Do The BLAST Groups Mean Anything?
As the partnership system for BLAST expands in the final year before Valve's ruling takes place, I take a look at the results of the past and discuss whether it was ever important to look at.
Preamble
The start of every CS season for the past few years has been heralded by the BLAST groups. Starved for entertainment after weeks of waiting, every viewer would jump straight into the return of top tier LAN competition only to realise that it was a set of meaningless matches that qualify you to one or two events in the year.
Players and teams treat the event at times like a boot camp, often using it to warm up before the “real” events take place - such as IEM Katowice which is often the next event in the calendar and regarded as one of the most prestigious trophies to lift. If you’re watching the ongoing (or recently concluded) BLAST Spring Groups in 2024, G2 are using these groups as a test zone to figure out their map pool and integrate Overpass, previously their most common ban.
In 2024, these groups have taken on four more teams and changed their formats to accommodate for this, finally eliminating the endless lower brackets and last chances, but it is still a glorified qualifier in most ways.
So how are viewers and pundits supposed to treat the event? If the teams aren’t seriously trying their hardest, how much stock can people put into the results and gameplay they see? To discuss these questions, I looked at some of the relevant tournament placings that teams in the BLAST system had over the last two years, and I’ll give you my thoughts on the matter.
If you think I’m wrong or right, be sure to give me flak on my Twitter!
Relevant Placings?
I scrubbed through the results for each team and looked at relevant placings (usually top half placements, but I included some obscure results like BIG winning a fairly stacked online cup or NIP winning a one off LAN with some decent teams), and attributed them per season.
There are (or were) three brackets that teams were placed in - top 3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12. I think it’s most important to consider the top half and bottom half as the major distinctions, because that’s the bar for qualification and elimination respectively.
The number of relevant placements for teams in the bottom half over those two years was 29 - the number of relevant placements for the teams in the top? 65.
More importantly, it was rare for a team that placed in the top half to have accomplished nothing for the entire season. OG only accomplished top placements at BLAST events and are the most notable counterexample to any conclusion that the results of these groups matter. The counterfactual statement is true - the teams that placed in the bottom half were most frequently doing nothing or very little - thank the teams like EG and Complexity for doing nothing of relevance for years.
Starting with 2022, the best teams of the first season (NaVi and FaZe) both placed in the top half. The same thing happened in 2023, where the top 3 (G2, Vitality, FaZe) all did win in that season.
I think that this is actually more to do with the nature of the teams in BLAST being relatively top and bottom heavy respectively. There are multiple top teams who have been at the top for a long time (Vitality, FaZe, G2, NaVi) and also many teams that simply will never win in that fashion (EG, OG, COL, BIG). Looking at the statistics would only tell you what looking at the team list would already make you aware of.
Trophy Lifts
This follows a similar trend - the number of trophy lifts in the top half teams over the years was 17, whereas the bottom half only managed 3 - G2’s Cologne, Vitality’s EPL, and Heroic’s 2022 Fall Final. The majority of the trophies came in the form of FaZe who won 7 trophies, and in both seasons where they won many trophies they were first place in the BLAST groups.
Despite the relative unimportance that you can place on the result itself, I think it stands to reason to conclude that a LAN bootcamp, even if it is against teams like EG at times, is worth the team building experience and will correlate (however weakly) with trophies lifted in the season.
The Role Of BLAST Groups
We’ve covered that there is a fair chance that the top placing teams of BLAST group stages will go on to have relevant tournament placements, and especially win trophies. It would, however, be the wrong conclusion that teams should try harder at the groups in order to get a good placement, or that the teams that won are those who tried harder.
I would view the groups as a place to test new players and tactics. It’s a consequence of the placement of the event that it often features roster debuts, and it made for a happy marriage with the forgiving format of the past. Through this lens, assuming every team viewed it the same (except OG, who I imagine are the only team who tries their best), the groups actually look like a sandbox of new gameplay where the winners are the most innovative or put together of the bunch.
This tracks with some of the winners in the past, with teams like FaZe in 2022 immediately showing their synergy, G2 in 2023 continuing their dominance, and Vitality in 2023 finally showing signs of cohesion as a team.
When telling the story of a team, results from other tournaments are a stamp of success or failure that often defines them. In that sense, no team should ever be defined by their result at BLAST Groups - but perhaps their results themselves can be defined in the context of the group stage. Something like “Vitality finally got off the ground in the BLAST Spring Groups 2023, which allowed them to figure out how to play for their tournament wins later in the season”.
This ties it all together - the BLAST groups are a great tool for narrative framing, because of the weak correlation that exists between performance at the event and future performance. It defines teams in many ways - EG’s perpetual last places and the pipeline meme after one meaningless triumph, FaZe and G2’s hot starts, and even perhaps NiP and Astralis being mediocre is reflected as well.
What Will 2024 Look Like?
This year, BLAST has four more semi-partner teams (along with a replacement for EG) - VP, C9, Spirit, GL and Falcons. VP, C9 and the core of Falcons (previously ENCE) have been some of the best teams in recent history, and Spirit clearly have strong individuals and are worth watching, so overall most of the problems with the absence of stronger teams should not exist this year.
As such, I believe the predictive effect of the group stage will get stronger this year given the format has improved and the teams are, on average, better across the board. This doesn’t mean that you look at each qualifying team as deserving of trophies, but when you introduce a team to an event such as the Major, or Katowice, in the first season, one of your first sentences should probably detail how they performed at this event. After all, if the teams view it as an extended boot camp, then we as viewers should be able to judge whether the “bootcamp” went poorly or succeeded.
It’s important to note that unless a team bombs out last place (which I think should preclude almost any team from winning an event in the same season, quite frankly) they should still have gained valuable feedback from the event.
What a shame that the BLAST events themselves are still 8 team events, thus limiting the field by a meaningful amount. If these events were 16 or even 12 teams, then more stock could be put into both the events themselves and the group stages we are focusing on here.
Do They Have A Place In 2025?
This is the million dollar question (perhaps more given the investment that BLAST have made into CS across the years) that I’m sure even BLAST would love to be able to answer right now. As it stands, even this year in 2024, BLAST is a partner team product that is primarily made possible by their partner teams investing significant funds into these events. It is not cheap to fund a 12-16 team LAN event, and there is little reason to hold a glorified bootcamp when you can no longer control the participating teams as closely and put on your choice of circus.
And yet, there is definite value to hosting a LAN to start the season compared to an online game. An online game does not get you used to your new team members in the most important ways - it does not run the game the same way as it would on LAN - and despite how I emphasised the groups of BLAST as a testing ground, players care even less for online competition, not even to mention the difference in putting on a show for the broadcast. The only reason people tune in for online games these days is if they are qualifiers or if they’ve bet an unreasonable amount of money on them.
My hope is that BLAST tone down the prize money and find other ways to cheapen the event without giving up on the core idea. They already have the best timing for viewers to be excited and interact with their product, and seem to be gearing their “blast.tv” website towards some form of exclusive content which may act as funding eventually.
Afterword
Thank you for reading this article! I want to do more writing-based articles and focus less on trying to find the “smoking gun” with respect to statistics and analysis. As long as you enjoyed reading it and I enjoyed talking about it, it doesn’t matter to me if it takes one day or the entire month to work on it, but there is an extra element of effort and stress involved with the number crunchers.
I recently got Twitch Affiliate as a result of some successful streams during the Major qualifiers, and I hope to continue streaming whatever I feel like - check it out below, and if you suddenly gained more feedback or have an idea, here’s my Twitter.