“Sadly for you, John Tier 2, your social credit score is too low for a CCT event.”

That’s the exact line that many players were told when they tried to sign for a new tier two team this past year. And by exact line, we mean we’re HEAVILY paraphrasing.

Essentially, CCT works with a company called GRID – a betting data provider – which has a rather ironically named ‘integrity team’ akin to North Korea calling themselves the ‘Democratic Republic.’ Sadly, for players like mwlky, this has led to teams refraining from signing certain players altogether.

Here’s how it works: Your team gets marked as one that has ‘abnormal betting patterns’ (which, again, is vague and open to manipulation), and slowly but surely, you get blacklisted from CCT events.

This is a problem because a tier 2 or 3 team needs those events to even survive, and so if you’re blacklisted, you’re not finding a team. Who knows how many talented players have fallen to the wayside because of this?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg that HLTV uncovered this week, and we do recommend reading the whole thing if you want to get angry this morning.

Valve implemented a less egregious rule this week. They decided that multi-continental teams no longer get to choose which qualifier they play for the Major. In short, Liquid will have to play in the Americas, and Wildcard will have to play in Europe. You can think DRILLAS for that.

Finally, a positive ohnePixel impact.