You take a male team in Asia, and a women’s team in NA, you put them together and what do you get? That’s right, Conflict of interest!

That’s the situation FlyQuest is in right now, both their men's and women’s teams qualified for their respective RMRs, but the women don’t get to go. This is thanks to Valve’s new conflict of interest rules, and unsurprisingly the org is quite upset about this. They argue that it’s never been a problem before so long the teams aren’t in the same qualifying regions, and the org divests if they both make it to the mixed stages.

The best example we can find for their first argument is 00Nation in 2021, their European “Prospects” team participated in the open qualifiers, and their Brazilian team participated in the SA Qualifier. Aurora did the second point, sort of, in this last Major cycle. Their academy team “left” the org to play the qualifiers, and then suddenly got re-signed to Aurora when their open qualifier run failed. No one noticed lads, well done.

You might notice that both of those examples happened in open qualifiers, which, bar Asia, don’t exist anymore.

These “rules” have never been tested outside of open qualifiers, and even then rules change, just look at the qualifying system this year. It’s a bit silly to base your argument on what’s been okay in the past.

We’re not quite sure what FlyQuest expected, there’s no way they must’ve seriously thought they’d be able to have 2 teams competing. Just imagine the accusations if both teams made it and then played each other, even if FlyQuest Red was playing under no name for the Major.

Is it fair on FlyQuest Red? Absolutely not, it would’ve been awesome to see them compete at an RMR, a whole new crowd of CS fans would be represented on primetime CS. Unfortunately, Valve doesn’t exactly budge on these things, and frankly, they shouldn’t. These rules make sense just… maybe let this slide, just this once, for fun, please.