Valve ranking model update nukes NA teams

Valve released a crucial update to the Valve Regional Standings (VRS) model on February 24th that has left the domestic North American teams in a dire spot.

This is because the tournament data will no longer count until the whole event concludes. As pointed out by Dust2.us' Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore, this change ultimately affects NA as ESL Challenger League Season 49 NA won't finish until after the invites for the BLAST.tv Austin Major/Major Ranking Qualifier (MRQ) are sent out.

This sole adjustment radically changed the VRS rank of multiple NA teams, according to HLTV's live version:

• Marsborne: 24th to 72th

• Vagrants: 26th to 47th

• Bad News Capybaras: 38th to 53rd

• Alter Iron/SUPER EVIL GANG: 51st to 39th

If ECL S49 is left out of the ranking for the BLAST.tv Major, the only events that will count to the dataset are qualifiers and two Fragdelphia tournaments.

While we're highlighting NA in this article, this change also affected other regions such as South America and Asia. Multiple Brazilian teams are already complaining.

The reason behind this change is likely because the previous formula caused issues such as GamerLegion losing out on an invite to BLAST Open Lisbon due to not being eliminated from IEM Katowice as fast as other teams, thus they didn't earn points in time. This issue was highlighted by Complexity's General Manager Graham "messioso" Pitt earlier this month.

This wasn't the only change Valve made to VRS's model. The developer also made forfeits count the same as a normal loss and decreased the number of matches a team must play to be ranked, from ten to five.

Valve also added the "club share" earnings from ESL tournaments to the model, meaning that now the player's prizepool and the orgs' prizepool will be summed up.

The VRS has been under much scrutiny, especially from tier-two teams, since its introduction. Valve, however, still hasn't made some crucial adjustments requested by many organizations.