22 teams write open letter to Valve: It’s not a level playing field

The current tournament structure does not provide a fair competitive environment across the Counter-Strike landscape.

That is the message from 22 teams, who have penned an open letter to Valve, highlighting “significant flaws” in the VRS system introduced for 2025.

In the letter, teams including Falcons, MOUZ, and NIP criticize Valve for implementing a flawed circuit that makes it exceptionally difficult for lower-tier teams to earn enough VRS points to secure invites to top tournaments.

According to the teams, the consequences could be devastating.

– Valve, you made a bold decision to reshape the Counter-Strike ecosystem, but the system as it stands is not a level playing field. — to get there, you have to finish what you started. From your perspective this might just be a time period where you’re accepting flaws in the system until it irons itself out. To us, the teams, this time period could kill our Counter-Strike organizations.

– To leave you with a short-term suggestion that would help us: add open qualifiers to the Major again. Allow all teams and players the chance to save their careers and dreams.

You can read the letter in full below.

The entire letter

Dear Valve,

We all share your vision of “A Level Playing Field” — where every team and player has the opportunity to qualify for a Major based on skill alone. We appreciate your efforts to reshape the tournament landscape, but we believe the current system has significant flaws that are undermining this vision. As a collective, we offer this feedback to help strengthen the foundation you’ve built.

Open qualifiers: The Only Way to Enter the Scene is Through Tier 1

As it stands, if you have a core without VRS points, open qualifiers are the only way of getting points.

For tournament organizers (TOs), open qualifiers (OQs) are a major undertaking, simply due to scale. Running 512-1024 team brackets requires a sizable logistical and administrative workload to ensure competitive integrity meaning only the biggest TOs are able to organize these effectively. This creates a layered ecosystem: the biggest tournaments offer a small chance at a dream OQ run that catapults teams to relevance, while the tier below runs on invites only. Below that tier is a dead zone, where teams slowly run out of oxygen while waiting for the next tier 1 open qualifier.

As a result, any new up-and-coming team can only enter the ranking, paradoxically, through Tier1-events, and these are few and far between. Unless the ranking system changes, there must be stronger incentives for smaller TOs to run open qualifiers.

Backpedaling on Decisions

The status of a tournament’s VRS license needs to be settled before the tournament starts. We’re only one month into the year and multiple tournaments have had their VRS status revoked mid-tournament while others have had it added mid-tournament. This uncertainty has major implications for teams and players — due to how precarious the situation is in tier 2, committing to the wrong tournament could result in a long stint in the dead zone. From a team’s perspective it is crucial that these licenses are not given out on a whim.

Communication and Complexity:

Credit where credit is due — making the codebase open-source has given everyone the opportunity to fully grasp the inner workings of the ranking, allowing us to fully understand the effect of every single match.

However, the esports industry gathers people from all walks of life with a great variety in technical knowledge and work life experiences. Presenting this crucial information on a GitHub repository, written in a very technical way, negatively affects accessibility for smaller teams and players who lack the technical fluency to dissect the model.

If players cannot understand the steps needed to climb the ranking, or if a TO does not understand whether their tournament fulfills the license requirements, there needs to be a centralized forum/platform where questions are asked and answered. We understand that there is a cost to building and maintaining such a platform, and are open to working with a third party to do so. Currently, the scene is coping with the lack of clarity by sharing information in what has become a global game of telephone where, at times, teams are educating TOs on the current interpretation of the rules, mostly operating completely in the dark.

Valve, you made a bold decision to reshape the Counter-Strike ecosystem, but the system as it stands is not a level playing field. — to get there, you have to finish what you started. From your perspective this might just be a time period where you’re accepting flaws in the system until it irons itself out. To us, the teams, this time period could kill our Counter-Strike organizations.

To leave you with a short-term suggestion that would help us: add open qualifiers to the Major again. Allow all teams and players the chance to save their careers and dreams.

The letter has been signed by the following teams: