaming, one of the venerable names in competitive gaming. As such, the MLG will be the main venue for the match livestreams, and there's a dedicated page on the company's site to the CoDC. There will be five separate streams to choose between, each showing different matches. In addition, the final day of the tournament will be shown on Xbox Live for Xbox One users.
What Is The Schedule?
With 32 teams competing, the three-day tournament schedule is packed with matches. Day one will be particularly hectic, with 48 matches being held in one day. The structure is a bit reminiscent of the FIFA World Cup, with teams being divided into subgroups and competing to earn a spot in the upper bracket (which ultimately leads to the championship match). There will also be a lower consolation bracket.
MLG has a full schedule (all times listed are Pacific Daylight Time) posted here. If you just want to watch the finale, the championship match will take place at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 29.
What Is At Stake?
Though Call of Duty isn't as popular as an eSport as games like Dota and League of Legends, it's still big business. That fact is reflected in the $1 million prize purse that will be divided among the top eight finishing teams. The prize money will be dispersed as follows:
8th Place: $25,000
7th Place: $35,000
6th Place: $50,000
5th Place: $70,000
4th Place: $100,000
3rd Place: $120,000
2nd Place: $200,000
1st Place: $400,000
However, perhaps more important than the money (many of the teams derive a greater part of their income from endorsement deals and money from video streaming and other outlets), is the bragging rights. These are highly competitive gamers, and pride is a major factor here, particularly for some of the high profile teams.
Who Are The Favorites?
Aside from the thrill of watching the world's best gamers compete at the highest level, eSports also offers fans a host of intriguing storylines and personalities – just like traditional sports. A lot of the coverage this year is going to center around the most high-profile Call of Duty team in the world: OpTic Gaming. OpTic has built up a large following and a well-known brand, largely due to the brash personality, considerable skill, and huge social media following of Matt "NaDeSHoT" Haag. NaDeSHoT is teamed with three other highly skilled players: Scumpii, Formal, and Crimsix. The four have proved to be a deadly combination, bringing a 13-1 MLG record into the UMG Orlando Tournament and winning that as well, then putting on dominating performances throughout the qualifying rounds of the Call of Duty Championship.
OpTic, for all its notoriety, has not been able to bring home a CoD Championship yet, finishing third the past two years. This year, most eyes will be on the team, akin to when the Miami Heat with LeBron James were chasing their first title.
Seth "Scumpii" Abner told his sponsor site Red Bull, '"We've been playing extremely well as a team the past few events, and leading up to [this] event we've just been playing better and better every single day. We learn new things and we improve on small areas of our game, so this is the most confident I've ever been going into a Call of Duty Championship tournament. All of the other years we were voted as underdogs and we weren't supposed to do well, but we ended up placing Top-3. This year we're going in with a lot more confidence and I think that we're gonna win, because now we're the favorite team to win the event."
Other major contenders include FaZe Red, Denial eSports, Team Kaliber, and Team EnVyUs. It should be interesting to see if OpTic can hold off the 31 other challengers and fulfill its mission to be world champions.
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