The 3/5ths Compromise
This article is based on the current reliable information at the moment — but is obviously subject to change if additional information is announced.
A few minutes ago, it was confirmed that there would be region locks for the upcoming Open Qualifiers of The Kiev Major. This prevents teams situated in one region participating in another region, preventing the somewhat infamous (no pun intended at all here) case of Prodota heading to the Americas Qualifiers.
To me, this is a bandaid solution — one that will, in the long run, hurt the scene more than it fixes it. The two obvious issues that the region locks aim to solve are:
- Teams can’t play in two regions at the same time (dropping out or forfeiting depending on their performance in one).
- Teams can’t just play in adjoining regions’ qualifiers if they think the adjoining region is ‘easier’.
Valve could prevent issue #1 above by just forcing teams to choose a single region when signing up for the Open Qualifiers and locking all those players to that region. Technically teams could be 2 EU + 2 CIS and have 1 player cross the Belarus-Poland border twice a day to play without breaking the rules (most likely will just proxy though lmao).
The 2nd issue has two variants: teams that are travelling to play in another region, and teams who just play from their own region to the adjoining qualifiers (a la Prodota). The second variant is moot assuming the “3/5 rule” as mentioned is only a physical limitation (i.e. players have to physically be in the region they’re playing in). Teams already do move around within their region (in SEA teams travel to bootcamp and do qualifiers at places with reliable internet — for example Singapore), and if they have to move to the Argentina for 2 weeks — so what. This creates a massive advantage for those teams able to afford this.
If the 3/5 rule actually just refers to nationality (and not physical location) then:
- Some teams are made up of players which aren’t specifically part of any region. B)ears for example has two Jordanian players (who get similar ping to CIS and EU), a Korean (mostly SEA), a German (definitely EU) and a Malaysian (definitely SEA). They’ve played exactly 1 qualifier (DAC 2017 qualifiers) and did that in EU only because 1 member lives in Germany and they had access to bootcamp there — they could have chosen CIS if they wanted to.
- You get a weird dynamic for some teams. Some teams are very very excellent within their region and very poor outside it; and vice versa. Being forced to play within the region which you most commonly participate in is a massive limitation for the 2nd category of those teams.
Bear in mind that this is all announced ~1.5 weeks before the qualifiers are to begin (it’s not even officially announced from Valve/FACEIT via a public channel that most competitors might see). I’m unaware of teams who made decisions to go to other regions, but I do know of some teams who considered it (or were planning to, but didn’t because of the timing). In the past, Not Today traveled to the BeyondTheSummit to prepare for majors and play from there. Even if teams are permitted to travel, perhaps some teams are made up of Europeans and 2 of the far-Western Europeans decided to travel to Ukraine to play the CIS Open Qualifiers (if the 3/5 rule is a physical limitation then this isn’t permitted) due to their high latency, whilst 3 of their Central Europeans don’t mind.
Although the qualifier spot distribution has not confirmed, many tournaments have had a single spot for CIS and 2 for EU. This is due to a difference in perceived skill between the two regions. Allowing teams to shift between the two regions allows this situation to reach a dynamic equilibrium (no matter the number of spots per region); forcing region locks means that there might be situations where a very deserving team is blocked in one region, but could win the qualifier in another adjoining region.
In the previous Major Qualifiers, Prodota were playing with 110–140ms to North America, which isn’t totally incomparable to the latency that some of the South American teams would be playing in the previous regional qualifiers. Despite being called “The Americas Qualifiers” — all previous Valve AM qualifiers are hosted on US East servers, unless both teams agreed (which the North American teams never ever agreed to when playing against South American teams). There are additional facts:
- No Korean teams would choose China over SEA (despite getting better ping + packet loss to China for a long part of the night).
- No South American team would choose North America over South America. Some North American teams might consider traveling to play in South America.
- Unlike NA <-> SA, EU <-> CIS is a different setup to where most of the teams could very easily play in both regions with very low latency (and based on the tournament — and already many teams participate in fully online events or qualifiers). The only justification for a CIS qualifier is to ensure reasonable representation at the event by a team from the CIS region. If this is the case — then what about does Australia not have access to a qualifier, since their latency is also massive to the SEA servers? What about Africa, or the Middle East, or Japan? South Africa alone has ~300 teams that participate in local events, and on average less than one qualifier a year with international finals (MSI Beat It in 2014, WESG this year). They get 160–200ms to EU.
To me, the form of region locking that has been described is a very suboptimal decision in the short and long term; and much better alternatives exist in each case. If Valve care about regional representation — then all regions should get reasonable access to qualifiers. If Valve don’t care about regional representation, then there are many ways they could create rules that accomplish their goals without massive downsides. It just doesn’t seem very well thought through, and given the timing it seems like it’s being rushed into the qualifiers at the last second.
