Ah, the VRS. That complex and frustrating system we all love to hate.

It’s riddled with issues, that’s for sure, but it seems Valve are slowly patching it into a more stable and sensible state.

This week brought two examples of that effort, with them rolling out significant updates.

The first change addressed how early stages of multi-phase tournaments contributed very little to VRS point gains or losses. This was mainly because those stages had minimal (or no) prize pools, as their main purpose is to qualify teams for later rounds.

Valve has now smoothed out that flaw by updating the rulebook: “Event stages that can be connected to later event stages now add to their prize pool a portion of the final stage’s prize pool”.

Now, you might ask: ‘Alright nerds, but what does this actually mean in practice?’

Well, it means that Play-In stages and qualifiers will now carry significantly more weight in the VRS. As a result, they become much more appealing to teams who previously might’ve skipped them in favor of some random local LAN with a 5k prize pool.

It didn’t make much sense that a win at EPIC.LAN was worth more than a win in Stage 1 of IEM Cologne, did it?

The second change - not as impactful, but still a welcome one - now requires a player to have played in at least five of the past ten matches to be listed as part of a team’s active VRS roster.

While this might not seem like a big deal, it helps avoid awkward situations where short-term stand-ins, who only played a couple of games, end up being registered as full team members in the system.

Think back to when FaZe used s1mple and skullz as stand-ins at IEM Dallas. Under the old rules, they were considered part of the official team in the VRS.

But Valve didn’t stop there.

In what must’ve been an absolute crunch week - surely leaving the one poor Valve employee assigned to the VRS on the edge of burnout - they pushed out yet another update, this time regarding the Major slots.

And the big news? There are no news.

After months of teasing us with a “TBD” in the rulebook, Valve finally revealed the regional allocation for Stage 1 of the StarLadder Budapest Major, and it’s exactly the same as before: 6 slots for Europe, 6 for the Americas, and 4 for Asia.

Thanks for nothing.

Finally, we just couldn’t wrap up this VRS chronicle without the weekly NIP tweet crying about something. To be fair, they actually have a point this time. It seems they’ve found themselves in the sweet spot to not play CS.

As Xizt and Snappi pointed out, NIP - ranked #14 in EU and #19 worldwide - are just a little too low to get invites to the big events, yet too high to qualify for the smaller ones.

Basically, they’re too good for tier 2, but not quite good enough for tier 1, forcing them to rely on teams above them turning down invites just to play anything meaningful. Now that we think about it, maybe it’s not such a bad thing not having to watch NIP play…

But don’t worry, Ninjas, we’ve got the perfect solution for your problem.

Just play better.