CS2: What Changed About Qualifying To The Major?
Reviewing the freshest changes to the Major rulebook as of 31/5/24 involving changes to the Major qualification system.
Prelude
Valve has been paying closer attention to how the professional CS2 circuit operates than ever before. They announced that from 2025 onwards, partnership leagues would be a thing of the past, and that their ranking would be the official method to invite teams to tournaments - but we don’t yet know the explicit details.
The last Major before these changes come into effect is PGL/PW Shanghai, Asia’s first Major. As such, Valve looks to set the precedent that should follow into the new era of competitive CS - and I’ll be going through the changes to their rulebook on GitHub, and giving my thoughts after each change.
This is a more contemporary article than most, but if you like more rapid-fire CS2 thoughts from yours truly, be sure to check out my Twitter.
The Major’s Changes
No more RMR invites based on Major performance
The previous expectation was that if you kept a 3-man core from the top 16 of the previous Major, you would guarantee yourself a slot in the RMR of the next one. A far cry from historical Majors that would simply invite you directly if you placed high enough, but it was enough to affect business decisions. Falcons purchased the ENCE core due to their direct invite into the RMR, eschewing their chance at building a more bespoke line-up - they’re regretting that decision in hindsight, as the team has done nothing but fail from then onwards. Had they made a team from the ground up with some of those pieces, it could be a very different tale!
The new rule is that the Regional Standings (otherwise known as Valve Ranking) will be used instead, with the top half of the RMR filled via the rankings, and the bottom half filled via the closed qualifier. It is now more important than ever to maintain a consistent level for your team if you want to skip the rigmarole and get extra time to prepare for a Major slot.
Organisations like Gaimin Gladiators, who purchased the ECSTATIC roster that made it to the top 16 of PGL Copenhagen 2024, will no longer be able to simply waltz into the RMR and hope to win the lottery. They’ll have to prove they care about investing in a CS team long term instead of playing a short term game and leaving players out to dry at the first instance of failure - consistent success will be key, and poor management and coaches will be more of a liability than ever.
I think this is a great change. While I do think there should be a special courtesy extended to the previous Major winner, on some level you do have to agree that if they fail to maintain their ranking for an entire season to such an extent that they don’t even get an invite into the RMR, it’s hard to argue they should be given that privilege. Majors still give plenty of rating points and this ensures the best teams skip the most stages of qualification.
Valve Ranking considers cores for team invites
This is just an important footnote. A 5-man line-up in the rankings will require 3 out of the 5 to accept an invite in order for the invite to be valid - if this does not happen, the next highest ranked team in the region is invited and so on. No problems here.
More accurate rankings used for RMRs
This addresses a recent problem with the ranking not being updated in time - if there is a gap between closed qualifiers and the RMR, a new ranking will be produced before the RMR starts. This will be true as per the schedule for Shanghai 2024, so we will see the rule in action. It makes sense.
Teams Changing Regions Doesn’t Change Invites
Previously, if a team from one region changed the core nationality but kept a 3-man core as a team, then they would take an invite from their old region into their new region - they owned that invite.
Now, with the change towards ranking invites instead of inviting specific teams based on their Major performance, it seems by the removal of certain text that if a team changes region, they will simply be invited based on the slots the region has and their position in that regional ranking. The fantasy discussions about Vitality adding another player within the Asian region and thus adding a slot to Asia is no more - they would (if they don’t get outranked by TheMongolz pretty soon) take the first seeded invite instead of adding a slot.
With Valve moving away from inviting teams to defend the slot they earned, there’s no other way to do this. It may be a semantic change - inviting the top X teams in a region, instead of inviting the teams that earnt a slot via Major performance - but it shouldn’t have an actual impact on the event.
No More Open Qualifiers For EU and Americas
This is the biggest change that people are going to be discussing for the months to come. The operation of the closed qualifier, which in itself was a recent addition aimed at combating the complaints of pros in sub-top teams who didn’t want to wade through open qualifiers filled with cheaters, random five stacks, and technical issues, has changed - this time to eliminate open qualifiers in large regions.
Previously, half of the invites were based on ranking, and the other half were from open qualifiers - this time around, Valve has ditched the open qualifiers and entirely invited teams from the rankings, in a move that most people would have thought was against their previous ethos of open and free qualification.
This is at the discretion of the tournament organiser - essentially meaning that for smaller regions like Asia, where there may not be a practical amount of teams ranked in the first place, open qualifiers will continue as they have been.
I think the majority of outcry against this change specifically comes from people (and I don’t exclude myself from this) who are sentimentally attached to the narrative of an open circuit and the dream of getting a rag-tag team of five players through an open qualifier into the world’s biggest stage and thus cannot see the practical reality that faces us today. Open qualifiers for Europe especially have given us a lot of trouble, and with the constant stream of tournaments and games played in the region, most if not all relevant teams will have a sufficient ranking for the closed qualifier.
