Its a giant competitive issue though.
Blast Bounty invites will be missed due to this missing coverage or rather.. gained from the crazy coverage of GIBAWAY and DraculaN.
You can argue both ways, but its wildly inconsistent.. you cant argue that.
Many of OG, Ecstatic, 9INE, HOTU, etc will now miss getting a Blast Bounty invite and some of them because they prioritised this bigger LAN over the smaller GIVEAWAY LAN which turned out to be a golden VRS lottery ticket for those who signed up for that one.
Its so inconsistent.
What HLTV can be blamed for in my opinion is not being transparent in any way about what kind of coverage events will get.
They must have some internal rules/guidelines for coverage and when teams are "forced" by VRS to make these investments in LAN participation it is not unfair to ask for some guidelines on what coverage events will get.
Right now its just a lottery from event to event.
Its not ok if it really is this random whether groups are covered or not. Its such a huge factor for trying to navigate whether its worth signing up for or not.
Some consistency is needed!
If the rule is that 32 team events will not get coverage while 24 team events will, then let it be publicly known so teams can navigate what events to prioritise.
Just some thoughts because I completely understand the frustration of the teams too while also understanding HLTV is also in a tough spot...
Once again its Valve to blame really, they are so uninvested in fixing the ecosystem.
All it would take is probably one dedicated employee who connected with the scene and evaluated quickly on the learnings and updated the rules along the way.. its so frustrating 😔
What a wild ride by the boys. From Top 56 in August to Top 24 today. We've put ourselves in a really good position going forward, but man it's so rough to miss the major by just a couple of rounds, especially since we missed invite to the last RMR by a couple of ranking points.