An unfortunate situation arose in the Halo Infinite scene, where Royal2 of Sentinels was caught cheating. Sentinels defeated OpTic Gaming and were ultimately the top seed, but just a week before the HCS Raleigh event, it was said Royal2 was accused of using Geofiltering to create a situation where an abnormal amount of ping would pop up on the servers. Through this, Royal2 was accused of cheating, and an investigation took place. As such, he was punished, suspended until January 28th, 2022.

The investigation the HCS team put out stated that servers are automatically determined, and players cannot influence this normally. The dev team reviewed the server lofts from all matches – matchmaking and custom – that Royal2 played in Halo Infinite, and claim he was cheating. A blog post was released about this investigation and ruling about Royal2:

“We found that from November 26, 2021, the day before NA Open Series 11-27 on November 27, 2021, through the last match of the NA Kickoff Qualifier 12-1 on December 3, 2021, all US servers but 1 server in the United States (westus2) were missing from the server ping list, thus forcing all of Royal 2’s matches onto that server and creating an abnormally high ping for players in the affected matches.”

They determined that the only reason that Royal2 was using the “west2” servers, was a direct modification of files, to give him an unfair advantage. As a result, he was banned from competing until January 28th, 2022, and can not field their specified team in the Raleigh Major. Sentinels’ Halo team are not very happy with this result either. In particular, the supposed cheating Royal2 did for Halo Infinite also harmed his team’s ping.

Royal2 lives in Canada, so playing on the West server gave him the best ping, but his teammates had a high ping as well. Frosty of Sentinels said they’d never seen a team cheat that also “intentionally put themselves at a disadvantage because of it.” There is no reason that Royal2 would intentionally spike his own team just to give himself an advantage.

Another teammate even pointed out that they tried to give the Halo Championship team proof:

“My face when I read this HCS announcement, and then remember that Mat offered to send them his entire PC to look through for proof and they denied it.”

Overall, the response from Sentinels has been derision. They are also “100% not going”, and Royal1 said that the decision was “completely awful.” In particular, Royal2 has also opened up about the supposed Halo Infinite cheating. This came via a Twitlonger by Royal2:

“During the launch of halo Infinite, I was experiencing extremely high ping with the central server. I changed my settings to use the west coast server, but failed to turn it off for the NA Kickoff Qualifier. While this was corrected before last night’s Esports Arena tournament, I understand the issues my oversight caused for the qualifier. I truly did not realize the impact this decision would have, and for that I am deeply sorry and apologize to my fans and wish my teammates the best of luck in Raleigh.”

Royal2’s response makes sense, and it’s understandable. It could be seen as a pretty serious reach for the Halo Infinite team. Despite Ricky Spanish saying that the team isn’t going, FormaL said he’d be playing with Sentinels in Raleigh. FormaL was with Space Station Gaming but now appears to be confirmed for playing with LethuL, SnakeBite, and Frosty at the upcoming LAN. We’ll just have to see if Sentinels show up, or FormaL plays at the next LAN.

Ultimately, Royal2 admits he was set up to play on the “west2” server but forgot to change it in time. Sentinels do claim to have offered more proof but it was rejected. The end result is that Royal2 is suspended from Halo Infinite for this cheating infraction, but he’s only out until January 2022. The situation is for sure a strange one, as it doesn’t make sense for a team to cheat when it’s going to hurt the result is that it hurts the rest of the team.