royal2, a player with Sentinels, was banned after Halo Championship Series (HCS) officials discovered that he had “geofiltered” cheating during a tournament qualification.
Complaints were made almost immediately after Sentinel’s last qualifier for HCS Kickoff Major Raleigh 2021, with rival teams accusing them of “Geofiltering, ”a practice that allows you to block servers that are giving you a high ping (and thereby potentially generating a higher ping for your opponents). There were also some suspicious “lobby connectivity issues” that also the qualification postponed by over four hours, which some thought were related.
Here is how HCS officials described the situation:
Following the NA Kickoff Qualifier 12-1 tournament on December 1 and 2, 2021, a number of players made allegations that Sentinels forced the game to select a server, resulting in an unusually high ping for players in the game lobby. One such allegation was directed against the Sentinels’ Royal 2. These allegations were accompanied by ratings of the Sentinels players’ Twitch streams, which categorized the perceived changes and anomalies in player pings directly in the game client. There were also significant connectivity issues in the lobby during the tournament, causing the tournament to be delayed by more than 4 hours. On December 3, 2021, the HCS administration decided to immediately initiate a formal investigation to better understand the causes of lobby connectivity issues that occurred during the NA Kickoff Qualifier Day 2 delay of more than four hours, and to better understand these allegations of server tampering to investigate. .
After reviewing the data, the HCS found that Royal2’s server logs were indeed showing rotten behavior:
We have determined that from November 26, 2021, the day before the NA Open Series 11-27 on November 27, 2021, through the final game of NA Kickoff Qualifier 12-1 on December 3, 2021, all US servers except 1 server present in the United States States (westus2) were missing from the server ping list, forcing all Royal 2 matches to this server and generating an unusually high ping for the players in the affected matches.
As a result, Royal2 was found guilty and suspended from all competitions until January 28, but in addition to punishing, the HCS also imposed penalties on the entire Sentinels team, removing their seeded position and docking points for them.
Next, aDue to Royal2’s suspension, the Sentinels will not be able to produce the same full line-up for the tournament for which they qualified as the top seeder.HCS Kickoff Major Raleigh 2021-So will not be eligible for a pool play position at all at the Raleigh event (although “tThe rest of the squad is entitled to participate in the open bracket.
In case you’ve read all of this and still wondering what happened, here is a 4-minute explanation from gloriole player Snip3down this contains some additional information that was missing from the official HCS summary:
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