What happens to OpTic Gaming now that LA Thieves has taken its CDL slot?

With 100 Thieves officially making the Call of Duty League with their all-new Los Angeles Thieves franchise, there are questions about the future of the OpTic Gaming brand, especially now that they don’t have a place in the CDL. .

Everyone was elated when Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez bought OpTic Gaming, but the emergence of 100 Thieves’ new CDL franchise, LA Thieves, raised serious questions about what will come next for the iconic brand.

OpTic was previously owned by Immortals Gaming Club before being recently sold to H3CZ seemingly out of nowhere, and their Los Angeles CDL slot was later acquired by 100 Thieves.

Now the brand is in limbo and a lot of fans are wondering what place, if any, it has in Call of Duty now that its place in the league is in another franchise and OGLA no longer exists.

How did we get to this point?

Going back to when H3CZ first requested OpTic from Immortals, it quickly became apparent that he would have to make a subsequent transaction since he is already CEO of Chicago Huntsmen.

Thus, reports have revealed that the two most likely scenarios for H3CZ were either to sell the LA Slot Machine and rename Huntsmen to OpTic, or to sell Huntsmen and move CoD esports business from NRG to Los Angeles.

He would have preferred the first option, but sources claimed that the CDL front office wanted the franchises to remain tied to the cities in which they were founded, which would make it impossible to rename the Huntsmen to OpTic.

In those same reports, it was also said that NRG was indeed willing to sell Huntsmen and the Chicago Slot Machine to continue operating OGLA if the league did not allow them to bring the Green Wall to Chicago.

However, this obviously turned out not to be the case, as the LA spot was eventually sold for 100T, leaving the second scenario as the only real plausible scenario, although the CDL was apparently not keen on it. idea of ​​a Huntsmen rebranding.

That said, the overwhelming feeling is that Hector, being the savvy businessman that he is, would never have given up on Los Angeles without knowing he could bring OpTic to Chicago. This suggests that he might have the league’s blessing to execute the plan many believed to be his first choice anyway.

So what does all this mean?

Before the start of the 2021 season, we could very well see NRG and Rodriguez get rid of the Huntsmen brand and remodel their CoD franchise into Chicago OpTic or OpTic Gaming Chicago.

That in turn would put Seth ‘Scump’ Abner and Matthew ‘Formal’ Piper back in OpTic colors, something longtime CoD fans never believed was a possibility until this year.

Even outside of Scump and FormaL, the transition from Huntsmen to OpTic would be very natural and seamless. The organization already has several enlisted Green Wall Legends, including Marcus ‘MBoZe’ Blanks Jr, Nick ‘MaNiaC’ Kershner and Davis ‘Hitch’ Edwards, who leads the content creation team, Team Summertime, under the NRG banner.

Then, of course, there’s H3CZ, which hundreds of thousands of fans tearfully watched as they parted ways with their beloved organization after losing their buyout from Infinite Esports & Entertainment in 2019.

Seeing him as the head of OpTic Gaming once again seems fair, further fueling speculation that a Huntsmen rebranding is coming, as it just doesn’t seem possible that he will reacquire the Green Wall brand. if he didn’t have bigger plans for it.

What will happen to the Huntsmen if Chicago becomes OpTic?

The short answer to this is that the Huntsmen brand will cease to exist, at least for now. That said, however, with CDL promising that it will look to expand after the 2021 campaign, it will obviously become a prime target for potential owners to adopt for their new franchise.

So, it’s probably smarter to make the name change now rather than multiple seasons, simply because the name would become more mainstreamed into CoD culture by then – maybe a bit too much for the league to do well with. its exit.

As it stands, Huntsmen (187.4K) leads all other Twitter follower franchises by a mile (second highest is Dallas Empire with 85K), so it’s already the most popular name in the market. .

That said, there’s no denying that this is largely due to the Huntsmen’s deep roots in OpTic’s history. As mentioned above, its CEO and several of the great professional players and content creators are icons of the Green Wall, which inevitably allowed the organization to take advantage of the void left behind when OG came under the control of the Immortals.

Ironically, during his time in the CDL, OGLA became something of a ‘public enemy’ among CoD fans, many of whom called the Huntsmen ‘the real OpTic’ and regularly took photos on their social media posts. , especially those who were arsonists.

After beating @Huntsmen, #OGLA tweeted this meme which has now been deleted …

?‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/tLv4TWfKwt

– DEXERTO Call of Duty (@DexertoIntel) July 26, 2020

So returning things ‘to normal’, if you will, would put things in their much more natural state, and if the hunters end up being the sacrificial lamb, it’s probably for the best in the grand scheme of things. .

Obviously, that might not be quite the case three or four seasons later, at how much too much weight the brand might have, OpTic or not, for the CDL to allow H3CZ to shed it.

As it stands, the time for a name change may be now or never, and this became evident in Dexerto’s own social media poll, which asked Call of Duty fans about the two. options:

What would you like to see happen # CDL2021?

– DEXERTO Call of Duty (@DexertoIntel) November 6, 2020

Are there any alternative outcomes?

Yes, it is far from over, of course. As noted above, the league could very well step in and declare the Huntsmen too popular to give up, unless another suitable franchise is there to immediately reclaim the mark.

Since we know things can happen no earlier than 2022, there is a chance that OpTic Gaming will not be a CDL team in the coming season, and that can continue until a new team is. ready to take the name. As it stands, it seems more like a “when and not if” situation.

Nothing will be set in stone until the official announcements are released. There are a lot of moving parts involved – too many parts that have a say in this process for there to be an extremely preferred outcome right now.

Ultimately, H3CZ deserves everyone to take advantage of the doubt that they will do whatever they can to ensure the best situation for OpTic. Although he was the first to admit making mistakes in the way he managed the brand, he also learned some valuable lessons along the way. There is no one else who can be trusted to do the right thing for the Green Wall more than him.