Valve has published a plan and rules stating that starting in 2025, they will take full control of all eSports events in Counter-Strike 2. These rules will be important for both active players and bettors. CS2 is still the most popular game on gg bet and other betting platforms. That is why playing there ensures successful betting on your favorite eSports disciplines.
Main Rules
Starting from 2025, the tournaments will be divided into licensed (for which you need to get a license from Valve), which will be ranked, and unlicensed (requires a simplified license). All other tournaments, even with a huge prize fund and famous participants, will not be taken into account.
The number of teams invited to the tournament must be 1.5 times greater than the number of participants in the main event. For example, for a tournament of 16 teams, 24 teams are invited, the 8 highest in the rating go to the main part of the tournament, and the 16 play for 8 places in the closed qualification. For every 8 teams in the main tournament, the organizers can invite 2 teams through direct invitations, but cannot invite anyone. The core of such a team had to be in the top 8 of the world or had to win the top 1 tournament in the last 12 months. This is done so that during reshuffles, top players do not lose the opportunity to enter top tournaments due to elimination from the rating. In addition, the invited teams cannot immediately enter the main tournament, they have to play a closed qualification and have the lowest seed.
All rating tournaments must be announced in advance (from three months to two years). The prize pool of unranked tournaments must not exceed $100,000, and the tournament operator cannot hold such tournaments for more than $250,000 in prize money per year. For non-rated tournaments, the organizer can distribute invitations at his own discretion and conduct them according to the system convenient for him.
Benefits Of New Rules
The following advantages of Valve’s new rules can be recognized:
- All teams will play by the same rules, and mass invites of popular teams that play poorly but generate views will disappear.
- The chaos and layering of large tournaments will stop. The schedule will be known in advance (for the top tournaments in two years), and tournaments will be evenly distributed throughout the year.
- The rating will not be given for invitational farm tournaments held by bookmakers solely for the sake of betting on games. These tournaments will be able to be held in the future, but they will have no weight in the community.
- Tournaments will receive additional protection against unfair play because teams will be afraid of losing the all-important rating.
- There remains the potential to obtain a license and hold regional ranking tournaments to promote the local scene and allow smaller teams to advance in the global rankings.
Weak Points Of New Rules
- It is unclear how many open qualifiers there will be for the tournaments. Valve has not introduced any clear quotas for uninvited teams or closed qualifiers, so it is likely that the organizers will do a minimum of such qualifiers. A vicious cycle may occur where a team cannot enter a ranked tournament because it is too low in the ranking and cannot rise higher because the rating can be obtained only at the rating tournament.
- The new system actually kills the HLTV rating, completely losing its value (now Valve calculates its rating based on the matches that get on HLTV). This is a minus for the industry because the HLTV rating has become the backbone of the entire professional CS for many years.
- Unranked tournaments, even with good prizes, will turn into a solid swamp of fake matches, because teams will not be afraid of losing their rating and, because of this, not getting into big tournaments. Everyone will play seriously only at ranked tournaments.
Valve is very serious about regulating the CS2 scene, and that’s a good sign. We see that the game’s developer is planning years, maybe even decades ahead, and trying to eliminate the unfair advantages that arose as a result of the scene’s organic development and the emergence of local monopolies both among the organizers and among the teams.
Valve destroyed the possibility of holding franchise leagues, opened equal opportunities to everyone, and tried to streamline the system of conducting, the schedule of tournaments, and the level of their participants. On the other hand, there are still big questions about the extent to which the new system will contribute to the development of young teams that are currently outside the TOP-50 of the world rankings.