Valve introduces changes to CSGO’s RMR circuit guidelines

April 19, 2021 | 2 | 191|  Share |  Tweet

#Controversy #CSGO #CSGO Major #Valve

It has been years since Valve last touched on the matter of players banned from their sponsored Counter-Strike events. Finally, this changed last week, as Valve introduced changes to its guidelines affect the next Major and its qualifying process.

These new changes aren’t light, and will impact the game in the long-run. So, what does this new change brings, and what does it means for CSGO?

Valve’s new rule

Announced in a blog post, Valve announced that if a player received a VAC ban BEFORE they played in a Valve-sponsored tournament, and if this ban is five years old or older, then they would be eligible to play in Valve’s circuit once again.

Players can get banned by Steam’s VAC anti-cheating system if they join a protected server while using any cheating software. Profiles banned are left with a public message on them, showing that the user was banned and for how long the ban has been active.

Moreover, the RMR system is now much bigger than in the past before the pandemic. While in the past, Valve limited the Major system to include only qualifiers, Minors and the Major itself, now any tournament could turn out to be a Valve-sponsored event that counts as part of the qualification process for the Major.

This change immediately brings some players up to light. Brazilian 21-years-old “v$m” and Finnish 19-years-old “Jamppi” both were VAC banned in 2013 and 2015 respectively. Now, both can play on Valve tournaments once again.

V$M and Jamppi can return to Majors

Before the new guidelines went out, the two aforementioned players were still able to play on professional tournaments. V$M did great during his time in MiBR last year, and Jamppi quickly climbed the Finnish scene. Ãlso, ztr, a talent playing for Young Ninjas, is catching many eyes within the Swedish scene.

However, the ban affected these three players. V$M, while talented, would hold any team he was part of from reaching the big stage. Jamppi went as far as starting a lawsuit against Valve, and also ended his CSGO career, moving to VALORANT.

Once the new rules were announced, though, players sent positive reactions to it in social networks. While Jamppi will not be returning to CSGO as he already has a career in VALORANT, V$M is now a very interesting option for Brazilian teams.

As for ztr, he will be able to continue playing for Young Ninjas. Now, he knows that his efforts might led him to play on the biggest CSGO tournaments.

Overall, a total of 25 players were unbanned as result of the new guidelines.

The controversy

Of course, such change wouldn’t go unnoticed by critics. While many were happy for V$M and Jamppi, others criticized Valve’s decision. After all, we’re talking about a sensitive matter within esports: cheating.

Both players cheated in the past – while they were underage, and the Counter-Strike scene was a different beast back then. Still, is this enough reason for forgiving them? Shouldn’t VAC bans be definitive punishments?

Moreover, this raises the question if Valve should revisit iBuyPower’s case once again. The infamous match-fixing scandal from 2014 still is discussed today. Now, fans wonder if the players involved with the case shouldn’t also be unbanned from Valve’s circuit. After all, it has been over six years since the incident.

Nonetheless, the new rules have opened many debates for similar cases in CSGO. After all, this is the first time that Valve introduced rule changes that lifted bans from CSGO players. Who should and shouldn’t be unbanned is now a trending topic in the scene.

What does this mean for the future of CSGO?

Immediately, the biggest impact of this change will happen within the Brazilian CSGO scene, of course. V$M is now a valuable player to up-and-coming projects, and could be a key player in such team success.

In the long-run, however, there’s more to it. We are aware of players that stopped their CSGO careers very early as they found themselves in the same situation as V$M and Jamppi.

Previously, these players were hard picks for organizations. Getting such player in their ranks meant that not all pieces of their teams would be eligible to play in a Major. Still, in the past, teams like Cloud9 and ENCE brought banned players to their teams as the Major circuit wasn’t as a big, but with the new RMR format, it simply isn’t viable to bet on a banned player.

With the new RMR system, any tournament could be sponsored by Valve. Having a compromised player means that your team isn’t able to have a definitive five-starting-players lineup. Due to this, no matter how great the player might be, the setback brought by them just didn’t made sense.

