The football association has suspended Royal2, who plays Sentinels, after securing suspension after the Halo Championship Series officials found out that he cheated during a tournament qualifier using geofiltering. A post-conflicted complaint was made after Sentinels’ last qualifying match with major Raleigh 2021, when rival teams accused them of using geofiltering, a practice that allowed you to block from servers that give you a high ping (and thus create potentially higher ping for your opponents). Some suspicious lobby connection issues also delayed the qualifiers over four hours, which some thought were related. Here is how HCS officials describe the situation. Following the NA kickoff Qualifier 12-1 tournament on December 1-2, 2021, several players claimed that Sentinels had forced the game to select a server, and then a large ping for players in the game lobby. One of these accusations was directed towards Royal 2 from Sentinels. These allegations were accompanied by the review of Twitch-based players, which categorizes the perceived changes and abnormalities in pings directly in the client. There was also significant lobby issues during the tournament, and the delay of 4 years to the tournament had gone away for a second. On December 3, 2021, the HCS administration decided to put into a formal investigation for an end to the logical side of the problem of lobbying during the 4+ hour delay of NA Kickoff Qalifier Day two and to further examine these allegations of server manipulation. After completing the exam, the HCS discovered that Royal2’s server logs showed a very good fishy behaviour. We found that, from November 26, 2021 to the day before the Open Series 11-27 on November 27, 2021, the final of the NA Kickoff Qualifier 12-1 on December 3, 2021, all US servers but one server in the US were missing from the server ping list, making all of Royal 2s games a spinner on that server and creating a cycloping effect for the players on the affected parties. In the end of the experiment, Royal2 was found guilty and suspended from all competition until January 28 ; besides punishing him the HCS also handed out penalties to all Sentinels teams, removing their seeded position and docking them points. Due to Royal2s suspension, Sentinels will be unable to pick the same full roster for the tournament they’re ready for a top-seed group of 5:1-11, the team isn’t eligible for a pool possibility in the Raleigh event at all (though the rest of the roster is unable to compete in the Open Bracket). In case you have read all this and still wondered what’s going on, here is a 5-minute explainer from the Halo player Snip3down that includes a few extra pieces of information missing from HCS official rundown.
