No Americas or European Open Qualifiers for Shanghai Major

Earlier today, Perfect World announced the dates and locations for each competition of the Shanghai Major cycle but the biggest talking point has been the disappearance of the Open Qualifiers for the North American, South American, and European regions.

Also, the changes to Valve's Major Rulebook reveal that Elimination Stage teams (former Legends stage) will no longer receive direct invites to the next Major's RMR and all RMR invites will be decided through the developer's Regional Ranking.

These changes mean that mix teams will no longer be able to try to qualify for the RMRs like yur did during the Paris Major cycle. More so, if these changes had been implemented during the Copenhagen Major cycle, NRG, and Liquid, for example, wouldn't have been able to even try qualifying due to being new squads.

The abolishment of Open Qualifiers promotes consistent and established squads while removing any chance for a newly-former team to contest for a Closed Qualifier spot. On the other hand, this also means there is less chance for cheaters to ruin someone's day, something that plagued the Copenhagen Major Open Qualifiers.

With all this put in practice, Complexity, FURIA, Imperial, and paiN do not have an RMR spot reserved, despite playing in the last major's Elimination Stage and will have to stay on top of their game during the following months.

Using the most recent version of Valve's Regional ranking, there would only be three North American squads invited to the RMR, as the eight invites will be sent to the Top 8 of the Americas region, regardless of sub-region. MIBR, paiN, Imperial, 9z, and FURIA would be the South American squads, and, as for NA, Complexity would be joined by Liquid and M80.

The NA Closed Qualifier will feature the top 16 teams from the region at that time. It is not immediately clear what the regional distribution will be for the RMR as there are only seven spots available for the Shanghai Major.

The Perfect World Shanghai Major cycle is scheduled to start on August 21st, with the first American teams playing on August 26th.