Since 2016, the Valve CS:GO Majors take place twice a year and are the most important and prestiguous tournaments the CS:GO scene has to offer. And within the nature of it being of high importance, in parallel to eras being established, legacies being created and stars being crowned, we also have constant conversations about the way in which these championships are to be conducted to give the community as well as the teams and players the best possible viewing and playing experience.

Especially during this Major, we had many discussions ranging from timetable issues, to in-game bugs and hardware problems, but in the last few years, we had one topic of conversation that was ubiquitous and it still is: Major format discussions.

Generally speaking, you will always have some sort of format discussions, no matter which system is being put in place because some fanbases of certain teams will always feel hard done by. And in some sense, this is the nature of the game: it gives people something to talk about even without real action taking place.

When it comes to the CS:GO Majors, however, this is a large issue because of the inherent flaws of the way it is being done. In theory, you should have all the important ingredients to have the best possible tournament: it is backed by the game developer, it takes place twice a year and it has a $1,000,000 prizepool.

However, similar to the World Cup in football, this is not necessarily the case. Why? Because just like the FIFA World Cup, it is designed to have the best teams from the different regions of the world which rarely ever equates to having a starting field consisting of the best teams the game has to offer. There are many squads from regions like Europe and even North America that, from a competitive standpoint, would deserve to be at the Major more than the best teams from weaker regions.

To draw an analogy from football once more, it is often acknowledged that the European Championships of the past have been usually more competitive and harder to win than World Championships because the ratio of good and bad teams is considerably different between the two.

But, in my opinion, it is not necessarily wrong to construct it like this. It makes sense to want to have teams from all the regions present at the Major in order to create more excitement for the tournament, the game and the scene in general. It is always easier for people from a certain region to get into the ecosystem if they have someone to cheer for who represents them in a way.

A good example for this might be TyLoo because many people had problems with them constantly being a part of Majors in the past because they have not been able to be competitive at all — but now, this has changed for the better and TyLoo actually is a team that can close the gap between them and the rest of the Western teams more successfully; which in part is due to the fact that they were able to get these experiences in the past.

Another question that needs to be explored is: “how much do you want to reward prior Major performances?” — as we all know, Valve has made the decision to put huge stock into good showings in the previous Major when it comes to the following one — and while I think that this is not a concept that is inherently bad, it can backfire like in the case of Winstrike for this Major.

However, there is another discussion looming about the format and it actually has a lot of merit and concerns the way of seeding as soon as the action starts.

If you don’t have proper seeding, you run the risk of having the two best teams in the world square off against each other in Swiss Round #1 — like it was the case with Astralis and Natus Vincere at the beginning of the New Legends stage.

Simply put: you can not have both Astralis vs. Natus Vincere and Vega Squadron vs. Cloud9 as two of your opening matches in the Swiss Rounds without someone asking questions about the validity of the format.

Seeding like this does not promote the best teams to advance because the ‘luck of the draw’ influences the path certain teams can take more than it should.

By the way, arguments like “just make sure you win your games, if you want to win the Major, you have to be able to beat everybody” quickly lose their weight in situations like this. First of all, not everyone has the ambition to win the tournament, for them it is important to come as far as possible.

Second of all, when Astralis wins against MiBR with a 16–0 scoreline in Round 4 of the Swiss format and finds itself in a considerably worse position in the bracket, where they will at least have to exhibit some hidden strategies that they otherwise might not have had to fall back on until the Grand Final, it definitely has an impact on the progression of the tournament as a whole.

Adding this to the aforementioned problems due to the qualification setup divided by regions, the competitive integrity of the most important tournament in CS:GO becomes less and less consequential.

In my opinion, it is way more important to fix the seeding than it is to work out if the Swiss format is better than others or if we need to start with best-of-threes instead of best-of-ones. Obviously, these are still valid discussions to be had, but the topic of seeding needs to be at the forefront.

Of course, we, in the community, see an easy possible step to take in order to fix this: Valve needs to set up a system that ranks the participating teams according to their achievements in a suitable time frame and create a seeding with the help of that system.

That would already lead to a huge improvement without having to change the qualification process, messing with the different stages or doing other things.

This would require Valve, however, to adapt a more hands-on approach when it comes to tournaments aside from the Major, at least in order to determine which tournaments are more meaningful than others.

But even if they are not willing to do that right now, if voices from the community, the players and the team executives become louder and louder, Valve will need to do something about it.

And that is a good thing, because it’s not like it can’t be done and knowledgeable people wouldn’t be eager to help.