Opinion: BLAST's formats need to change

BLAST runs five prestige tournaments a year: two seasonal groups, two seasonal finals, and the World Final at the end of the year. Time and time again the formats behind these events ensure that the best teams do not attend these tournaments. Instead, BLAST chooses to keep their events walled in for their partner teams, which is of course their prerogative, but the combination of teams attending and the formats of the events themselves lead to artificially extended lengths with minimal consequences for partnered teams failing, but enormous consequences for non-partnered teams losing.

Groups

First, let's start with the seasonal group tournaments, the first tournaments of the two semesters of the year. Twelve partnered teams are invited to this event, and zero non-partnered teams are invited. BLAST Spring and Fall Groups are the two biggest events of the year with zero qualification system for teams who haven't ponied up the sum of money to join the exclusive club.

Let's compare BLAST Groups to ESL Pro League. At EPL Season 17, there were 15 partnered Louvre Agreement teams out of a total of 32 teams. A majority of teams in ESL Pro League are not part of ESL's franchise agreement. There are zero teams at BLAST Fall and Spring Groups that aren't part of BLAST's franchise. There is literally no opportunity for non-partnered teams to attend BLAST Groups.

Onto the tournaments themselves though, BLAST Groups are equally as tragic. BLAST does not make it easy to understand the Group tournaments, with the event going through three different formats over the last four events.

Two years ago, BLAST Groups were simply three GSL double-elimination groups with the top two of each group qualifying for the Final of that season. But, since then, BLAST has tried to introduce play-in stages and last-chance stages which complicate the format and make it difficult for viewers to understand the importance of the match they're watching.

On top of that, these multiple consolation formats decrease the value of each individual match. Why should I care about any individual match if this is a triple-elimination event? In fact, the 2022 events introduced a format that allowed quadruple elimination! Teams could lose more series than they win or lose more maps than they win and still qualify anyways. The format is entirely too forgiving.

The format for 2023 has slightly changed, removing the opportunity for quadruple elimination, but each team still gets three losses before they're fully removed from the tournament. There are barely any consequences for losing since each individual match matters so little. Especially since half of the twelve teams qualify for Spring Finals anyway, why should there be so many chances for each team? Why do we spend so much time each season on a tournament that doesn't even crown a winner?

On top of the triple (or quadruple) elimination formats, each losing team from the seasonal BLAST Groups also gets a direct invite to the BLAST Showdown, the next event under our scrutiny.

Showdown

The BLAST Showdowns are yet another chance for partnered teams to make the seasonal Finals, while it's the only opportunity for non-partnered teams to get a lick at BLAST's eminent events. To highlight this disparity, let's look at the most recent Showdown, BLAST Premier: Spring European Showdown 2023. For 9INE to attend this event, they had to win RES Western European Masters, and to qualify for that event, they had to win the GAM3RS_X Polish Clash. It took winning two events and thirteen maps for 9INE to make this glorified qualifier. What did NIP do to make Showdown? They bombed out last in Spring Groups. Marco "Snappi" Pfeiffer puts it in 280 characters for us below:

Over the past two seasons, there have been four Showdowns, two per season, two per region (one for the Americas and one for Europe). In these four events, only one partnered team has won a single Showdown. While it's pleasant that non-partnered teams are managing to eek their way into BLAST's walled garden, it brings up questions with regard to the quality of teams in BLAST's ecosystem. If their partnered teams can't defeat non-partnered teams in the Showdown, why are we watching them play a triple-elimination event in the Groups?

Seasonal Finals

BLAST's Spring and Fall Final have eight teams, six from the Groups and two from the Showdown. For the last three times this event has been run, BLAST has used two GSL groups with the top three of each team attending playoffs. For some reason, this eight-team event has a six-team playoff bracket, of which four are guaranteed to be partner teams, further boosting their status.

However, outside of that quirk, there are no real issues with the seasonal Finals. It's a simple double-elimination format that has been tried and tested to create interesting and meaningful matches.

World Finals

BLAST's marquee event, the World Finals, also suffers from the same issue as the rest of their circuit, namely, artificially promoting the quality of their partner teams. The teams invited from winning previous events are perfectly fine. It's grand that the winners of the Major, both EPLs and both of BLAST's seasonal Finals are invited. It's in the BLAST Premier World Leaderboard that the invite system begins to fall apart.

To get an idea of the issue at hand, we can take a short view back to the past when OG were invited to BLAST World Final 2022. Milan "Striker" Švejda of HLTV wrote an article at the time detailing the crux of the problem. As he notes, over 40% of the points in the BLAST ecosystem are guaranteed to go to BLAST partners in the absolute worst-case scenario that they all bomb out last place of the Showdowns and seasonal Finals.

To put it in one simple example, in 2022, OG obtained points on BLAST's leaderboard from just four events, the Spring and Fall Groups and Finals. The team did not score in the top half of any other S-tier event that year. ENCE, on the other hand, placed in the top four at the PGL Antwerp Major and finished second at IEM Dallas and ESL Pro League Season 15. Clearly, ENCE were the better team in 2022, yet OG were invited simply because of the weight that BLAST gives to partnered events.

BLAST has slightly changed the point tallies this year, but not in any significant manner. A similar percentage of points are still guaranteed to partnered teams in BLAST's walled garden. In fact, the Showdown and Finals, the two parts of BLAST's circuit that non-partnered teams can access, receive less points, while the seasonal Groups have actually increased in relevance growing from 30,600 to 31,800 guaranteed points for partnered teams. It's not unlikely that we'll see another OG situation transpire again near the end of 2023.

In conclusion, BLAST's format is egregiously beneficial to partner teams. Their formats artificially extend tournaments, create meaningless matches, and prevent the best teams from reaching the most prestigious tournaments of the year. Their systems benefit the organizations which paid the tournament organizer as opposed to creating the best tournaments filled with the most competitive teams in the world.