Split-majority teams such as Liquid or Wildcard no longer have free choice between which region they represent at the Majors.
Valve has released an update to the Major Supplemental Rulebook which addresses how a team’s Major region is defined and how invitations are handled for teams that have equal representation between multiple regions.
Previously, if a team had no three-man majority and there was a tie between two other regions, that team could choose which region they would represent.
That is no longer the case following Valve’s Thursday update. The part of the rulebook addressing regional assignment has been changed to say that a team’s region is “determined by the region of the VRS from which they have been invited.”
Valve specified how this is handled for teams that appear in multiple VRS regions, such as Liquid, who now have two Americas players and two Asia players, and Wildcard, who field two Americas players and two European players.
“In the event that a team would be invited to a particular stage based on more than one regional VRS, they are considered to have been invited based on the region with greater representation in the Major (i.e., Europe, then America, then Asia),” it is explained in the rulebook.
This effectively means that such a team’s assignment will be enforced depending on which VRS guarantees them an invite further into the Major. And if they both lead to an invite to the same stage, they’ll be assigned to the region with higher representation.
That also applies to the newly introduced Major Regional Qualifiers (MRQ), the replacement for RMRs in the recent Major expansion to 32 teams. As an example, should Wildcard be eligible for an MRQ invite in both the Americas and Europe, they will be invited to play in the European qualifier as the region with the highest representation at the moment.
In the same update, Valve also clarified the order in which invites are sent ahead of the Major, starting from Stage 3, then Stage 2, and then MRQ.
Leave a Reply