Why will four players not get stickers at the Major?
With all 24 teams for the Perfect World Shanghai Major decided, excitement is running high as stickers for the Chinese Major are expected to drop ahead of the start of CS2's second Major on November 30th. With that, 120 players will have their names immortalized in game with signature stickers marking the achievement. However, four of the players who are set to attend this upcoming Major will not be given the honor with stickers instead going to players who did not even play the RMRs or are even in China, so what gives?
Ahead of the start of the four Perfect World Shanghai Major RMR events, Perfect World set the deadline for teams to submit their core rosters as September 7th, after which teams would be unable to make changes to their starting lineup for the rest of the Major cycle.
With the CS2 landscape being fickle at the best of times, a number of teams made changes to their lineups during the two-month gap between the roster deadline and the start of the RMR. Fortunately for these teams, there exists a loophole of sorts where teams could register a new substitute until September 22nd and then simply swap them in for the RMRs and the Major should they qualify.
While this is all well and good for the teams, Valve has stuck firm to a ruling for a number of years that only a team's starters at the time of submission get stickers, meaning that even if players who were subs qualified for the Major they would not get stickers.
This has happened a number of times in CS history, however it may be the most pronounced this time around with four players missing out on stickers.
The four players and their benched teammates who will get stickers are:
-
Timofey "interz" Yakushin -> Ilya "Perfecto" Zalutskiy -
Tim "nawwk" Jonasson -> 
Aurélien "afro" Drapier -
Sebastian "Tauson" Tauson -> 
Andreas "aNdu" Maasing -
Lucas "Lucaozy" Neves -> Breno "brnz4n" Poletto
Missing out on stickers will most acutely be felt by Tauson as the Perfect World Shanghai Major is the Dane's first Major meaning he has missed out on the honor and financial windfall of having his name added to the game for the first time. Based on previous Majors, the four players will miss out on anywhere from five to six figures due to being registered as subs.
With the circuit reportedly moving to invite players solely via the Valve Ranking System (VRS) next year, this may be the final time we see substitute switcharoo as there will no longer to be an RMR to qualify from, but only time will tell what Valve's rules will be next year and how teams will attempt to navigate them.
