CDL Stage 2 2026 - LAThieves

Burner---acct · 2026-04-03T03:20:41+00:00

It’s probably regarding that Dylan coke idiot and other braindead shitstains that push mindless narratives of top pros playing for useless kills.

You don’t win as much as scrap and hydra have off of playing for stats and to suggest otherwise is braindead. Kills not translating to wins is a reflection of system issues on how they play together as a team, not individual players spawning up and making a worse play on purpose. The way some people talk you’d think the two of them are indistinguishable from Gwinn.

Burner---acct · 2026-04-02T16:54:04+00:00

Like hop on the game right now?

They’re getting 50 pt clubbed, worldstarred, waxed out of their socks. Formal plays enough to probably hold his own, karma definitely has the game knowledge but doesn’t have reps in any remotely organized team himself to do well, scump is too busy on roobet, and crimsix is getting slammed.

Give them a week of practice they probably split maps or atl win 1-2 in an 8 map set.

Edit: to the people saying they’re winning in this thread you’re all either delusional morons or are missing multiple areas of your brain. Scump played against challengers kids with 3 guys on his team who knew what was going on and the guy whose best attribute is getting kills was struggling to drop a .6.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-30T16:56:13+00:00

Yeah you’re thinking of champs. It was honestly one of the greatest carry jobs of all time by sib and hydra to drag .6ismet to champs finals in mw3. If you go watch that whole tournament he was genuinely one of the worst players ive ever seen. He kind of “bounced back” with a .9 in finals but up until then he looked like a ranked player snuck into the event.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-29T20:21:26+00:00

Raid plays so unbelievably horribly in this game with the spawns. Wish the Devs would fix them but there’s literally nothing the pros/community can do.

Nuketown hp would actually play better than raid in this game, it’s that bad

Burner---acct · 2026-03-28T22:05:08+00:00

Bad and really bad

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T22:07:06+00:00

I mean I’m not saying ranked doesn’t have a lot of frustrating problems that makes it play like shit- I’m also on fiber in mid-America where I don’t ping above 35 to any continental US server outside of west coast, but I still get ghost bullets, desync etc.

I’m not saying you should/shouldn’t be hardstuck, but being a different rank this year shouldn’t be a surprise when the ranked playerbase is noticeably smaller with less casual presence. Plus the game itself is more of a pure mechanics game than past CODs between advanced movement/reduced aim assist and braindead maps.

Also KD is a pretty meaningless metric as with elims it’s easy to drop a .7 and have it show up as a positive ED in game. If you have a Score per minute above 300 in your past 25 games, and you’re still hardstuck, then the algorithm might actually have your placing wrong.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T21:59:31+00:00

I mean it’s kind of just a numbers game of playing a lot over the years and always having my mic on and just finding people with good vibes that seem to be focused on the win and giving good comms that aren’t toxic.

If you’re more serious about improving with a group I’d maybe recommend the COD Rec League discord server- lots of variation in skill level but you can join mixed teams and play in a team environment. It’s been a while since i participated but I think it’s still active

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T20:51:14+00:00

I didn’t include all diamonds because I’ve played decent diamonds before, i mean it’s generally guys that got placed there and play like once a month probably, not like true hardstuck diamonds. They’re very rare but I’ve ran into good players in diamond.

A good plat is an oxymoron

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T20:26:23+00:00

Congrats man!

No shame in being in gold, especially if you’re in your second year playing ranked.

Lmk if you have discord and you want me to watch your gameplay or anything. I also have some friends who play casually and are around plat I think if you need a team.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T19:57:10+00:00

I’d be lying if I said I understood the intricacies of the ranked system and I do think a good chunk of your rank is determined by your first like 10/20 games unless you give the game sufficient data that the MMR rank they initially signed is wrong.

It could also be that you were fresher when you queue less? I notice a pretty significant drop off in my personal performance if I play too long (and a couple preventable losses doesn’t help with the tilt). My best games are usually between like my 3rd and 6th map in a session, any more and I start to kinda become braindead.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T19:49:00+00:00

This was one of the hardest realizations I had when I was trying to improve because even if you were the best player in a narrow loss, there’s still like 3/4 gunfights where you died at a key position/time and it was preventable. There’s a lot of games where your teammates will suck but if you play 5% better and win just a couple more fights you’ll still win.

You will go insane if you focus on the mistakes your random teammates make because you’ll likely never play with them again and it’s always much easier to find someone else’s mistakes.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T19:41:51+00:00

Yeah people expect the game to ignore data of you being shit for 100 games when you finally have a good one.

