Valve has announced extensive changes to the Major system in Dota 2, replacing it with a "more organic approach" that moves tournaments to third party organizers, according to a news release from the publisher.

The current system, focused around Major tournaments run by Valve, will be abolished.

"For the next year we will be taking a more organic approach to growing the competitive ecosystem, working more closely with third-party tournaments," Valve announced. "Instead of the previous Major system, we will be selecting many third-party tournaments to directly sponsor."

These sponsored third-party tournaments have two tiers associated with them—Majors and Minors.

"Majors must have a minimum prize pool of $500k, and will receive an additional $500k towards the prize pool from us. Minors must have a minimum prize pool of $150k, and will receive an additional $150k towards their prize pool," said the release.

Stipulations for the new Major and Minor events include having a qualifier from each of the six major regions, cited as North America, South America, SouthEast Asia, China, Europe, and CIS, as well as a culminating LAN finals.

Qualifying for the International 2018 has completely changed as well, with qualifying points being earned only from these tournaments, and being ascribed to individual players as well as teams. The points will directly correlate to the prize pool value of the tournament, and will change based on how close they are to The International.

In that same statement, Valve also stipulated that "only the top 3 point earners on a team will contribute towards a team’s effective total Qualifying Points."

The statement from Valve comes with general community praise, mostly outlining excitement over the revitalization of third-party tournaments.

This, plus embedding 3rd party event streams directly in the @dota2 client =



Perfect formula to make 3rd party tournaments great again https://t.co/LCuNnvUBpn — David Gorman (@LDeeep) July 3, 2017

Well this certainly looks like a promising change! https://t.co/mrQDrKM1Xi — Sheever (@SheeverGaming) July 3, 2017

Huge fan of most of these Dota 2 tournament ecosystem changes. Specifically Majors going to 3rd party organizers. — Kyle Bautista (@coL_Beef) July 3, 2017

Gabriel Zoltan-Johan is a news editor at theScore esports and the head analyst for the University of Toronto League of Legends team. His (public) musings can be found on his Twitter.