OpTic Wins the Crown Melbourne Invitational 2016​

These past two weeks (April 4 ­ April 17) in the world of Call of Duty brought fans the Crown Melbourne Invitational 2016​and a handful of roster changes for Call of Duty®: Black Ops III.

Six teams battled it out in this single elimination, best­of­seven series tournament held in Melbourne, Australia. Quarterfinal action began on Saturday (April 9) as Plantronics Tainted Minds defeated The Chiefs eSports Club 4­3, and Mindfreak swept Team Orbit ANZ 4­0.

Moving on to the semi­finals, OpTic Gaming began their tournament run down under with a 4­0 win over Tainted Minds, while Millenium took down Mindfreak 4­0. This set up the Grand Final match up that everyone was expecting: OpTic vs. Millenium.

OpTic jumped out to the early 1­0 series lead with a 250­223 win on Breach Hardpoint, but Millenium responded right away with a 6­1 win on Stronghold Search and Destroy to even the series at 1­1. From there, it was all OpTic as they were able to win 8­3 on Infection Uplink, 1­0 on Evac Capture the Flag and 6­2 on Breach Search and Destroy to close out the series 4­1.

After this weekend where OpTic was crowned the champions yet again, a few roster changes took place as teams are preparing for Stage 2 of the CWL. First, Chris “Parasite” Duarte was released from compLexity Gaming and has been replaced by Jevon “Goonjar” Gooljar­lim for Stage 2. Also, Team EnVyUs announced their new Call of Duty roster by dropping Patrick “ACHES” Price and Tyler “TeePee” Polchow for Johnathan “John” Perez and Bryan “Apathy” Zhelyazkov. Dream Team also announced that they have released both Steven “Diabolic” Rivero and Troy “Sender” Michaels, and will be looking for two new players before the start of Stage 2.

Optic Gaming_CWL

Congratulations once again to OpTic Gaming on winning another championship at the Crown Melbourne Invitational 2016, and good luck to all the teams competing and preparing for the start of Stage 2 of the CWL this week (Tuesday, April 19).

Check back next week for another look at the week of Call of Duty action in review.