Valve cancels fourth place deciders mid tournament

Valve faces mid-tournament controversy as they canceled the fourth-place deciders originally used to determine progression to the Elimination Stage. Earlier in this RMR, during the Europe RMR A, fourth-place deciders were held, instead of using the VRS, like at the PGL Copenhagen Major, after Perfect World secured Valve's approval, to ensure fairness for the competing teams.

However, this decision conflicted with Valve's own guidelines, and as reported by HLTV, the game’s developers requested to revise it. Subsequently, Valve revised the rules mid-tournament, canceling the fourth-place deciders and relying on VRS to decide which teams advance.

A silver lining among this upheaval is that the changes will likely not impact RMR A, as all higher-seeded teams successfully qualified for the Elimination Stage.

Perfect World provided a statement to the affected team, which reads as follows:

"It was previously communicated that the Europe A and B RMRs would play a tiebreaker to decide the 4th and 5th place advancement spots which determined Opening and Elimination stage placements at the Major.
This tiebreaker and its corresponding format of how teams advance from the RMRs has been seen in past Majors before, and its execution in Shanghai was discussed and confirmed with Valve ahead of time. Today Valve requested us to cancel this tiebreaker going forward, facilitating a full transition to the VRS system for 2024 and onwards.
Additional to this change, for sorting teams qualifying from the Europe RMRs into the Major itself: an update to the Valve Regional Standings will come after the conclusion of the RMRs, and all qualifying teams, including those who had already completed the Europe A RMR, will be sorted before the Shanghai Major solely based on the VRS instead."