FACEIT: "No changes were made after the rulebook was sent out"

FACEIT has issued a statement to shed some light on the changes to the player eligibility rule for the upcoming Major.

Earlier in the week, HLTV.org revealed that, unlike at previous Majors, players who competed at the Minors but did not manage to qualify remained eligible to compete at the FACEIT Major for the teams invited to the New Legends and the New Challengers stages.

These 16 teams have until August 5 to submit their rosters for the Major. The remaining eight sides, who came through the Minors, already have their rosters locked and cannot make any changes.

While praised by many, the new player eligibility rule has sparked a heated debate in the scene regarding an alleged miscommunication between FACEIT and the teams competing in the Major circuit. OpTic coach Casper "⁠ruggah⁠" Due was one of the most vocal critics, going as far as to claim that the rule had been changed "within the last week" and that "it had been outlined multiple times that a player would be locked after Minor registration".

In a statement, FACEIT has guaranteed that "no changes were made to the rules during the Minors" and that the final rulebook was sent to every Minor and Major team on June 25. Contacted by HLTV.org, FACEIT stressed that the teams competing in the closed qualifier for the Europe Minor - OpTic being one of them - also had access to the rulebook on this date as the qualifier only ended on July 1.

Below you can find the complete statement from FACEIT regarding the changes to the rules:

"Over the past few days we have seen confusion over whether the rulesets for the Minor tournament and Major tournament had been changed throughout the course of the Minor, specifically the rule concerning player transfer prohibitions between rosters participating in the Minor tournament and rosters participating in the Major tournament. We would like to address this issue.

"For this Major, the rule in previous Minors’ and Majors’ rulebooks prohibiting roster changes and adding players that competed in the Minors was removed. We sent the rule book containing these rules to all teams on 25 June 2018.

"No changes were made to the rules during the Minors, or at any point after the rule books were sent to teams. The rule books that were sent never included a prohibition for teams playing in the Major to pick up players that did not qualify from the Minor.

"The rules that were provided are written prohibitively - stating what teams cannot do, rather than what they can. This language is normal for complex tournament rule sets, and help to assure teams in no uncertain terms what is disallowed. The omission of a rule stating players from the Minor are not allowed to compete at the Major should have been enough to tell teams that they could do so, but in retrospect we acknowledge that further clarity in the communication could have helped avoid confusion. As soon as we realized some teams were confused, we contacted all competing teams to clarify the player transfer ruling.

"Compared to previous Minors and Majors, we have implemented a lot of positive changes based on feedback we collected from players and the community. These changes have been carefully considered and discussed internally as well as with Valve, and have remained consistent since the start of the competition.

"We're sorry for any confusion surrounding the rule book and will continue our endeavour to be as transparent as possible with the community in future."