Halo Pro Accused of Cheating, Receives Suspension

The latest cheating scandal to come out of esports involves a Halo Pro with the Sentinels Organization. Halo Championship Series officials determined that Royal2 of the Sentinels cheated by using “geofiltering” for his qualifier matchmaking. 

The accusations came flying in after the Sentinel’s final qualifying match with rival teams accusing them of having used “geofiltering”. This practice allows players/ teams to block out servers with high ping for themselves, but leave the team they face on a high ping server. Many feel that this ties into the “lobby connection issues” that plagued the tournament for almost 4 hours. 

HCS Intel on Twitter: “//🚨BREAKING: @HCS have suspended Royal2 from competitive play until January 28th. They also have forfeited Sentinels 1st place seed, and all prizing from the online seeding tournament pic.twitter.com/vPzWyf9vfS / Twitter”

🚨BREAKING: @HCS have suspended Royal2 from competitive play until January 28th. They also have forfeited Sentinels 1st place seed, and all prizing from the online seeding tournament pic.twitter.com/vPzWyf9vfS

HCS officials had this to say:

“Following the NA Kickoff Qualifier 12-1 tournament on December 1-2, 2021, a number of players raised allegations that Sentinels had forced the game to select a server resulting in abnormally high ping for players in the game lobby. These allegations were accompanied by reviews of Sentinels players’ Twitch streams which categorized the perceived changes and abnormalities in player pings directly in the game client. There were also significant lobby connection issues during the tournament which led to the 4+ hour delay of the tournament. On December 3, 2021, HCS Administration made the decision to immediately undertake a formal investigation to better understand the causes of lobby connection issues experienced during the 4+ hour delay to the NA Kickoff Qualifier Day 2 and to more closely examine these allegations of server manipulation.” 

The Results

Upon further review of the data, HCS concluded that Royal2’s server logs showed evidence of tampering. Because of this Royal2 was found guilty and will be suspended from all competitive play until January 28, 2022. The Sentinels as a whole were punished as well, having been stripped of their seed position and being docked points.

The Sentinels will not be able to field the same roster that they had for their top seed qualification. 

Cheating has no room in the competitive or even casual gaming space. As far as I’m concerned, this punishment for this Halo pro was light and could have been way more severe. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Stop cheating in online games, y’all.