Karma’s Health Concerns, Simp’s Esports Awards Win, More – Call of Duty News Update 11/18/2019

Our top story today revolves around Karma’s health concerns. Karma announced on Twitter that he will be taking at least a week off from streaming to focus on fixing some unknown health issues.

The Seattle Surge flex player remarked that he may have to go in for more testing soon. His doctor wasn’t sure what the cause of the issues is, and that he was beginning to panic over it.

The announcement has caused concern as to whether the health problems will be resolved by the start of the season or if it would prevent him from participating in the league, at least initially.

Fellow pros have come out in support of him on Twitter, hoping he gets well soon. We extend the same regards to the man as well.

We’ll continue to cover this as more updates on his health arrive over the coming weeks.

Parasite Calls Out Call of Duty Pros and CoD League

While Karma has been busy dealing with his illness, another pro still waiting on a team to pick him up has gone off on the league’s Path to Pro system and one of his fellow pros.

In a stream on his Twitch channel, former Midnight Esports player Parasite lashed out at the perceived unfairness of the Path to Pro system, dubbed Call of Duty Challengers, specifically on the advantage it gives current CDL substitute players over other others participating in the amateur scene.

Substitute players are given 15,000 circuit points just for being subs, a massive quantity given a normal “Home Series” LAN win in the circuit only gives 10,000 points for winning.

While players could easily make-up the point gap by proving themselves at these LANs, the gap alone means they have to travel to more events to do so, and thus spend more money than they likely can easily earn.

One win could likely fund you for the next several events, but if you’re already struggling financially and mess-up at your first one or two events, it could become nearly financially impossible to keep competing at LANs.

Online tournaments are an option too, but these only given 2,000 points in the pre-season and 1,000 during the season per win, a paltry sum that can make catching up nigh impossible.

While that alone is enough to warrant discussion, Parasite decided that calling out the league wasn’t enough and attacked London Royal Ravens flex player Dylan during the stream, berating his history with cheating.

This history is well-known in the community. It isn’t the only instance of pros allegedly doing so, as even players like Skrapz have had accusations of cheating thrown at them, so why Parasite decided to revisit that is currently unknown.

Given he hasn’t found a team to sign with for the CDL in 2020, attacking the league and other players doesn’t seem like the best move on Parasites part, though with a couple of months to go and spots still open on rosters, we may still yet see him in the league’s inaugural season.

Simp Takes Home the Gold at the Esports Awards

Our last stop of the day takes us over to Arlington, Texas, where the Esports Awards took place over the weekend.

Honoring the best in the industry over the past year, Call of Duty found itself with one award winner for the night as rookie Simp earned himself Esports Console Rookie of the Year.

The young SMG player earned his first world title at the Call of Duty World League Championships back in August after only four months of pro play and has already signed to the Atlanta FaZe for the first season of the CDL.

Congrats to Simp, and we hope he has a successful sophomore year in the scene.

That does it for our first edition of CoD News Update.

Want to see more of this series or have stories you want us to cover? Let us know on social media and in the comments of the linked YouTube video above.