GA’s in Call of Duty esports are one of its most well known and defining aspects, let’s talk about their influence.
What is a GA?
GA stands for ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ and refers to fictional rules that professional players agree to follow. These gentlemen’s agreements are not official parts of the Call of Duty League’s (or the former Call of Duty World League) rulesets, and because of this, are never enforced by league officials or referees.
Each year, professional players look at the official ruleset that the league comes up with and decide amongst themselves what other guns, attachments, perks, tacticals, etc. that the league didn’t ban, should be restricted to create what they believe is a more fair and balanced competitive experience.
If GA's aren't enforced by the league, why do players follow them?
As I said above, GA’s are created by pro players in order to establish, what they consider, a more fair and balanced competitive experience both to play and to watch. Some things are GA’d due to game breaking bugs they can cause and other things are GA’d due to being considered far too overpowered to the point of being unfair and dominating the meta too much.
A recent controversy in the Call of Duty League's 2023 season, in a match between OpTic Texas and the Minnesota Rokkr, has to do with a player using a GA'd streak that was GA'd because of a known game breaking bug, then being rewarded a replay by the referees because, officially, GA's are not part of the rules. You can view the fallout of this controversy in this video here:
Even though GA’s aren’t official rules, pro players are essentially forced to tolerate and follow a GA whether they agree with it or not or else they risk being unable to practice because they will likely be blacklisted from the rest of the competitive community.
Are GA's good for the game?
The most controversial topic in all of competitive Call of Duty. To be honest, I don’t think the correct answer to this is as simple as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In my opinion, some GA’s make sense and others do not. If something, like say a killstreak, has a terrible, well-known, and fairly common game-breaking bug attached to it, then yes it makes sense to GA it.
Call of Duty, in my mind, has four roles- main AR (Assault Rifle), main SMG (Submachine Gun), Flex (uses either), and off-sub (secondary SMG player and the one who will use an AR on a map where three AR’s is better than just two). If a gun is so overpowered it makes either of those two weapon classes obsolete; i.e. an AR that’s so good at close range, it makes SMGs unnecessary, or an SMG with long enough range that it makes ARs unnecessary, then yes GA’ing that gun is within reason.
Recently, in the 2023 Call of Duty League season, we saw an example of an assault rifle (the M4) being GA'd because it was so strong it could outduel SMG players at close range and made SMG's feel obsolete. Here is a Tweet pointing out it's dominance:
Now, instead of asking if GA’s were good for the game, if you asked me…
Do pro players GA too much?
In my opinion, absolutely. You can read through all the items GA'd for this CDL season (so far), on this article by Breaking Point. Every year, it feels as though certain pro players abuse their GA system and, GA many things that don’t really need to be GA’d, just because they find it annoying, and they haven’t spent any time trying to figure out a way to beat it so they just leave it up to it being overpowered and ruining the game.
It’s important to understand that not every player or even every team needs to agree to GA something. If the vast majority of teams do agree to a GA, then any team that doesn’t agree to it is essentially bottlenecked into following it anyway or, as mentioned above, they risk not being able to scrim (practice) against any of those teams and even being blacklisted from the majority of the competitive community.
Final Thoughts
Over the years, Call of Duty’s professional players have created their own predetermined definition and vision of what competitive Call of Duty should be. This definition is what they believe the best version of competitive CoD is and they will never change or adapt that definition.
They will continue to GA anything and everything that changes that definition or creates friction with it. For people, like myself, that have been in the competitive Call of Duty space for a long time, GA’s have become the norm and an immediate expectation whenever a new game comes out or a new meta is discovered.
The influence GA’s have on Call of Duty esports is a powerful one. They quite literally define the meta every year and completely change how competitive Call of Duty is played. They have their place and can be reasonable but oftentimes are abused by pro players to get the specific version of Call of Duty they want to play.
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