ESL Vice President responds to players' dissatisfaction with RMR qualifiers dates

ESL SVP Product Ulrich Schulze has taken to Twitter to explain why the company has scheduled the qualifiers for the upcoming RMR tournaments the day after the end of the summer break. Such a decision by ESL caused dissatisfaction among some professional players, however, according to the manager, there was no other choice.

Schulze noticed that the tournament calendar at the start of the second half of the year did not leave ESL with any other options other than an early start of the qualifiers.

After the break, there are 7 weeks of tournaments - 2 with BLAST à 12 teams (many of them not in OQ), 5 with EPL a 24 teams (many of them in OQ). The RMR starts after that, which means the choice of dates is limited. We already scheduled some OQ in EPL weeks without NA teams.

The second half of the year is always incredibly dense, which is one of the reasons we championed an earlier break for early 2023 – which was also discussed a lot, but it shows again that there are two sides to each coin and perfect solutions rarely exist.

The ESL VP emphasized that the summer break is a break specifically from tournaments. He went on to say that the players themselves should decide how to manage their free time.

The break is a tournament break, meaning inside it there are no tournaments, outside of it there can be tournaments. There used to be different versions in the past with some weeks being open to "less important" online matches and qualifiers, but it was messy to navigate because who says what is important and what is not? So the only practical solution is to define it as a tournament break, and players choose how to use the tournament free weeks. Can there be a discussion about it having to be longer? Certainly, but this also has downsides.

Finally, we had to wait with the announcement until after IEM Cologne, which allowed us to seed EPL with an updated ranking and based on those groups align and schedule both the groups as well as the affected qualifiers. That is why it wasn't announced sooner.

According to the ESL press release published the day before, the qualifying tournaments for the RMRs will be held from August 15 to September 5 in seven regions. More information can be found on our website via this link.

Origin: twitter.com