Keep in mind the closed qualifier for Europe, as of right now, will now directly invite 32(!!!) teams (from Europe!) and the RMR will also invite up to 16 teams, depending on Major performance. The focus now is on whether the top ~48 teams in the world accurately match the top 48 teams on Valve’s rankings.
The fortunate aspect of this for the Americas is that the closed qualifiers are split evenly for slots between North and South America, even if all the qualifying teams are South American. NA benefits from SA’s success, as we will see in the upcoming Major. There are barely enough teams to make a 16 team CQ from North America, so it’ll work out either way - it’s basically impossible to miss out because there really aren’t any teams who will be snubbed.
Edit 1/6/24: Due to the change in direct invites to the RMR, this has a slightly different effect - the 16 team Americas RMR will have 8 direct invites, and 8 CQ invites, meaning an 8 team closed qualifier from each sub-region instead of 16 teams as it was in Copenhagen. The bottom 8 teams in each region never stood a chance regardless, but this just means the hyperbole of a 16 team Americas CQ is not as crazy.
The removal of open qualifiers for these regions means many things. First amongst them in my mind is the fact that you can no longer construct a team “for the Major”. You have to make the team beforehand, and grind for ranking points until you can qualify to the Major. Combine this with the movement of Majors to the end of the season from now on, and the season-long narratives make perfect sense! You make a team in the break between seasons, and grind to make it into the rankings and get your invite.
It sets a rhythm to roster moves and creates the potential for a true “off-season” where we see shuffles during a risk-free post-Major period where your invites are purely based on your ranking and not on whether a 3-man core survived from the previous Major. Roster moves should flow easier - and over time, when contracts start getting signed in this break period more frequently, it’ll just make more business sense.
I sympathise with the romantics who love the idea of a Major open qualifier dream. The reality is that we already have lower tier tournaments to grind for EU (where it actually is possible to miss out, unlike in NA) and if you couldn’t grind through the normal tournaments to scrape together the ranking points, why should I care about your chance in an open qualifier? It might seem harsh now with the ESL and BLAST invites but in the open circuit this will make much more sense.
What’s The Takeaway?
Valve are clearly listening. Pros complained about open qualifiers and invites for ages, with the top pros moaning about having to play them and the circumstances that always surrounded them. Now that they’re gone, people will pretend as if they have been robbed of an opportunity that was a product of a lesser time where there was a real chance for the open qualifiers to contain teams that do real damage.
In 2024’s RMRs, the lowest ranked teams were Nexus at #51 on HLTV and ITB at #57 (but they were invited due to a roster core, so it was actually Enterprise at #48). Take away the smattering of teams in the top 50 who aren’t from Europe, and we haven’t missed anyone at all! Meanwhile, the closed qualifiers had teams like NaVi, VP, C9, MOUZ - all within the top 10 of HLTV’s rankings, and yet stuck in the closed qualifier.
Now every segment of the Major qualification process is segmented by rankings. The RMR will now ALWAYS contain the top regional teams, and so the closed qualifiers can make room for the lower tier teams to battle it out in the absence of those aforementioned rosters. Open qualifiers aren’t needed when we are filtering essentially 40-50 teams into ~16 - the ranking is doing the filtering. If the same formula was applied for Asia, we would run into problems, but the rulebook already accounted for that and includes open qualifiers in the edge cases.
There are some things to discuss for the future - issues of scheduling, importance of tournaments, validity of Valve’s rankings, regional events in the future, players being burnt out by grinding for rating, and so on. But I believe that the changes overall are headed in the right direction for a straightforward path to the Major without the hassle of online single elimination brackets with thousands of teams.
So what are we really complaining about? A remnant of the past, a sentimentality in the mind of years and decades gone by where it was necessary to let the little guy have a chance because they could be world beaters in waiting? Give me a break. They have their chances - months of online cups and lower tier LANs to qualify to via open qualifiers. Load up Liquipedia, filter by “Qualifiers” and start signing up to prove you’re worth something, and you’ll make it into the ranking threshold - let the Major circuit run smoothly.
Afterword
Thanks for reading my article! I’m slowly getting more and more subscribers on here, and I’m a big fan of the organic traction. I nearly didn’t get an article out but it would be remiss of me to forget - the point of discussion here saved my brain. If you want to keep up to date with my thoughts and other ramblings be sure to check out my Twitter!
I recently worked my first broadcast for Dust2IN, covering the regional Indian tournament. It was a great experience and I’m thankful to all my readers for motivating me to do something in this wretched esports world beyond being a fan and consumer. Here’s to more of that!