Valve's cutoff date for Regional Major Rankings leaves oNe out to dry
Following Valve's most recent blog post there was understandably a great deal of confusion and in some cases, outrage, at how CS:GO's developer handled sticker allocation, RMR rankings from 2020, and how those rankings carried into 2021.
Arguably, the team that felt most slighted was oNe, who found themselves one place outside of Contender status, just behind a Gen.G roster that currently consists only of Timothy "autimatic" Ta. Three members of the Gen.G CS:GO roster that competed for RMR points in 2020, Damian "daps" Steele, Sam "s0m" Oh, and Kenneth "koosta" Suen, have since retired from CS:GO and left for VALORANT. Gen.G's fourth member, Hansel "BnTeT" Ferdinand, and their coach, Chris "Elmapuddy" Tebbit, are now on different teams, EXTREMUM and Cloud9, respectively.
In spite of that, Gen.G have not had their point total adjusted to reflect their roster changes because they never submitted another roster following 2020's second RMR event, which was cs_summit 6. As a result of that technicality Gen.G never received deductions on their 2020 RMR point total and were rewarded with 100 RMR 2021 points and sticker revenue from Valve. Other organizations that stand to reap revenue benefits without a currently active team include 100 Thieves and BOOM. The latter will share a portion of the revenue with their former roster.
Conversely, oNe have lost just Bruno "b4rtiN" Câmara and their coach, Olavo "cky" Napoleão, to the new Brazilian GODSENT project and their players have remained loyal to Valve and CS:GO in the wake of VALORANT's release. Despite that, they will not be receiving any revenue and were awarded 0 RMR 2021 points. Many of oNe's players and staff have made it clear that they don't think that it is fair that Valve failed to assess Gen.G with roster deductions in light of the current state of Gen.G's roster. However, Dust2.us contributors that have been working with the RMR system can see where Valve is coming from.
Dust2.us's own Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore and Collin "CarbonDogma" Davis weighed in on the consequences of the blog post as our resident experts on the subject. The pair have been largely responsible for maintaining the RMR standings and information pages on Liquipedia and have been sorting through Valve's policies and procedures for the RMR system since the beginning of the scene's shift to an online format due to COVID-19.
Mnmzzz noted that the roster changes are, by Valve's definition, determined by changes that happen between two RMR events. So with that context the decision to enforce the cutoff based off of roster changes following the second RMR event, cs_summit 6, makes sense. Since the deductions are enforced by changes in the lineup used when registering for an event, the lack of a fourth RMR event or the Major following IEM New York makes a cutoff between cs_summit 6 and IEM New York, like the roster lock for IEM New York on September 10th, the latest possible option.
CarbonDogma agreed, noting that this system, though not ideal for oNe, is better than arbitrarily selecting a date to say that some deductions count while others do not with no logic or written procedure to back it up. He also noted that the lack of a predetermined formal roster lock date contributes to the discontent, since Valve are now retroactively choosing a cutoff nearly seven months later, rather than abiding by a decision made long in advance that teams could have been aware of.
The final 2020 RMR Standings are:
| Qualification Status | 2020 RMR Points | 2021 RMR Points | |
 Evil Geniuses |
Legend | 5788 | 600 |
 100 Thieves |
Legend | 5669 | 480 |
 FURIA |
Legend | 5375 | 480 |
| Liquid |
Challenger | 4795 | 240 |
| GenG |
Contender | 3475 | 80 |
| oNe |
N/A | 3031 | 0 |
| Cloud9 |
N/A | 2900 | 0 |
| Triumph |
N/A | 2817.6 | 0 |
The full 2020 RMR standings can be found here.
oNe are currently bootcamping in Europe in anticipation of the IEM Katowice 2021 Play-In that will take place on February 16-17th.
