The Very Rubbish System

What if we took away the magic and replaced it with cold, hard logic?

Well, first off you’d be reading the HLTV newsletter instead of the TLDR one, but you’d also be watching the VRS leaderboard instead of the best tournament of the year: the RMRs.

Somehow, the people at HLTV, and the types of people who bleat on about ‘consistency’ and who give a sh*t about ‘formats’ and ‘rankings’ (all of which are nonsense thought up by nerds to make Counter-Strike less fun), won. Now we all have to endure this system exclusively enjoyed by maths perverts and people who interact with Counter-Strike purely through a computer sc- never mind, that is all of us. But you know what I mean.

As has been the theme of the last 15 years, the bloody nerds have won. What’s next? Expected rounds?

In case you’re not up to date, the VRS system is essentially a replacement for qualifiers for most of the big events of the year. Instead of having Open Qualifiers (meaning teams who aren’t the same guys who are at every event have a chance), most events are either exclusively or mostly invited teams. These invites are based on Valve’s rankings, which is based on performance at events that follow certain rules to qualify as Valve ranking events.

This leads to weird stuff like Fragadelphia and EPIC.LAN counting towards qualifying for the Major, which is apparently much better than the RMRs for reasons that only make sense to people who think quadratic equations are a replacement for human interaction.

Oh, and it means EU teams are just flying to Chicago (when it’s not Philadelphia, change the name lads) to play in what is supposed to be a local LAN. At first, this seems like it could be fun and give the NA players something interesting to test themselves against, and I’m sure it is at first. However, the whole vibe of Frag is about NA CS dudes getting drunk and occasionally playing Counter-Strike, and it’s a shame for them to lose that.

The importance of having fun

The biggest criticism, that was repeated ad nauseam, was that the ‘RMRs were the biggest/most important tournament of the year’, to which I say:

So?

First of all, that is not the fault of the system. That is a consequence of Major qualification being the most financially lucrative tournament of the year. That isn’t because you qualify via the RMR, it’s just because Valve want to make money from stickers. That works for everyone, and is obviously a good thing. Money for the developer, money for the teams, for the players - that keeps the ecosystem going.

In fact, it meant that a lot of smaller orgs actually had a chance at making some decent money they wouldn’t otherwise. More on that later.

Secondly, that’s what made them so bleeding special. Yeah, there was a lot on the line. Yeah, the stakes were insane. Yeah, the pressure was high. That’s what made it great. Qualification for the Major DID mean more than the Major, but now the Major doesn’t feel any more special, there’s just a gaping, weeping void where my heart used to be. Whether or not you think that is a good thing doesn’t matter, because qualification to the Major STILL matters more, it just isn’t with the high point of what we had before.

We lost the RMRs, the most exciting, high stakes, high pressure tournament of the year, and replaced it with… nothing?

That’s the solution? Just… less excitement?

Good work, guys. Now instead of the RMR being the most important tournament of the year, it’s f*cking StarLadder StarSeries Fall.

It wasn’t even second screen viewing. The most important tournament of the year for six different teams was third screen viewing for serious Counter-Strike fans and addicted bettors.

No, I’m not going to watch Gentle Mates vs B8 for a ‘66% chance’ for Major qualification instead of FURIA in a BO5 grand final for the first time in a decade or something. I’m a masochist, but not even Spurs fans like pain that much. I shouldn’t have to watch StarLadder at all, but I definitely shouldn’t have to watch it with a spreadsheet, calculator and some VRS boffin’s Twitter open just to try and figure out who is going to the biggest tournament of the year.

Cheers, by the way, @MischiefCS2. It’s been very useful.

Illustration by NovaH.

Thirdly, we’re now losing those emotional ‘pops’. Remember seeing BNE create a moshpit when they became millionaires and made it to Paris? Remember Passion UA going crazy? Yeah, forget all that - instead, we have Gentle Mates scratching their heads on the second most watchable stream of the weekend trying to figure out if they’ve gone for a 23% chance to a 78% chance of qualification.

