Unwritten rules are inherent to sports, so gatekeeping esports from having consensus do’s and don’ts is shortsighted and unnecessary.
After all, if baseball is allowed to have three trillion unspoken rules, then Call of Duty can have three.
I have written about competitive gaming in the past and I believe that esports is a real sport and should be considered as such.
People who use their human dexterity to control and function as precisely as professional gamers are truly next level and while they may not be athletes in the traditional sense, they certainly deserve a seat at the table for sports players.
That’s why the Gentlemen’s Agreement in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is reasonable and in line with sports ideology.
The Call of Duty League is a professional gaming association with 12 region-based teams in North America and Europe.
It has regular season matchups which lead into postseason championships.
The league recently decided to ban one weapon attachment and the exploitation of two errors in the game from competitive play. as part of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which is what the league calls its own unofficial rules.
The list of things banned from competition by the league are the Merc Foregrip andthe use of Auto Tactical Sprint and Snaking, according to a May 28 article from GGRecon, an esports news site.
The Merc Foregrip increases weapon accuracy but also increases player running speed.Auto Tactical Sprint allows players to overuse the supplementary sprint mechanic, and snaking is an error in the game that makes players look like they are laying down “proning” to the enemy but they are actually moving at full speed as if they were standing up.
The new rules came before a set of matches that were scheduled to take place between June 5-7.
The main reason these items have been banned from competitions is because they are advantages perceived by professional teams as unfair for competitive play.
It is interesting to note that the aforementioned unbalanced mechanics and errorss have not been removed from the game by the developers and can still be used in casual gameplay.
This distinction is fine because most players are not professional gamers with a financial reward on the line where any inherent advantage would be considered unfair.
An important detail about esports is that video game developers have the ability to alter or adjust mechanics to help balance the game.
So, in theory, they could remove the items listed in the Gentlemen’s Agreement that professional players believe gives an unfair advantage in the game.
However, it is not good game design to restrict rules of play when a game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has millions of players.
You wouldn’t force all of your doofus friends to shoot 3-pointers from 22 feet because NBA players are capable of it.
Similarly, you shouldn’t expect regular gamers to follow rules set for professionals.
Casual fans of the franchise should not have to adhere to rules which are meant for competition.
This is not to say that competitive games don't need constant updates, but unless something makes the game unplayable, it should not be changed.
Those balancing updates are rarely tailored to the professional crowd whose playing styles are sometimes completely irrelevant and inaccessible to the general gamer that wants to play for a round or two, according to a March 2019 Forbes article.
In all honesty, professional gaming is going to be popular for the foreseeable future and discounting rules just because they’re not “official” misses out on decades of sports history.
