written by Ryan Kelly "FearTheDeer34"
Becoming a competitive Call of Duty fan starting back in Black Ops 2, I knew I had to get to the first ever of the newly formed “Call of Duty League”. Despite being a rather big fan of competitive Call of Duty since 2012, I attended my first event at CWL Champs 2019. Being from Wisconsin, when they announced the first CDL event was in Minnesota I knew I had to attend. When comparing the atmosphere of Champs 2019 to the opener of the CDL, the CDL was lacking a little bit. To be fair to the CDL, it was just an event of regular season matches, so the stakes weren’t nearly as high. There was much more hype around champs simply because a world champion was to be crowned when it was over.
The venue the CDL chose was bashed on Twitter leading up to the event, so I was sufficiently worried what the experience would be like. Simply put, everyone on Twitter was very wrong. They did an excellent job with the venue. Every seat had a great view of the screen so you could easily watch the matches. In terms of broadcast talent, I still believe that the CDL may have the best talent in Esports. Between the casting duos of Maven and Merk, Benson and Chance, Miles and Momo, and Puckett as the host, the show was excellent. To have three casting duos that could truly be the main casters is a blessing that CDL fans shouldn’t take for granted.
In terms of production I can’t really attest to how it looked on stream because I saw it all live. The production quality seemed to be very good, but some details could use work. First, as any Call of Duty fan who watched the event knows, the codcaster function needs significant work. For those who don’t know, codcaster is the tool that is used to spectate the game and show fans what is happening. It is the equivalent to any cameramen in other sports. Normally codcaster consists of following the players around in a first-person view, constantly switching between players to make for the best action. It also consists of a constant scoreboard so you can see how the players are doing on that specific map.The CDL really needs to work on improvements for this feature. In the first match of the Chicago Huntsmen vs. Dallas Empire, the game was constantly being viewed in a third-person form. This lead to the crowd not getting hyped for great plays, because we honestly couldn’t tell what was happening. On top of this, instead of the normal scoreboard displaying the player’s K/D ratio, we just saw pictures of their faces. I understand what the CDL was trying to do. They were trying to have new fans associate players faces with a name to give them more recognition. However, by doing this they lost a lot of the crucial information fans look for by not showing a scoreboard. The third-person function was supposed to make it easier for new fans to understand, but all the most serious fans who were at the event couldn’t understand it, so there is no way that any new fans did. The CDL did improve the codcaster immensely throughout the weekend. They alternated between player faces and the scoreboard as the games went on, as well as using less third-person. These improvements that came after just one day show positive signs for the rest of the year.
Another thing I’d like to touch on is “home-field” advantage that was supposed to be associated with having city-based franchises. As someone who has been around this community almost since its birth, I was skeptical of the idea that cities would rally around their teams. I thought with the popularity of players like Scump and Formal on the Huntsmen, almost all fans would be cheering for them. While they were certainly one of the most cheered for teams in the venue and certainly have the most fans worldwide, they actually didn’t have the loudest cheers in the venue. That title belonged to the home team Minnesota Rokkr. While this team includes established veterans in the community, they aren’t players with a massive following. At any other event this team would have very minimal fans. However at this home event for Minnesota, the fans were absolutely nuts for them. They had the loudest cheers I’ve heard at the two events I’ve been to. The other event I went to included Optic and 100 Thieves in the top 3, so the fact that Minnesota had louder cheers than them is very significant. This excites me greatly for future events when other teams get their home events. To have other teams apart from Optic getting all the cheers is a very refreshing thing for the community.
Overall, this event was a very promising start for the CDL. The challengers area was even a very nice setup for the path to pro players, including a huge $250,000 prize pool. Something completely unheard for an amatuer league before franchising. With improvements to codcaster, the awesome home crowds, and possibly improvements to the current game or better future games, the CDL is on track to be a successful league.