It’s just… not how competition is supposed to work. Win, lose. Do that three times and you’re through or out. That’s undeniable, simple and effective. Why did it need changing to something so obtuse for the average fan?

fnatic have had a few online losses to teams you’ve never heard of who may or may not be cheating, and their VRS has taken an absolute battering for some reason, while they seem to get very little for beating real teams on LAN. I wouldn’t like this system even if it worked, but also, importantly, it barely seems to work.

The weighting of events is massively off, too. Obviously it in theory makes sense for more recent events to matter more than the others, but maybe NIP and B8 shouldn’t get a massive jump from StarLadder that matters more than the months of grinding?

If one tournament is going to matter so much, why not just do that properly and have the RMR?

The players themselves seem to agree that the RMR was better - although, in fairness, CYPHER is quite a biased source given ITB’s run in Paris. Still counts, though, and he’s not the only one.

Oh, and he went out 2-3 with BLEED, so he’s not completely biased. Take that.

Illustration by NovaH. Source: BLAST/Michal Konkol

Hardcore fans only from this point

How do you explain this to a casual? Trust me, it’s hard. I’m fortunate that you guys aren’t complete idiots and can launch straight into a tirade. The RMRs were easy - you qualify through a qualifier. You win three games to go through. That’s all you need to know.

I actually reached out to Finn (the aforementioned MischiefCS2) to ask him a few questions, and talked about the ‘painful process’ of figuring out how VRS handles data, and the fact that it ‘requires both statistical and coding ability’, which is kind of my point, here.

I shouldn’t have to learn Python to understand who is at the Major.

Finn does say he thinks it’s pretty possible to learn, though:

“I would say it's possible to learn. I have a maths background but nothing really close to this, I just spent quite a lot of time trying to learn it and asking others a lot of questions. Looking back, my first questions to messioso about VRS were incredibly stupid, but I eventually got to where I am now.

He then dropped a very casual line that outlined how poorly thought out this whole thing is: “Admittedly a lot of confusion for me was caused by Valve incorrectly explaining how they handle LAN wins.”

If f–cking Valve don’t understand it, what bloody chance do we have?

You can show someone who knows nothing about the game a video of Passion UA going mental after qualifying and they can see what it means to them. It legitimises Counter-Strike as a real sport. This sort of rubbish does the opposite - no emotion, complicated rules, a need to follow the whole season to have any idea why the teams are there. It ruins it for casuals.

Speaking of Passion UA, the removal of the Open Qualifiers in lieu of this god-awful ranking system means that a story like that cannot happen again, and even if it did, it would come with none of the emotion.

If you’re not going to every event, either because you’re not invited, or you had a clash with a ranking event, or for any other completely reasonable (or indeed unreasonable) reason, you’re just screwed. Once you’re in the system for invites, you have a chance - multiple chances - to get the ranking points you need, and if you’re not, you’re not.

There’s also a bit of a ranking dead-zone, too, where you’re too good for tier 2 events but not quite a tier one super team, you sort of miss out on invites and slowly bleed points. That’s gotten better over time with refinement, but there’s still some ranking weirdness going on.

Someone like Bad News Eagles, who made the Major cycle a lot more fun to follow, couldn’t be there.

There are multiple reasons this is terrible.

Teams who grind their way in via ranking might be technically better teams than the other tier 2 teams over a consistent period - but to actually shake it up against the big teams, they’re going to be predictable, and just slightly worse versions of those teams. Consistent output requires consistent input, and you’ve proven yourself to have consistent output and input that is bettered by at least 8-10 other teams. Everybody already knows Gentle Mates aren’t going to beat FaZe. Bad News Eagles did.

That’s probably a bit much, and maybe they will go on to shock everyone - but they are a consistently mediocre team with a low ceiling and a high floor. For qualification purposes, that’s ideal. For making things fun at the Major, it’s not at all.

