CHEATING IN COMPETITIVE HALO: Royal2 From The Sentinels Is Suspended After Halo Infinite Investigation

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Last night during a $25,000 Esports Arena online Halo Infinite tournament, players noticed something was off in their lobby and there was abnormally high ping in their game. Ping (or latency) is how many milliseconds it takes for your actions to happen within a game after you make said controls. For example, if I have 25 ping, that means when I press "shoot" on Call of Duty, it'll take 25 milliseconds for the shot to actually happen in the game.

In competitive gaming, ping is king. If you ever followed the competitive Fortnite scene, the player with better ping always had a significant advantage over those with higher ping (lower ping is better because it means your connection is quicker). Said player could build walls faster, edit faster, shoot faster - you get the point

So let's break down what actually happened yesterday and why it's considered cheating. So during the online event (and in previous events) a Sentinels player named "Royal2" is based in Canada. His other 3 teammates are based in the US, so he would always have to be on worse ping relative to the rest of the lobby.

Since Royal2 didn't want this disadvantage, he used a third party software to only place him in servers connected to the Seattle servers. This was the only NA server that Royal2 could play on that would give him the least advantage. Now, since it was the only server he modified his game to connect to, everyone in the lobby would be forced to play on this server resulting in higher ping for the other 7 players. Halo Infinite officials have been investigating this issue since November 15th when they sensed there was a problem due to match connection issues in a previous tournament. Even players could sense the high ping immediately (us gamer nerds know when something isn't right).

The Punishment

So after the investigation concluded and the ruling came out today, HCS Officials decided to suspended Royal2 until January 28th, 2022. Further, the Sentinels will be able to play in the upcoming Raleigh HCS LAN Event next weekend (Dec. 17th - 19th) but they need to find a 4th replacement have it locked in by December 13th. They forfeit the seeding they earned in that tournament (1st overall) and will have to compete in the open bracket. The Sentinels have ultimately decided to not compete in the LAN tournament and first in-person HCS Event for Halo Infinite. Prior to this, the Sentinels were a top 3 team in the game.

Players found out on stream today at the same time the public did (SnakeBites is a Sentinels Halo Player and teammate of Royal2):

UPDATE

In the video above, SnakeBiteFPS said that the Sentinels would not be going to Raleigh to compete regardless. This is not true as FormaL will now be joining as the Sentinels 4th player. AKA Sentinels will be playing at the LAN…

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