It looks like the Valve Regional Standings (VRS) are an absolute mess, full of loopholes, inconsistencies, and glaring issues - who would’ve thought?

This past week, several key figures in the scene have spoken out against the current format of the VRS. The movement was sparked by Endpoint, who announced they were putting their CS division on pause, citing "changes in the CS landscape" as one of the reasons behind their decision.

GamerLegion also raised concerns about discrepancies that "significantly impacted their eligibility for recent invites". Essentially, since other teams were eliminated early from Katowice, they were able to benefit from their earnings, which boosted their VRS ranking. Meanwhile, GL, still in the tournament, missed out on these points and subsequent invites because they hadn’t yet earned the prize money by the cutoff. We swear we’re not making this up.

One of the many issues, and arguably the most significant, is pretty clear: if you’re a new team looking to climb the ranks and break into the big leagues, you’ve got a grueling task ahead of you.

There simply aren’t enough open qualifiers and lower-tier ranked events to start building up VRS points. As Endpoint highlighted in their statement, this results in a “much smaller and internal ecosystem”, which predominantly benefits the top-30 teams that receive all the invites to the major ranked events.

It's not just the organizations speaking out - players are voicing their frustrations too.

A few hours after the Endpoint announcement, Snappi expressed how it’s “borderline impossible to grind rank” and how Valve has “fully closed down the entire system”. While Snappi has every right to be upset, it's worth noting that NIP still receives wildcard invites - something most teams aren’t even eligible for. So, in a sense, he’s actually gotten the easy way out.

All in all, it’s clear that the VRS has created more problems than it’s solved, leaving us to look back at the partner system and wonder how they’ve managed to create something even worse. Valve pls fix.