09.02.2020 // By:
Marco -
Hey everyone!
With the inaugural season of the Call of Duty League officially over as of August 30th, the entire competitive scene has now entered the offseason. During this timeframe, the CCL will actively be looking for as much information as possible to help finalize plans for CCL 2021. In fact, the community has already received important updates in just the past 4 days. Here’s information that you should be aware of and a preview into the 2021 season.
Updated CCL 2021 Rules
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The next title we will be competing on will be Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The first trailer was released August 21st and the multiplayer reveal is scheduled on September 9th. Additionally, the announcement of competitive CoD returning to 4v4 was released on August 31st by the Call of Duty League Twitter account. With that information, we can finally announce the following updates to Section 1 - Team and School Eligibility of the player handbook.
Team Definition
- 1.5 [UPDATE] A team must have a minimum of four (4) eligible players on the roster.
- 1.6 [UPDATE] Teams are allowed up to two (2) substitute players on the roster. For a total roster of six (6) players.
These updates are official and are actively being written into the 2021 player handbook. We’ll do our best to stay as transparent as possible with future updates to rules.
*Please note: We currently do not intend to update rule 1.4 under subsection School Definition. Therefore, like 2020, a school may have a maximum of 2 teams within the league. We do recognize that as the collegiate landscape for Call of Duty expands, there may be 3 or more teams from universities looking to compete. As this becomes the majority across the space, we will look to expand accordingly. :)
Registration
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Registration is expected to open early to mid November. Registration will be done through the website.
Cross-platform play?
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As of this moment, the official platform which competitive CoD will be played on has not been formally announced. However, we know that last year’s console was Playstation 4. We also know that there appears to be early access to the game this year for Playstation users. Modern Warfare was the first Call of Duty with cross-platform play enabled in any capacity. This year, cross-platform play across 5 platforms (the Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC) might be possible. This is also one of those weird years where because new systems have been announced and will be released, competitive CoD might shift platforms in the middle of the year as it did during Call of Duty: Ghosts.
We at CCL want to include as many platforms as we can this year, but we might not be able to. With the information currently, here's our estimated breakdown:
Playstation 4 & 5 (95-99%) - Management feels like there is a 95-99 percent chance that next year will include both Playstation 4 and 5. There was a known deal with Sony for competitive CoD last year and understanding there is exclusivity with the game’s release this year, we hypothesize that Playstation is still the expected platform to compete on.
PC (50%) - To those asking about PC, we unfortunately lack all the necessary information to call a Yes/No shot on this right now. For instance, some key points include networking, in-game visible use of controllers or KBM, refresh rates, FOV, Ultrawide Monitors, etc... With too many unknowns, we simply can’t call the shots yet. We believe there’s a 50/50 chance that PC is allowed next year. However, we’ve already discussed and concluded that if in any capacity PC is allowed, it will be controller locked. Meaning there will still be no keyboard and mouse next year. The loophole that would change this would be if the Call of Duty League chooses to not just play on PC but also allow keyboard and mouse at the highest competitive level.
Xbox One & X (10-30%) - For CCL 2020, in accordance with the Call of Duty Event Guidelines, play was not allowed on the Xbox One. We expect this event restriction to continue in 2021. Should changes be made to the officially COD Event Guidelines, provided by Activision, that allow for Xbox crossplay- we will immediately begin reconsidering cross console play as a facility of CCL. Unfortunately, we only feel there is a 10-30 percent chance of this happening right now.
BO4 September Tournament
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The CCL Black Ops 4 September Tournament will begin 9/9 at 8:00 EST. Registration for this tournament has already closed but we are definitely looking to host more during this off season. Be on the look out! College CoD will be looking to cover the games for this tournament on either the Main or Bravo channel (undetermined which channel we will used as of now). All matches will be Best of 5 variants based on the 2019 CWL Ruleset. This tournament will be over 4 weeks and will be limited to school teams and alumni. The schedule can be found below:
9/9
- 8:00 EST - PRELIMINARIES
- 9:30 EST - LOSERS ROUND 1
9/16
- 8:00 EST - WINNERS QUALIFIERS
- 9:30 EST - LOSERS ROUND 2
9/23
- 8:00 EST - ROUND OF 16
- 9:30 EST - ROUND OF 8
9/30
- 8:00 EST - SEMIFINALS
- 9:30 EST - GRAND FINALS
