Suspended Royal2 until January.
After an intense investigation, HCS officials made a competitive verdict on the latest cheating charges against top organization Sentinels and star Halo Infinite player Royal2.
On December 11, Inconsible's Snip3down explained the situation in its stream, where Royal2 allegedly uses geo-filtering to block servers that are pinging you above a certain amount. He said multiple partner teams have accused Royal2 of straining the Seattle servers every game, specifically tuned to provide better connectivity from other players in the lobby.
The Halo development team reviewed the server logs of all the matches Royal2 played in Infinite since November 15, 2021 and found some suspicious patterns in the matches. In their games from November 26 to December 3, all servers except one in the United States were missing from the server ping list. All of Royal2's matches were forced into a single server causing abnormally high ping for players in the affected matches.
“Our internal development team has reproduced a well-known and documented tactic to proactively remove servers from the list of eligible servers,” the statement said. “After doing that, the resulting data signature matched the same data signature that Royal2 found only in matches where the Westus2 server was available.”
After extensive behind-the-scenes work, the authorities concluded that “the only explanation for Royal2's telemetry data model mentioned above is the direct replacement of files that violate official rules.” As a result, the 25-year-old player will be banned from HCS Competition until January 28, 2022. Sentinels' placements for the NA Open Series and NA Kickoff Qualifiers were also voided, and 3.660 HCS 4v4 Points were removed for all players. Members of the Sentinels team.
The Sentinels also need to lose their first-place Pool Game positions for the 2021 HCS Kickoff Major in Raleigh. While Royal2 has been suspended, the rest of the roster can compete in the tournament's Open Bracket, but they will have until roster lockdown on Monday, December 13 to complete their roster. However, Sentinels star SnakeBite said in a broadcast that the team may not participate in the event if they choose a substitute.