You need some variance from your underdogs, otherwise they’re just strictly worse. A team who is more inconsistent, but peaks at the Major (a la BNE, Vega Squadron, DreamEaters) has more of a shot at beating a big team because their styles tend to be more unorthodox and less consistent, which in a tournament situation is fine.

There’s a reason League Two teams don’t go out and try to out-press Liverpool or out-pass Manchester City. You don’t go to India and bowl spin at Virat Kohli. You don’t play scaling comps into Korean LoL teams. You don’t try to outaggro Red/White decks.

Illustration by NovaH. Source: BLAST, Stephanie Lindgren

To beat someone who is amazing at something, you have to bring something else. As Miyamoto Musashi puts it in the Book of Five Rings, “To become the enemy, see yourself as the enemy of the enemy”, which is to say: if you want to beat Vitality, do the thing they least want to play against.

You can be good, you can be bad, you can be somewhere in between - just don’t be easy to play against. The team 30th in the world is usually there because they’re more consistent than the teams below them, because rankings care about consistency. Tournaments do not, and those teams will nearly always lose to a good team where one who plays differently, may not.

Put that in your book, Musashi.

We don’t have a league system in CS and it’s a really weird proxy to have a ranking system that essentially works as a league, except you get points by playing tournaments. You don’t play each team twice, like you would in a real league, so the results are not even.

We need new blood. Nobody wants to watch the same 16 teams all year, the same set of players. So many top players had their careers start because of a crazy Major overperformance - players like Boombl4, chopper, CYPHER, rigoN, Jambo, Jame, iM - and these players keep the scene fresh.

This is exacerbated by the fact that smaller orgs need that Major money to stay afloat. By that, I don’t mean that the Major money literally keeps them going, because that would be a horrendous business model - more that the teams keep putting in money, and trying to improve and flip players, for a shot at finally tasting that sweet, sweet payoff. With no payoff, there’s no point.

Illustration by NovaH. Source: PGL/Joao Ferreira

Turning gold into straw

The Major is supposed to feel special. The whole USP (not the pistol, the unique selling point, you big nerd) of the Major was that anyone could win it. Literally anyone. Except NiKo. You and your mates could join the qualifiers and if you were good enough, make it to the closed qualifier and so on and so forth. While practically that didn’t mean anything for my fellow yellow level FACEIT gangers, it was a nice dream - and teams did get through those Open Qualifiers and make a splash.

Those qualifiers served as a test, too. Right now, if you’re in the top 10, there’s no real litmus tests. If you’ve dropped off pretty badly, you just sort of stink up big events, but there’s no marker for how far you’ve fallen. There’s not even any hope of NiKo not making this Major, which is a real shame.

On a less jokey note, those gauntlets were a test of if you had really solid fundamentals, if you were really a tier one team that you claim to be, or if you really had fallen as far as the HLTV threads claimed you have. Vega Squadron did not have good fundamentals, so if you were really a tier one team, you’d just batter them. NIP against Vega Squadron really shaped me on this - NIP had really fallen that far, and in a closed system we might have assumed they were in that OG, VP tier - not the ESEA Open tier they really were in.

Oh, and the pressure is crazy, and you have to be able to handle pressure to be the best. Looking at you, NiKo.

And my Lord, every event is the same bleeding thing.

Even proponents of the system admit this - they just believe it to be a good thing. When talking to Finn, he was actually very positive about VRS, calling it ‘Valve’s finest work’, which is, quite frankly, an insane thing to say.

I was going to make a joke here that was something like ‘they literally made X game/piece of software!’ that was bad, but looking through their resume, they’ve genuinely never made anything bad. Which makes the idea that VRS is their magnum opus even more crazy.

But I digress - the point was that even he sees this issues when praising it.

“The model also has a lot of stability at the top end. If you can get into that Tier 1 cluster, you'll have a pretty stable time there, consistently having opportunities at events and it's pretty difficult to fall out. I can't say I know too much about the previous partnership agreements teams had with TO’s (and the benefits that came), but you get similar stability for top teams who do deserve it without having to shell out the millions required. Having to attend a few open LANs is a far cheaper price.”

