Call of Duty League is keeping good on its promise for a Path to Pro by announcing Call of Duty Challengers. Today, October 18, 2019, the official Call of Duty League Twitter account posted details about the new official amateur competition.

Presenting Call of Duty Challengers, the official amateur competition for Call of Duty esports. Learn how you can participate and start on the path to pro. https://t.co/ZkGGgx0o8X pic.twitter.com/UFPzUQBuXq — Call of Duty League (@CODLeague) October 18, 2019

What is Call of Duty Challengers?

If the announcement of the Call of Duty League hasn’t shaken the eSports world, the official announcement of the amateur competition series Call of Duty Challengers surely will. The official Challengers series of competitions will have a $1 million prize pool for amateurs to try and grab. Keep in mind though, Call of Duty League teams can have up to 4 two-way contracted players who can also compete in the amateur tournaments. With that being said, hopefully, the unseen talent pool is able to fend off even the sweatiest of pro players to grab that cash.

The Challenge tournaments will be both offline and online, where contestants will face-off to collect Champion Points, a new system that will rank individual players. Those points, combined with both the individual player as well as four other players will determine seeding brackets during the competition. It’ll also help determine travel accommodations for amateurs in certain open bracket events.

Online Competitions

The rules for the competition will be based on the same Call of Duty League official competitive rules. However, another interesting insight from the press release is that playing with a mouse and keyboard on the console(s) is strictly prohibited. This is probably due to mouse and keyboard being more accurate than a controller’s thumbsticks, paddle-style controller or not.

The Call of Duty Challengers registration opens on October 30, 2019, for online Ladders and the first official online tournament.

The online ladders for Call of Duty Challengers are set to begin on November 2, 2019. Pro points earned from Call of Duty Blacks Ops 4’s competitive season will determine seeding brackets for this first event.

There will be 24/7 Ladders that will give players a total of 5 Challengers Points per winning game. The first win of the day nets players an additional bonus of 5 points for a total of 10. There’s a hard weekly cap in Ladders of 100 Challengers Points.

Preseason games for the Call of Duty League are worth a whopping 2,000 Challengers Points. However, tournaments during the regular season will only be worth 1,000 Challengers Points.

All eligible players must register both an Activision account and a GameBattles account to compete in the online tournaments.

LAN Tournaments

Offline or LAN will be hosted by the Call of Duty League itself or by League teams. Those team-held events will be called Home Series events.

Teams will have to purchase an event team pass to any and all open events.

The complete tournament rules and breakdown for Challenger Points will be listed in the Call of Duty Challengers Rulebook. I like that these events will be based on the official Call of Duty League rules just like the online tournaments.

Also, players must compete on Playstation 4 consoles and are not allowed to use a mouse and keyboard. I also noticed that there’s still no mention of PC or Xbox here. WIll this competition be exclusively for Playstation players?

Call of Duty Challengers is a good thing

This solidifies both pro and amateur tournament paths. I’m excited to watch this develop and hope that it’s truly going to help propel eSports even further.

Click here for the official Call of Duty League blogpost.