Muenster offers thoughts on Fragadelphia going international: "It's either adapt or die"

The list of teams set to attend Fragadelphia Blocktober later this year has drawn a massive amount of attention, as it features several top 30 and European teams. What was once considered a primarily North American event will only field 12 NA teams out of a total of 32 teams.

This massive increase in interest in the event is a result of the LAN being the final event before invites for the StarLadder Budapest Major are released, but the changes have drawn some criticism, which has been responded to by Joseph "muenster" Lima, the Media Lead & Photographer for Fragadelphia.

"The previous Frag model isn't sustainable in the current VRS ecosystem. It's either adapt or die and region locking Frag events is the same as committing suicide as a TO as things are right now.," Muenster wrote on X. In his lengthy post, he went on to say that NA teams, even top ones like NRG, Complexity, or M80, aren't big enough viewership draws without EU teams to play against.

He went on to say that the VRS ecosystem allows Fragadelphia and other TOs to attract more competitions to North America: "Recent Frag events have been showing EU teams that CS doesn't only need to be focused in Europe anymore. Suddenly they're realizing that maybe there's a reason for them to cross the pond. This is what everyone has been wanting for years and it's finally happening because of Frag. "

Muenster's comments about the future of FRAG follow Complexity general manager Graham "messioso" Pitt's own thoughts about the changing landscape and FRAG, with messioso focusing on how the need to attend LANs like Fragadelphia to qualify to the Major could increase the costs of running a Counter-Strike team for organizations, potentially pushing smaller organizations out of the scene and overall damage the scene as a result.