The 2019 CWL Championship is just around the corner, and OpTic Gaming‘s professional Call of Duty team may have been blacklisted from practicing for it at bootcamps.
The upcoming CWL Championship will be the biggest tournament of the Black Ops 4 season, featuring 32 of the world’s best Call of Duty teams battling it out for a share of the $2 million prize pool.
As is usually the case, many of those teams will participate in bootcamps in preparation of the event, meaning that they will get together and hold scrimmages against each other offline.
However, one team that may not be partaking in these practice sessions is OpTic Gaming, who have apparently been denied the chance to scrim on LAN by other teams.
Thomas ‘TJHaLy’ Haly suggested as much, in a tweet he posted on July 27 before deleting it moments later: “We got blacklisted, unbelievable.”
Further fueling the speculation that OpTic have been blacklisted was what Luminosity Gaming’s Josiah ‘Slacked’ Berry said on a livestream the same day.
According to Slacked, OpTic will not be ‘bootcamping’ for Champs, and that 100 Thieves have already set up a session with eUnited, Team Reciprocity, and Gen.G.
Logic would dictate that the Green Wall would not voluntarily exclude themselves from these practice sessions, especially considering their disastrous performance at CWL Finals, where they lost both matches by a combined map count of 0-6.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
Slacked says @100Thieves are bootcamping with @eUnited, @TeamReciprocity and @GenG
He also says @OpTicGaming aren’t bootcamping. pic.twitter.com/jFVp6NEyOs
— CWL INTEL (@INTELCallofDuty) July 27, 2019
If what is being speculated about OpTic’s situation is true, it does create an atmosphere of confusion about the circumstances that have led to this point.
For one, they’ve always been the hosts of these bootcamps, as CEO Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez has invited teams to his H3CZQUARTERS on numerous occasions this season to practice against his team.
If they have indeed been left out, it must mean that the any and all of the teams they invited this time around turned them down, assuming they were planning on hosting one again, of course.
It must be noted that the squad did have an issue with 100 Thieves in one of those bootcamps, when Ian ‘Crimsix’ Porter engaged in a mini-feud with 100 Thieves’ Ian ‘Enable’ Wyatt about players showing up late.
OpTic not the only ones blacklisted
As it would turn out, OpTic is not the only team that’s been kept out of these bootcamps. Several days ago, FaZe Clan’s Thomas ‘ZooMaa’ Paparatto also tweeted that his team had been kicked out, and, unlike TJHaLy he decided to not delete the tweet.
Kicked out a boot camp. :pencil:
— FaZe ZooMaa (@ZooMaa) July 26, 2019
Perhaps OpTic and FaZe could wait around for a couple of more teams to get blacklisted, and then they can all form their own “blacklist bootcamp,” which, all jokes aside, might end up being a successful idea.