When you’re at the top, outsiders assume that everything is fine, that you have no problems, and that you don’t face the same issues that everyone else does, despite being just as human as them in the end of the day.

This is the case for OpTic Gaming , Call of Duty’s most prolific squad . They’ve been around as a competitive team since the dawn of Call of Duty: Mordern Warfare 2, have tasted victory in nearly every iteration of the game, are kings of YouTube and streaming, with hundreds of thousands of fans who wait upon their every word. Yet, they're still incredinly human, and struggle all the same.

Rebuilding Process

The first half of the Call of Duty: Ghosts season was not kind to OpTic Gaming. They couldn’t pull together a win and lost nearly all of their team's roster, leaving just Matt “NaDeSHoT” Haag to rebuild the mid-way through the game series' typical one year shelf life. That’s something no one should envy.

Clayster at the High Performance Boot Camp © Marv Watson/Red Bull Content Pool

It took time. They seemed as though they had lost their way, with some players lasting no more than a few days at a time on the team. From every vantage point, it looked as though OpTic was experiencing their first true test.

Then came James "Clayster" Eubanks, Marcus "Mboze" Blanks, and the return of Seth "Scumpii" Abner. The team was all-in, and willing to put their differences aside to bring the collective whole back to where it needed to be.

They meshed, for the most part, grabbing third place at the Call of Duty Championship in Los Angeles, which netted them $120,000 in prizes. They weren’t content with this though. Third place wasn’t first place, and that’s something they’d been wanting as far back as they can remember. They had been promising a championship to their fans and were itching to make good on their word.

Mboze split off to lead another team, OpTic Nation, — comprised of himself, MiRx, Killa, and Ricky — while his former squad picked up Jordan “Proofy” Cannon to complete their roster. It wasn’t clear how this roster would work out, as they didn’t perform well at their first event as a team and took home 7th place at UGC Niagara, but they promised there was more in them.

Success at Last

They proved that they had what it took at the MLG X Games Invitational though, shredding any hint of doubt that their opposition might have had as they took first place, making them the first pro gamers in history to win X Games Gold Medals.

It was the spark they needed.

OpTic Gaming Streams their League Matches © Marv Watson/Red Bull Content Pool

Their next event, the MLG Anaheim Championship, was nearly as successful for the team, netting a second place finish and a $10,000 prize. It showed that their previous placing at CoD Championships was hardly a fluke. The team was clearly there to win and had finally gotten the opportunity to truly shine. OpTic earned it, qualifying themselves for the X Games and MLG Anaheim Championship.

A multitude of factors at Gfinity G3 resulted in an uncharacteristic finish for OpTic, but NaDeSHoT and team took away what they could from the experience and set back to work.

At the time of this article, they’re most of the way through their High Performance boot camp at Red Bull HQ in Santa Monica, where they're already seeing significant improvements in their team chemistry, an important factor in a team-based 4v4 game like Call of Duty.

“This boot camp has taken us to the next level,” says Clayster. “I felt we were lacking in a couple aspects of our gameplay and this boot camp has really brought us all together again. We’re getting to know each other a little bit more, and it's helping us improve our gameplay to the point where we can kick it into a gear we didn’t know we had.”

The Comeback Kids

This isn’t a flippant statement either. Since arriving at the boot camp, OpTic Gaming have gone 14-1 in their MLG COD League matches, an area they were previously struggling with before training started.

They haven’t completed their training and certainly aren’t done learning more about each other to work better as a team, but the results are already showing. Going into Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, these things will matter more than playing hundreds of hours of the game.

Once the core mechanics are understood, everything else follows. Communication and teamwork are key. That’s where OpTic Gaming will excel.