From 2025, tournament organizers are required to use Valve's rating for invites

Valve has announced a change in the system for qualifying for tournaments. Starting from 2025, teams will be able to get to the tournaments in only two ways: according to Valve ranking system or through open qualifiers.

According to the developers, this decision was made in order to make the professional scene more open and avoid situations where access to events depends on partnerships between teams and tournament operators.

The new selection system for the tournaments will still be finalized. At the moment, Valve has defined three points that reveal its core:

  1. Tournament organizers will no longer have unique business relationships or other conflicts of interest with teams that participate in their events.
  2. Invitations to all tournaments will use our ranking system, or otherwise be determined by open qualifiers.
  3. Any compensation for participating teams—prize pool or otherwise—will be made public and will be driven by objective criteria that can be inspected by the community.

There are currently two major partner leagues in the pro scene. 15 organizations cooperate with ESL: Astralis, BIG, Complexity, ENCE, Evil Geniuses, FaZe, FURIA, fnatic, G2, MOUZ, NAVI, NIP, Liquid, Vitality and Heroic. In turn, 12 clubs are BLAST partners, including Astralis, Vitality, NAVI, BIG, Liquid, OG, G2, Complexity, FaZe, Evil Geniuses, NIP and Heroic.

Valve's ranking system is based on three factors: the amount of prize money that the team won; the amount of prize money won by the opponent that the team bested, as well as the number of these opponents; results of personal matches. The current Valve rating, which is divided into Europe, America and Asia, can be found via the link.

Origin: store.steampowered.com