Teams have found an easier way to make it through stage 2 of the CODM World Championship 2021

To advance through the second stage of the Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship 2021, qualified players have to form squads of up to six members and compete in 30 ranked matches to earn points. Five members of a registered team must play a ranked match together for it to count towards the standings. Some teams, however, have found a way to exploit this system in order to face easier opponents.

Dot Esports spoke with the manager for Team Vitality’s CoD: Mobile roster, Melson “Mello” Miranda, to better understand this issue. Team Vitality is currently sitting in first place on the leaderboards for South Asia and the Middle East region with a perfect score of 600. They won all 30 of their ranked matches on July 1 itself.

Mello explained that during the pre-match loading screen for ranked matches, teams can see who their contenders are. On spotting a tougher opponent, one of the members of the team disconnects before the match even starts. The matchmaking then puts a random player to fill up the ranked lobby in the place of the disconnected player.

Since the rules state that all five members of the team must play the ranked match, such games don’t count towards the second stage’s scores for the team which had a player disconnect. Team Vitality, one of the most popular and strongest teams in the region, faced this issue at least six to 10 times, according to Mello.

While this isn’t technically cheating and doesn’t directly harm the opposing team, using this to avoid certain teams is certainly unfair to the ones who have been playing their ranked matches fairly.

Mello says that a fix might be too late at this point since a lot of teams have already completed their 30 ranked matches. He suggests, however, that Activision could remove the pre-match screen in the ranked game to prevent players from seeing their opponents.

Activision hasn’t publicly spoken about this issue yet. A small update was released into Call of Duty: Mobile yesterday, though, which caused problems towards the counting of ranked matches for some teams. While it’s unclear at the moment, the update may have been an attempt to prevent more teams from doing this in the future.

The second stage of the CoD: Mobile World Championship 2021 runs from July 1 to 11 and the top 256 teams with the most points in each region will qualify for the third stage.