The VRS system appears to be slowly chugging along nicely so I thought it would be interesting to look at a perspective on how its changed particularly the small to medium sized LAN scene. A lot of people still seem to long for the perhaps more intense RMR feel, and part of me understands that longing very well. By comparison, the VRS cutoff date maybe doesn’t have the same punch, but what it does seem to have done is allow smaller tournaments to suddenly have an impact and with that comes a whole lot of interesting consequences. So let’s dive in and see what the smaller LAN circuit looks like!
As per usual, let’s take a walk down memory lane to see if we can try and remember what it might mean to go to a LAN back in the dawn of time, when CSGO was just starting. The first LAN I attended as a commentator was called “The Blast”, which interestingly has nothing to do with the modern day “Blast” tournaments. I was paid 500 Danish kroner and I slept on the floor on a small foam rollout ‘matress’ with the rest of the attendees. It was great fun!
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Borrowing from Liquidpedia, these are the teams that attended:
Some of these teams were well known orgs either from CS 1.6 or CS:Source and others were just hobby teams who got a chance to see if they could find success against the big dogs. In other words, seeing teams like ‘Western Wolves’ and ‘Copenhagen Wolves’ an ‘Fnatic’ at the top of the bracket towards the end of the tournament, wasn’t really much of a surprise. But for everyone else there, this was an amazing opportunity to learn what it’s like to play against people who are simply better. This kind experience is incredibly valuable to an up-and-coming player or team. It’s a well known concept that you will “learn more from failure” and although none of us like hearing that, it’s absolutely true. So getting your head caved in by a young dev1ce might not be fun, but it really shows you how much work you need to do to catch up.
A similar style of LAN back then was the “Copenhagen Games” that would feature all of the top teams, but also an absolutely onslaught of local Danish teams nobody outside of Denmark would know. To prove im not lying, here is a screenshot of the 2014 group stage:
Now admittedly, Copenhagen Games wasn’t exactly a small LAN in terms of teams attending, but for the purpose of the point im trying to make, its good to add because it once again gave a massive opportunity for people of little to no fame, to actually play top level teams.
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At some point this style of tournament fell out of favour and the more professionalized and borderline franchised league systems took over where partnered teams were more or less pre-booked for the big tournaments. This created a very unfortunate class system of teams where that once readily available experience was now essentially impossible to come by. Unless you were one of the teams who could draw in the views and had some leverage to get invited to tournaments, you’d likely never get to play against any of the top dogs.
The VRS world however, while perhaps not perfect, has somehow managed to re-introduce this in an interesting way. The first sign that this was happening was through the world of online Counter-Strike and particularly through places like CCT and similar tournaments. Initially these circuits became a battleground for Tier 2 and 3 teams to fight for VRS points, but it wasn’t long before higher level teams started to dip in to get themselves points too. This is how Parivision originally farmed enough points to get the LAN invites as an example.
After this LANs like Draculan and a few others also started seeing higher level teams somewhat desperately signing up, sometimes very last minute, to attempt to farm the much needed VRS. This once again opened the link between world class teams and players and the local teams. The difference in 2026 is that your average local team is a much higher level team than they ever were back in 2014. So the chances for upsets are a lot higher than they used to be. But the real success in my opinion is even having possible access to these teams to begin with.
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The Parken Challenger tournaments has somewhat successfully managed to improve on this stuff by also granting players a look and feel into what it might be like to play a tier 1 tournament in sense of what the media surrounding the event might feel like, while also drawing in names like 100T to play and ultimately win Season 6 as an example. Now you might say that 100T aren’t topping the global rankings right this minute, and thats fair. But imagine for a moment that you’re one of the much lower level players getting a chance to fight dev1ce and Rain on a server, on LAN. For a lot of people, this might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. For a few, it will be an experience so exciting you end up fighting hard enough to get back and do it over and over and ultimately make a career out of it.
In my opinion there are many more interesting steps that could be taken to improve the quality and coverage of these LANs, but the fact that they finally exist again and are able to build the bridge between the tier 1 world and everything else is a big victory for the world of CS. Ideally we would get more interviews or player profiles of some of these relatively unknown players, because it makes for great historical content when some of these people eventually go on to make careers for themselves later.
A natural challenge for these events is that because of the mad volume of Counter-Strike that is happening any given week throughout the year, it can be hard to get the viewership to support bigger sponsorships, but perhaps this problem can also be helped if the events keep building their own reputations and gather their own dedicated fanbases. For me, watching a LAN with a fair few unknown teams means you will likely be watching some less-than-perfect CS, but the upside is that you get a flavour of CS that doesn’t feel like the same thing you saw last event, and the one before that. Sometimes getting into a tournament and asking if B8 have finally found consistency or if Falcons have finally fixed their playoff problems, can feel a bit like groundhog day. The odd tier 2 LAN helps to break up the flow of the year a bit and I think if we as a community invest our time into watching them, we will ultimately be helping to make a healthier community for ourselves.
Ultimately I still think we are very early on in the VRS world so its hard to know how all of this will play out even a few years from now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we will see a new wave of players who play their way through these tournaments and find themselves scouted in a way that sadly through a lot of CSGO wasn’t possible in the same way.
At the end of the day, im curious how you guys feel about this, would you prefer VRS return, or would you rather have the RMRs back as a qualification method?