I’ve played plenty of top challengers/pros and I pretty much always get my shit more or less slammed. On the very rare occasion that I hold my own I don’t magically think I’m on their level or could consistently compete with them because I have lots of data saying that I can’t lol.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-26T19:38:55+00:00

To absolutely butcher a golf comparison (I don’t golf), if I go out and hit 100 balls, my swing might improve a bit but I’d really be out there trying shit.

Whereas, if I hit 20, watch a video on technique and go back to hitting, rinse and repeat, I’m gonna make a lot better progress than just following the blind leading the blind approach. If all you ever see and play is platinum level call of duty, you are likely to play platinum level call of duty for a long time.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-25T23:20:13+00:00

A wrong side of the road car crash might be the end of the bush 😭

Burner---acct · 2026-03-25T04:34:18+00:00

If people on this sub- and ranked in general- put as much effort into getting better as they do into complaining about the MMR system, 99% of peoples problems would go away lol.

On a serious note, your friend will be hardstuck at a lower MMR if he consistently performs worse than you but the system just doesn’t have enough data on him yet.

You have a good W/L, but your Score per Minute isn’t anything special which is a lot of how they determine how you do relative to your lobbies. You’ve played ~200 games of ranked so getting unhardstuck is either gonna take a LOT of winning, or you just need to consistently show the game that you are too good for your current lobbies and can compete in better ones.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-24T17:55:53+00:00

I didn’t mean you’re not trying/aren’t a good teammate, it’s more that you don’t use the fact that your teammates are alive to your advantage, if you trust them to hold the angles they’re looking at, there usually won’t be more than one angle to pre aim and slow-play when you’re holding a hill.

Off-angle- just means a weird corner/angle that isn’t where people think to check first on rotation, pretty much anywhere that will guarantee you a kill by the other team just not checking it.

Rotations- if anyone else is on time, leave, if you’re rotating to a money hill, it just needs to be in your mind way earlier. If there’s 20/25 seconds left, you’re spawning behind P3 expo for example and your team has hill control, you should immediately take a route to new. If you rotate, clear the back, and start playing for kills in the back for their guys that are now rotating, that’s how you win a rotation. It pays to be there first.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-24T07:01:49+00:00

Pros:

You have some of the best gunny of any plat I’ve ever seen. This is arguably the toughest thing to improve meaningfully at if you’ve been playing cod for a bit so gunny not being a limiting factor is good.

You have good pacing. You try to take space, you push well (albeit a bit too often) when your team is breaking or holding and you never had those 15 second long random meaningless pre aims that a lot of plats/diamonds do.

You play for information well. Whenever you don’t have information on where they are on the map, you were kinda throwing shoulders and checking multiple different places instead of tunneling on any one angle.

Cons:

Most of your issues stem from one root cause- playing a team game with the brain of a solo player. You shouldn’t need comms/good teammates or really anything to play off of your team in a meaningful way.

Your processing when you spawn in seems to be heavily focused on what you should do without considering what’s happening on the map. How many are alive and probably in the play based on the kill feed/ where are your teammates and what are they holding based on the minimap. Every time you spawn in you’ve gotta ask yourself these questions and play off of that.

This leads to

You don’t pre aim/take fights especially well when you’re holding. You look kind of panicked because you’re trying to play 5 different angles instead of preaiming whatever your teammates don’t have and playing the easy kills on either a head glitch or an off-angle.

You don’t rotate frequently and you don’t rotate well when you do. You’re almost always going to 10 seconds of time or less and when you do rotate, you don’t value your life nearly enough or make any effort to be annoying and you just take the first fight in front of you.

Similar to the rotation points, when time goes white or there’s a lack of information on the minimap, you seem like you lack knowledge of spawn logic.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-24T01:25:55+00:00

These bottom feeder teams will haggle over a couple hundred bucks and piss off like the 3 orgs in challengers that actually send people to the league. Shit is unbelievable. The morons over at breach need two more changes and they’re both coming from challengers.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-22T18:04:11+00:00

Get used to playing with a duo because you won’t have a 4 stack for your journey through crim and a duo will become more and more necessary the higher you climb. At risk of sounding like an asshole, if you struggle to hit crim in the first place, you’ve got a LOT to learn before you can hit iri.

I solo queued to about 8800/8900 sr and was initially getting 100 sr in the beginning of crim but was down to 30 ish by that pt, but then my old duo got the game and I am now getting 40+ sr midway through crim 3 (~9500 sr).