Now, this change will allow players in such situation to keep working to climb up the rankings. After all, they will be aware that they have a second-chance at a fruitful career as long as they don’t repeat their mistakes from the long past. This should give a small boost to regions constantly losing players, such as North America.

Does Valve have more changes for CSGO underway?

CSGO is almost a ten-year-old game by now, and many rules for Valve’s Major circuit were established earlier on. This means that many guidelines aren’t updated as they should, and as cases such as Jamppi’s come to light touching on these older, untouched rules, Valve will have to do more and more changes.

Moreover, CSGO isn’t the sole game in its genre as it was almost ten years ago. With VALORANT and other games rising, CSGO is facing competition in a way it hadn’t seen before. Keeping guidelines updated in a way that rules doesn’t hurt the game growth is a must nowadays.

So, in order to keep up with everything CSGO and esports, make sure to follow us! You can check our latest articles here, and get the best predictions right here!

MJunior

The author

My name is Marcos, I have been following the CSGO pro scene since 2015 but really got into in following games and pro teams in 2016. Used to bet a lot, stopped a bit but never stopped following the esports scene. I'm a student right now so I got a lot of time to keep with it and discover new things.

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AngryFinlandMan

22 days ago

Please do your research. If you did 5 minutes of research on the Jamppi case, you would find out that he claims never to have cheated but simply bought the account for a friend when he was 14, now this could be looked at as a violation of steam ToS which states that you can’t sell accounts (Jamppi got financial compensation for buying the account for his friend) but because he was located in a country that is in the European Union, Steams ToS doesn’t apply for that as you can sell game accounts freely in EU

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MJunior

21 days ago

Reply to  AngryFinlandMan

Let’s set the record straight. I particularly avoided discussing Jamppi’s lawsuit in depth because it deserves a whole piece so it can fully debated, and there’s much that we only know due to third-parties, so instead of going further into it, I just noted that he was one of 25 players impacted by the new guidelines.
At the same time, Jamppi’s case is interesting to this article as his decision to move over to VALORANT was certainly influenced by the old guidelines that wouldn’t allow him to participate on Valve-sponsored events. He, along with v$m were perfect examples on how those rules impacted talented players until now. Never, in this article, I discussed the validity or cause of his lawsuit against Valve. This wasn’t the objective of the piece at all. Just for the record, Jamppi himself manifested on his social networks regarding the unban: https://twitter.com/Jamppicsgo/status/1382747578425561088
Following up, Jamppi had an account to his name at a certain point in time that he allegedly gave to a friend and said account later received a VAC ban. Once again, this article hadn’t the objective to judge who is telling the truth, or who have the reason in this case. We’re discussing the FACT that Jamppi was banned on the grounds that Valve found him linked to a VAC banned account and had him banned from their own events. Until we have a verdict or more public, officially released and verified information, that’s what we know for certain.
Furthermore, in order to not side with one of the parties involved, I decided that it would be best to not mention to quote his defense and instead simply state the facts: he was banned, and isn’t anymore after the new rules. Jamppi’s father has confirmed on Twitter that Valve consider his ban to be expired as it was applied over five years ago: https://twitter.com/olkkispetu/status/1383024143172526083
So going back to your comment, as far as this article goes, whether Jamppi cheater or not, it’s not what we’re discussing here. Valve considered him until now to be a banned player as his father’s tweet confirms. Thanks to the new guidelines, Valve now considers him a valid player able to participate on their tournaments.
Also, yes, I’m aware of certain leaked bits of the lawsuit process that point out that Valve agreed that Jamppi himself might not have cheated, but as there’s no verdict on the case, and this part of the lawsuit has not been officially acknowledged by both parties, I decided to avoid mentioning it. After all, Jamppi’s father tweet is, in my opinion, enough to show that Valve is unbanning him on the basis that his ban has expired.

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