Valve is making some major changes to its VRS model, as players will now be required to further prove out their participation and event stages will feel more connected.
VRS is Valve’s new method to rank the most worthy teams and invite them to the most prestigious tournaments in Counter-Strike 2. The system has received significant criticism from CS2 players and fans alike ever since it was first announced. Many have argued that VRS is limiting the potential of newer teams struggling to earn points, and there have also been discussions about how event prize pools are distributed at events with multiple stages, focusing even more of the pro scene’s money at the very top of the game.
Valve has seemingly listened to some of the criticism as it’s introducing VRS changes that may improve the system. Players will now need to meet a minimum required participation to be added to rosters, and prize pools may also become better balanced as tournament event stages will be more connected.
Valve is introducing two major changes to VRS, as players are now required to play in five of the past ten matches to appear on an active roster for a qualifying team. Multi-stage events will also be better connected, making their prize pools better balanced.
In July, Valve introduced a change for Majors through which teams were unable to change their qualifying core rosters. Valve has now introduced a similarly-minded new changes to its VRS model, as players are now required to play a set number of matches to prove out their participation. This will stop substitutes who played with their teams only briefly from becoming part of the main lineup of a Major team.
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FaZe Clan was recently involved in a situation where the June VRS ranking made Felipe “skullz” Medeiros and Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev part of the active roster. Many felt this was unfair as skullz had played only three matches for the team, at IEM Dallas.
Complexity saw a similar situation where the team competed at BLAST Austin Major without Håkon “hallzerk” Fjærli. Paytyn “junior” Johnson stepped in as a temporary replacement, and he ideally shouldn’t have so affected the side’s VRS ranking.
This VRS change will ensure that stand-in players don’t affect the ranking drastically, as VRS won’t count substitutes as the team’s core players while ranking teams.
The second change to the VRS model will even out the weight given to all the stages of multi-stage events. “Event stages that can be connected to later event stages (e.g., qualifiers or group stages) now add to their prize pool a portion of the final stage’s prize pool,” the update reads. This change addresses the issue that saw some multi-stage events face a significantly unbalanced weight distribution in prize money. While the later stages will still weigh more than earlier stages, the prize pool distribution should now be more closely balanced.
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