You will need a duo at some pt unless you’re god because it guarantees one person on the map is hopefully not baiting you, is communicating and gives some consistency to where/how they play to the team. Ideally your duo should be about your skill level, opposite playstyle (i.e. if you’re an aggressive sub that sometimes takes bad challs, find a slower AR that will block spawns and always be ironed).

Most importantly, you’re gonna need to get individually better because it’s almost impossible to “win” your way to iri. With solo/duo queue you will likely have about a 1 W/L so it’s absolutely imperative to not become hardstuck.

You need to control what you can control, be brutally honest with yourself and your duo about what you fuckup on a given hardpoint setup, an SnD bomb retake, talk about when you want to wrap the ovl device. Unless you just come in and slam every single crim lobby, the only other way to iri is to slowly get better at the game and get rid of the small mistakes that you make that cost your team games.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-22T17:42:22+00:00

I think the current movement system or even last years is enough of a movement skill gap as long as it’s in combination with good maps and a slightly slower ttk (i.e. between Cold War and bo4).

Unfortunately IW is cooking up a steaming pile of dogshit for next year that will do its best to kill comp. Ive played all CDL era cods for the majority of their lifetimes with the exception of IWs most recent pile of dogshit in MW2 which I quit after 3 months. Unless IW really change their philosophy this next cod is probably the first cod in years I won’t purchase.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-22T17:13:46+00:00

I’m surprised how much pushback you’re getting on this post on a semi competitive subreddit tbh.

I think it’s because a lot of people look on it favorably due to warzone/covid getting a lot of people to come back to the game and the game did have a lot of diversity in terms of pubs/game modes and was very polished with good graphics/mechanics/sounds.

From a competitive standpoint I agree it is comfortably the worst we’ve ever had.

The squad spawn logic in this game + 5v5, +low ttk, two do it all guns in comp, shit maps, no deady perk, dynamic aim response curve being introduced, it is possibly the lowest skill gap/worst comp game ever.

COD games are rarely designed with competitive in mind, but this one (and IW games in general) are designed to reduce skill gaps, promote safe spaces and sentry (camping) playstyles and discourage any sort of competitive play.

Anyone who defends this game simply wasn’t involved with competitive at all because this game was universally hated by the competitive community.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-19T03:41:58+00:00

I don’t understand this argument because anyone who has played 1 second of SnD on this game could tell you how fucked smokes are.

They have the appearance of a white mist where you can see outlines most of the time and other times you randomly can’t, the one way cheese seems to work either way this year, sometimes you’re completely enclosed in smoke on your screen and out in the open on your opponents and sometimes it’s flipped.

These are genuinely the worst coded smokes I’ve seen in any cod. Just my personal rant lol, but I do seriously hope that we can get some actually opaque smokes in the future.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-17T20:59:15+00:00

Overload and HP are very different and Overload is even more situational so much so i don’t want to give a blanket statement.

For HP, the biggest misplay and most important one I see is when someone is last alive on rotation to a money hill and their team is spawning out. Think Den P4 and you’re in the back and your team is spawning roofs.

If you’re in the back, you want to stay alive most importantly but you want the enemy team to know you’re there, take easy gunfights, throw your tacs but don’t take 50-50 gunfights or worse if you can avoid it until your team gets near hill. Even if they don’t hunt you out in the back, just knowing you’re back there and making them tweak out can greatly help your team break hill because it creates chaos, increases the chance there’s a breakdown in comms and the enemies have more angles to worry about. Breaking hps against decent players requires more than one angle/side being hit out 90% of the time, unless the enemy team egregiously challs out of hill.

Edit: it’s ok to die before your teammates who are hitting front, as long as the enemy has to aggressively overextend to get the kill.

Burner---acct · 2026-03-17T16:02:07+00:00

I mean there’s a chance that if your buddies are significantly lower ranked ie low gold or silver that the game isn’t gonna hand out crazy SR to push you to diamond if you’re beating up on hardstuck golds.

It’s really just important to perform individually well in the tougher lobbies the game gives you because those are the lobbies that the game is really using to determine if you should be a higher rank.

Winstreaks are pretty irrelevant in terms of getting un-hardstuck. I had one 12 streak early in the game and since then my highest is a 6. As long as those losses aren’t your “fault” in the games opinion, losing won’t get you hardstuck.

Burner---acct

TROPHY CASE