Call of Duty (CoD) Challengers, CoD esports’ path-to-pro competitive series, has unveiled its format heading into the 2024 season.
From 2024 onwards, the series’ Challenger and Elite qualifiers will be hosted in collaboration with online gaming platform FACEIT.
Call of Duty Challengers is Activision Blizzard’s CoD grassroots ecosystem. The competition provides aspiring pro players opportunities to build experience and reputation as they aim to enter the Call of Duty League.
Since its announcement in 2019, online tournament website GameBattles has been the home of CoD Challengers. However, the company shut down on January 15th this year.
ESL FACEIT Group have stated that the Call of Duty Challenger tournaments will not utilise FACEIT Anti-Cheat’s system. However, the platform emphasised that an “experienced tournament operations team will aim to ensure a consistent and quality experience that the competitive CoD community is used to”.
The 2024 CoD Challengers season will begin with the Challenger qualifiers, followed by the first of eleven online Challengers Cups on January 20th. Both qualifiers and Cups are open to players from North America, Europe, LATAM and the Asia Pacific region.
2024 will also see two Challengers Opens hosted by the Boston Breach at Major I and the Toronto Ultra at Major II, respectively. CoD Challengers’ Elite tournaments will have three seasons for both North America and Europe. Elite has been expanded to two groups of six teams per season.
CoD Challengers 2024 will culminate in the Finals, which will continue to run with 16 teams from all four regions. Teams may qualify for the Finals through the regional leaderboard, the Opens, or the Last Chance Qualifier.
FACEIT is an online competitive gaming platform founded in 2011. Since 2022, the brand has been part of Saudi-backed ESL FACEIT Group (EFG) together with other veteran esports brands, such as ESL Gaming and Dreamhack.
Throughout 2023, FACEIT – and with that, EFG – have steadily increased their stake in the global esports ecosystem. EFG partnered with Counter-Strike news and coverage provider HLTV.org to integrate FACEIT onto its website. Perhaps most notably, the conglomerate acquired esports technology and infrastructure provider Vindex in March 2023.
