Ian Porter was late to the Dallas Empire’s post-match press conference.

He entered the press conference at The Armory a few minutes after his teammates already began taking questions following a 3-0 loss to Atlanta FaZe. The Empire star, better known as “Crimsix” in the newly launched Call of Duty League, didn’t plan on participating despite making an appearance.

“I’m not answering anything,” Crimsix said after a question was prompted for him.

The team’s leader was frustrated after the Empire suffered their second consecutive loss over the weekend after being projected as one of the best teams in the league. A team that supposed to be an unstoppable force giving even the best teams all the trouble in the world won just one map in seven tries.

Crimsix was upset that his team had to talk after a loss. He even said he didn’t want to be put in that position again for the remainder of the season.

But he did end up speaking.

“I feel like talking now,” Crimsix said a couple minutes later. “(Infinity Ward), if you guys put out a patch in under two weeks before an event, I strongly urge that we don’t play on it. I know this one fixed everything, but in other esports, to do what we did is considered a joke.”

Infinity Ward, the developer of Modern Warfare, introduced a significant patch to the game, including professional play, on Wednesday. The most important changes eliminated bugs where players could slide across the floor in the game, but cancel the animation allowing for fast reactions. That’s known by the community as a slide-cancel.

“Obviously everyone thought we were the best because of scrims, but what everyone has to realize is we put in so many hours in the pre-patch and we were playing on the slide cancel, which we were the best at,” the 18-year-old Anthony “Shotzzy” Cuevas-Castro said. “We had to adapt really quickly and didn’t show up.”

The hole in the logic is that all the teams competing over the weekend dealt with the same patch change. All the teams had to adapt. So getting swept by Atlanta and losing 3-1 to the Chicago Huntsmen Friday night couldn’t completely be pinned down to in-game changes.

Crimsix acknowledged that, too.

“I’m not blaming the patch or anything,” Crimsix said. “We sucked. I’m really proud of Anthony and Indervir (Dhaliwal) for playing against the most seasoned veterans. Those two teams probably have the most championships out of anyone and I’m proud of how they played considering it was their first major.”

Crimsix even said that the patch improved the quality of the game. It fixed bugs, after all. But he also said having to make those adjustments was a tough spot for Shotzzy and Dahilwal, or “iLLeY,” who played in their first major LAN matches

The Empire showed signs of its projected brilliance in both of its matches over the weekend. They dominated most of the opening round of hardpoint against FaZe, but lost the spawn advantage and couldn’t recover.

That cave was so demoralizing. GG’s Faze. Proud of how Ant/Inder played for it being their first ever major COD LAN. Thank god it wasn’t a tournament. Now we just gotta prepare our asses off for London. — Empire C6 (@Crimsix) January 26, 2020

“The first map of every series hit us hard,” Crimsix said. “The one against FaZe sure did because we should’ve won it.”

The frustration for Empire players wasn’t in the changes, but said the timing eliminated their hard work. They were preseason favorites because of their dominance in scrimmages in the months prior to launch weekend.

“We probably played the most out of any team here and it didn’t even matter,” Crimsix said. “Thanks again, IW.”

Despite frustration, iLLeY said the Empire know the meta now. They had to try new things on the big stage and most of their experiments fell as flat as their performance. But iLLeY said the game is more based on power positions on the map. There weren’t as many with the slide cancelling ability. Now, according to iLLeY, there are “hundreds.”

What’s the result of the Empire discovering the new meta? They think it means a return to the top.

“Whenever we find the meta we grind it,” iLLeY said. “We didn’t even get to grind this. We played a couple scrims and now we know the meta. It’s here, so we are going to go back home and put more hours in than anyone else and go over why we lost. We will be back stronger than ever.”

Dallas returns to the Call of Duty scene in London in the first tournament of the league on Feb. 8 and 9.

More Empire news from launch weekend