Illustration by NovaH.

This is a good thing for the big teams, I totally agree. However, I am not a big team. I just don’t think that is a good thing for the health of the scene as a whole, which he admits by saying it has ‘killed any hope for UKCS, which is annoying’.

That joke writes itself.

He did, for balance, have some positive things to say that are more reasonable.

“Additionally, it was raised on HLTV confirmed recently in which these changes have helped increase the prominence and prevalence of other tournament operators, particularly the local LANs. I really wish Valve would laxen (sic) their rules which essentially block all league formats, however VRS is shaping the ecosystem into its own global league pyramid structure. It'll be interesting to see where the ecosystem goes, but it's giving signs of hope.

“End of the day a lot of the “issues” with VRS are due to misunderstandings of how it works, in effect creating the issue itself.”

Oh I understand how it works. I just hate it. In fact, if I didn’t understand how it worked, I would probably not hate it so much. But let’s assume I don’t know how it works for the sake of the point: isn’t that more of a criticism of the system? It should be really easy to figure it out, because not all of us have the time to spend watching that much Counter-Strike.

Or spending time writing a 3000 word essay on it.

How it works doesn’t even f*cking matter. Maybe we’d all care more about the inner workings if it wasn’t so boring, lifeless and fun-sucking, and replaced the best event of the year?

This was always the same thing with seeding, where people would explain what seeding was to me and assume the reason I hated seeding was that I didn’t understand it. It’s incomprehensible that I could understand that it was biased towards big teams AND think that was unfair.

I’m not saying Finn is saying that. He’s a gentleman, and raised some good points in our conversation. We just fundamentally disagree on this point.

Illustration by NovaH. Source: Team Liquid

Please, lord, no more MIBR

FISSURE Playground was possibly the most fun event of the year precisely because it was a bit different. Swiss system, a different set of teams, all BO3s - it was a boatload of fun. You know what it felt like?

An RMR with playoffs.

Alright, maybe that’s a stretch. It didn’t have many new teams, it just was missing a few of the big ones. Maybe that’s what we could do as a compromise; have the super big S tier teams auto qualify and everyone else has to go through the RMR system. Vitality, MOUZ, Spirit, FURIA (basically anyone who has won an S-tier trophy this year) gets to qualify, and everyone else dukes it out in the Swiss system.

Every other event has the same 16-32 teams, with maybe a handful of exceptions. Last year, every tournament had the unholy trinity (MIBR, BIG, FlyQuest) that made events totally unwatchable. They were just about good enough to keep their spot (purely because of said closed system), while never, ever looking like they might threaten the upper tiers. They were incompetent gatekeepers - career journeyman boxers, the type whose job it is to lose to the up-and-comers to plump up their records.

You ever wonder how every top tier boxer has a record of like 24-0? It’s the same way G2 have a 60% win rate - they beat ringers most weeks.

God, I hate MIBR.

This year, the equivalent is far less egregious. 3DMAX at least attempt to win sometimes, and can genuinely be fun to watch. GamerLegion have their moments, and HEROIC have a new team every event anyway.

The eagles have departed

I could probably write all day about how much I hate VRS. It’s a flawed ranking that produces a closed system, insulates the top teams from the consequences of playing badly and makes it near-impossible for smaller orgs to make some money.

It stops careers from being launched, stories from being written, celebrations going into the night and the joy of an underdog run at the Major - and for what? So that we can see the same four teams in the semi-finals again?

Proponents always suggest that underdog runs ‘ruin’ playoffs, but if you look at Major finals throughout the years, there’s been loads of blowouts between big teams anyway. Astralis did to Liquid what they did to ENCE and AVANGAR. Who cares?

I’d happily give up another MOUZ loss to Vitality for the joy of a BNE miracle run. If you wouldn’t, then maybe the VRS is for you - but I don’t think we could ever be friends.

Bad News Eagles forever. RMRs forever.

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