Valve has made multiple changes to their Major Supplemental Rulebook ahead of the PGL Copenhagen Major next year. The event is set to be the first Major in Counter-Strike 2.
The changes revolve around both seeding and the names of stages, with the first of those changes bound to make huge differences in coming events.
Let's take a look at how these changes will effect future tournaments:
From now on, seeding will no longer be decided by the outcome of RMR events, and neither will the teams who bypass the first stage of a Major.
Instead, it will now be based on Valve's Regional Standings, a ranking introduced in December 2022. Before this change, the Standings were used to determine some of the invites for the RMRs for the BLAST.tv Paris Major.
The new changes will prevent high ranked teams from receiving low seeding at Majors due to difficult RMR events. One example of this would be FaZe, who were the lowest-seeded team in the BLAST.tv Paris Major Challengers Stage thanks to their qualification through the last-chance bracket at the RMR.
Valve has also decided to change the way seeding decides which teams play together.
Previously, the highest seed team would play the lowest seed team in each stage, although that would result in a skewed Swiss system due to the use of Bucholz.
Unsure what that means? Here's a handy thread from Complexity manager messioso to explain why that was an issue:
Teams will instead now face those seeded eight places below them, resulting in opening match ups looking as follows:
The other big change made by Valve is to the names of the individual stages at Major events.
In Paris, the three stages of the event were named 'Challengers', 'Legends', and 'Champions' stages, although this led to confusion for both fans and players alike.
With the new changes, these stages will now be known as 'Opening', 'Elimination', and 'Playoffs'.
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