A History of Majors with an asterisk
The Majors are considered to be the pinnacle of CS:GO competition. They are the most important events in the calendar year and have the most prestige as it is the event that players want to win the most. Despite that incredible reputation, the history of the Majors are riddled with outside circumstances that plague the tournament. The most recent case will be at the ELeague Boston Major where we have a slew of teams that will be in attendance without their full roster. SK will have to play with Joao ‘felps’ Vasconcellos instead of Ricardo ‘boltz’ Prass. Liquid will play with Wilton ‘zews’ Prado instead of Lucas ‘steel’ Lopes. TyLoo will have to play with Luis ‘peacemaker’ Tadeu instead of Hansel ‘BnTeT’ Ferdinand. If Nicolai “dev1ce’ Reedtz does not recover from his illness then they will be forced to play with Danny ‘zonic’ Sorensen.
In this particular case, the uproar is much louder than usual as SK in particular are looking to become a legendary team. The prior SK lineup with felps was already an amazing team, but this new lineup with boltz looks to outpace that older lineup. Their latest victory was at ESL Proleague Season 6 where they defeated FaZe and established themselves as the best team in the world. Because of that people are trying to put an asterisk to this upcoming Major as SK will not be allowed to play with boltz.
So given that context, it makes some sense that the uproar is worse than usual. A Major has the most prestigious reputation attached to it. It is supposed to the most competitive tournament CS:GO has to offer, at least in theory. But in reality, this is just another case in a long extended history that is the Majors of CS:GO.
The biggest example is DreamHack Winter 2014. Prior to that event, two teams had vac-banned players. Titan with Hovik “KQLY’ Tovmassian and Epsilon with Gordon “Sf” Giry. Valve rightly banned both players, but took it a step further. They blamed their teams for not knowing and both Titan and Epsilon were disqualified from the Major. This line of thinking made no sense and players that were innocent of any wrongdoing were painted with the same brush by Valve and disqualified from that Major.
If that wasn’t enough, we also had boost gate in the quarterfinals of that event where the rules weren’t even consistently applied to both teams. It was a giant mess made worse by the fact that Fnatic had already built resentment from the community. Fnatic ended up forfeiting that match which allowed LDLC to move on and they won that Major, but if the rules applied consistently, LDLC could have been disqualified from the tournament.
At MLG Columbus 2016, NiP could not play with Jacob ‘pyth’ Mourujarvi because of travel complications and had to use their coach Bjorn “THREAT” Pers as a stand-in. On top of that both Olof ‘olofmeister’ Kajbjer Gustafsson and Ladislav “GuardiaN” Kovacs had injuries which affect their performance. This is especially pertinent when you consider that both were superstar players of their respective teams. GuardiaN famous tweeted after those finals that the worse feeling wasn’t losing, it was being unable to help his team.
At ESL Cologne 2016 there was a trade situation with Dignitas and Astralis. Dignitas could use their player from the trade, but Astralis could not. On top of that Peter “dupreeh” Rothmann had a surgery so Astralis had to use two standins: zonic and Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander. At ELeague Atlanta 2017 at the beginning of the year had to use Ricardo “fox” Pacheco because they were unwilling to play with Lincoln “fnx” Lau any longer and could not use felps just yet.
This only covers circumstances outside of the game. There have been cases where roster changes had already occurred and players were forced to play on already dead teams. At ELeague Major, there was only one stand-in issue with fox and SK. But many of the surrounding teams were already planning a roster shuffle. This included: EnVyUs, G2, OpTic, North, GODsent, Fnatic, and Liquid would all immediately shuffle after this Major. FaZe could be considered in that group as well as Philip “aizy” Aistrup left FaZe soon after that tournament to join North.
As time has gone on, the amount of caveats to a Major have seemingly increased. The rules are outdated in the modern era of CS:GO and need to be revised for the next season. While saying that, I am not someone who believes the rules should be changed mid-season as this opens a whole can of worms for unethical practices in the future for Majors.
In general I like the roster locks as a rule because there are all kinds of weird games you could play if there were zero roster locks. You could have a star player “stand-in” for a lesser team and essentially boost them higher in the Minors before going back to his team to play for real. This gets even more complicated as there are organizations that own multiple teams in the current
Because of that, no roster lock seems impossible to me. But at the same time, the rules that worked in the past from 2013–2015 are no longer holding up. They are now outdated in the current era of CS:GO, though a part of that is because the Major cycle has extended in terms of length. If we condense it so that the qualifier to the Major lasts for 1.5 months instead of the current 3–4 months, that could help alleviate problems immediately.
In the case of the modern era, we at least need to make a special exemption for roster locks when it comes to injuries, visas, and unforeseen circumstances. Even then, this could be exploited as a team could try to fake an illness of a player and try to sneak in a stand-in (this has happened multiples times in The International).
Arguably the biggest problem though is the complete lack of communication. Valve has hoisted the responsibility to ELeague as the organizers of the rule, but in the end Valve is still the final decision maker. We cannot communicate with them and the few glimpses into their minds we do get (like forcebuys should be successful 4/10 times against a fullbuy), make your brain melt. I don’t think it’s possible to ever fix this problem.
These are just some basic suggestions. Others more involved with tournaments and the needs/requirements of teams/players will be much better than I to figure out the problem. So I will end it with this.
While Majors are upheld as the most competitive events of the year, they also require more luck. There are currently only two an year and there is no guarantee you will know when the next one will happen. Because of that teams cannot build their year in such a way that they peak at that Major. In this day and age, the meta can shift, your star player can rise up or fall down, and contracts make it so that you cannot dally around with roster changes, you have to do them whenever the opportunity presents.
On top of that we’ve had Majors that were decided by random map generators, majors with no seeding, and majors with format that increases the volatility of who makes it out. These are all things that could have an even larger effect on the result of the Major so in it’s own way every Major arguably has an asterisk next to it.
But in the end, these are still the tournaments that players and fans care about the most despite all of the luck factors that are involved. Majors are important, they have a critical importance in CS:GO history, and there will always be some level of luck involved. But at the very least we can make it so that the rules and format allow for the best competition possible so that we don’t have to explain the various caveats to every Major run.
