Valve push MRQ changes affecting Liquid and Wildcard's roads to the Major
Valve updated some of the rules of the Major Regional Qualifiers (MRQ) on January 16. The MRQs will be implemented for the BLAST.tv Austin Major and will replace the RMR, inviting teams based in the Valve Ranking System (VRS).
The biggest change is that now a team's region is defined "by the region of the VRS from which they have been invited." Before this change, a team's region could be determined by the nationality of the majority of the players.
On top of that, Valve also changed its protocol for when a team refuses an invite or disband. The invite process for the Major work as follows:
"Invitations are first sent to teams invited to participate in Stage 3. Then invitations are sent to teams invited to Stage 2. Finally, invitations are sent to teams invited to the MRQs."
"If a team declines an invitation, or is no longer intact, they do not participate in the Major and the next-highest ranked team receives their invitation. If there are no additional teams available, then the remaining slots are to be determined by a last-chance regional qualifier."
Should a team get invited to one of the stages based on more than one regional VRS, they will be invited based on the region with "greater representation" in the Major (i.e, Europe, America, and Asia).
This effectively means that Liquid, who have one player from Australia (Justin "jks" Savage) and one from MENA (Guy "NertZ" Iluz), ergo two APAC players, no longer can choose to change their region to Asia like before and take The MongolZ's legends spot, for example.
As for Wildcard, it gets tricky. Should they be eligible for a Stage 2 invite in both the Europe and Americas rankings, they would have to take an EU slot. However, if Wildcare are eligible for a Stage 3 invite in the Americas, but not in Europe, they would take the Stage 3 Americas invite.
The BLAST.tv Austin Major is scheduled to run from June 9th to 22th and it will be the first Valve-sponsored tournament with 32 teams.
