The 7 Wonders of the VRS

Valve has finally addressed several issues with its ranking system that the community has been voicing concerns about for some time. Given Valve's usual pace, we're honestly surprised by how quickly these arrived.

First off, forfeits are now treated the same as any other loss, whereas before they weren’t counted as official results, which opened the door for teams to exploit the system.

Facing a tough matchup that could drop your ranking and potentially cost you invites? Easy, just forfeit the game and lose 0 points! That was the case before this fix, but thankfully, Valve is on the case.

Secondly, tournament data will no longer be counted until the entire event is finished, directly addressing the issue GamerLegion brought to light earlier this month. Essentially, GL missed out on invites they would have qualified for because they hadn’t received their prize money and subsequent VRS points before the cutoff. For more details, check out edition #535.

This is one of those loopholes that is so glaringly obvious that it honestly left us wondering how Valve missed it in the first place.

Finally, teams now only need five matches to be ranked, down from the previous 10, while wildcard invites can only be given to teams with at least 3 players who have individually been part of a top 8 roster within the last 6 months, instead of the previous 12.

We had our suspicions before, but now we’re sure - Valve are huge fans of arrozdoce, just like we are! They clearly made this change so that JACKZ can no longer play for NIP, allowing arroz to finally join his squad. How sweet of them.

Oh, just one tiny problem – the Ninjas won’t have many tournaments to play in, since they’re currently ranked #157 in the VRS. The wonders of the “open” circuit.

It all fades to n0thing

We’re trying something new with some fun segments on drier weeks to try and make the newsletter a little more fun to read, so we’re stealing something from our first magazine we made a while back.

Welcome to First Game/Last Game. Today’s episode is on n0thing, whose career - at least according to HLTV records - spanned 17 years.

So far.

n0thing’s first game was about as impressive as it can be in a loss. His team United5, with four other players you’ve probably never heard of, lost 10-20 on Nuke to MIBR (back when that meant something). n0thing topfragged for his team, but didn’t have enough to stop gAuLeS, BIT and fnx on MIBR.

Yes, that gAuLeS, that fnx and not that BIT but the other one.

The Brazilian one.

The topfragger for MIBR was a guy called ton, who only played for a few years, and Lance was the fifth member of that team - he only played a handful of games before moving on. Who knows how many potentially great players we lost to time.

It didn’t happen during this game, but if we’re talking about n0thing on Nuke, we feel like we have to mention his crazy wallbang clip. And, just for good measure, if we’re talking about great n0thing clips, we can’t not mention this one from Cologne 2017.

We’ll never miss an opportunity to bring up that clip.

n0thing’s career also finished (in inverted commas - he could still play again) with a loss too, though not against quite the same calibre of competition. His team ‘Vibe’ with Skadoodle and swag went out with a 2-13 6-13 loss to Akimbo, a Mongolian team with two North Americans playing in CCT NA.

A shame, really. n0thing was one of the trailblazers for North American Counter-Strike, and is now playing the fiddle as Mongolia takes over NA’s throne as the main challengers to Europe.

‘Stupid f–ck, what are you doing?’

It’s been a disappointing week. Not for the podcast, which remains as fire as ever, just for Eternal Fire, Valve, The MongolZ, siuhy believers and FaZe fans.

Pro League is back and it actually might be good

It’s that time of the year, everyone, ESL Pro League is back. And it actually might not be terrible this time.

Well, just as soon as we get past the CCT-looking first stage, that is.

The teams are… uninspiring, to say the least. Eternal Fire, HEROIC, and GamerLegion are the best of a bad bunch, and there is at least some intrigue around NRG with br0 and SAW with their new signings, but the excitement is easily balanced out by the likes of FlyQuest, Housebets, and Mindfreak.

And yes, we did just name the three teams from Down Under. Maybe that should be a sign.

At least two of them won’t be there for very long, one of the big positives of this Pro League (other than it’s reduced length) is the new format. Full BO3 Swiss is something that has us very excited, especially for when the big boys arrive in Stage 2.

That’s because, unlike at PGL Cluj-Napoca, the elite teams actually all decided to accept invitations to this event.

Spirit, Vitality, and NAVI will all be battling it out again, while Falcons and MOUZ will both have opportunities to prove that their results in Romania came from actual progress, not just a weakened field.

All of this combined with the fact that it will no longer be held in a hotel conference room in Malta, and this Pro League might be a return to the glory days.

It might not be an arena event, so there’ll always be a caveat - and probably a few more frags for ZywOo - but it’s a lot better than what we had before.

☝️Maybe don’t do that

🤓 For the nerds

🧐 Questionable takes and even more questionable names

This TL;DR was written by aizyesque, shoko and AN1MO.
Welshy coded the email and Incipiens copy edited.

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