Strike #4: When's an American team not an American team?

We had a DRILLAS rule introduced to combat one loophole, and now we might just need another one for Wildcard.

'Strike' is a regular column written by HLTV Editor-in-chief Milan "Striker" Švejda, which focuses on the new realities of a Valve-regulated circuit.

In case you need a refresher: Last year, just before the Shanghai Major, DRILLAS played at the Asia RMR despite fielding a European core.

After qualifying for the RMR with a lineup that technically applied as an Asian core (two Israelis and a Moroccan-French player), they replaced Meytar "⁠AMSALEM⁠" Amsalem with Sener "⁠SENER1⁠" Mahmuti in a last-minute substitution to change their core to a European one.

That was understandably met with a fair amount of criticism, and Valve quickly responded by introducing a rule that prevents cases where substitutions would alter a team's regional assignment.

Just a few weeks later, Valve added another key rule to the Major rulebook aimed at multi-regional teams. They removed the option to choose which region a team with a split majority would qualify from — or so they had hoped.

Here's the rule in question:

Section "Regional Standing" of the Major supplemental rulebook

- 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).

What it means is that a split-majority team is invited from the region that guarantees them a spot further into the Major, and in case both regions lead to an invite to the same stage, the "stronger" region is chosen.

Needless to say, it didn't work.

Two weeks before the BLAST.tv Austin Major April 7 invite deadline, Wildcard were sitting in fifth place of the Americas standings. Had they stayed there, it would have been just enough for a direct invite to Stage 2 from the Americas, but M80 were breathing down their necks for that spot.

Dropping below fifth place would have been disastrous for the Peter "⁠stanislaw⁠" Jarguz-led team. They had a split majority between the Americas and Europe with two players from each and one from South Africa, and dropping outside of the Stage 2 invites would have caused the new rule to place Wildcard in the daunting European Major Regional Qualifier (MRQ) instead of the much less competitive North American one.

So instead of facing that reality, Wildcard gamed the system. To ensure they only classify as an Americas team at the crucial ranking update, they played their last tournament before the Major cut-off, the PGL Astana NA closed qualifier, with Jake "⁠Stewie2K⁠" Yip instead of Love "⁠phzy⁠" Smidebrant.

This caused the Valve ranking to classify Stewie2K as part of Wildcard's core lineup and shift the core from an Americas-Europe split to an Americas one. As a result, because the aforementioned rule no longer applied to them, they were invited to the North American MRQ after they did drop below the fifth-place cut-off with M80 overtaking them by winning the head-to-head match in the Astana qualifier.

Date	Matches
PGL Astana 2025 North America Closed Qualifier
01/04/2025	Wildcard Finished 0:2 M80	Match

Now, this would not have been a problem had they kept playing with an Americas core in the Major qualifier itself. After all, Wildcard punished themselves by not playing with their real team in the Astana qualifier, where a win over M80 in that crucial match would have likely been enough to keep them in fifth place.

However, they reverted to their previous lineup by bringing back phzy and went on to qualify for the Austin Major from the NA qualifier with the original, split core.

Read more

Fluxo and Wildcard earn Austin Major spots

While it is understandable that you'd want to avoid the harder qualifier if you're Wildcard, it is a clear violation of the principle of the new rule, which was supposed to prevent teams like them or Liquid from being able to choose which region they could represent.

One could even argue Wildcard's invitation to the North American qualifier was in violation of another rule that is supposed to prevent teams from changing regional representation after qualifying in a similar way DRILLAS had:

Section "Regional Standing" of the Major supplemental rulebook

If a team is invited to participate in a stage of the event based on their Regional Standing, at least three out of the five members of the core roster (the five players indicated in the Regional Standing) must accept the invitation and the resulting roster must satisfy the original regional criteria, otherwise the invitation will be extended to the next-highest ranked roster in the region.

You could say Wildcard no longer "satisfied the original regional criteria" because the "resulting roster" submitted for the North American qualifier would have been placed in the European qualifier had it featured on the VRS at the time of the invitation.

However, it's also possible to interpret that rule in a different way: that Wildcard fulfilled the original criteria because the submitted roster with phzy would still be displayed on the Americas VRS, from which they received the invitation.

You can see then how that rule was not quite written with this situation in mind because the wording leaves space for ambiguity (what does "original regional criteria" mean?), which is likely why it was allowed in the end.

But it's clear as day that Wildcard's solution went against Valve's intent nonetheless, and the rule needs to be changed so that it can be upheld against manipulation and have any meaning.

What's more, it once again exposes a crucial mistake of the VRS model, which considers a one-time stand-in as part of a team's roster, something that is causing issues in more ways than one, as outlined in the previous column detailing Nexus' nightmarish and unreasonable five-month wait before they could use their new player.

Read more

Strike #3: How a faulty VRS mechanic prevented Nexus from making a change for four months