NRG earned more VRS points for winning the Fragville 2025 tournament with a $10,000 prize pool than M80 did for reaching the playoffs at BLAST Open Fall 2025. This unexpected outcome of Valve’s ranking system sparked a wave of criticism from players and coaches.
What is VRS?
To players, VRS isn’t just numbers on a chart — it decides who gets to fight at a Major. The system, designed by Valve to distribute qualification points, has been under fire for months. The case of NRG and M80 has now become the perfect example of why: somehow, winning a small Tier-2 LAN ended up being worth more than surviving the playoff stage at a Tier-1 arena event.
Competitive Injustice
At Fragville 2025 in Knoxville, a $10,000 LAN with 39 teams, NRG beat Ninjas in Pyjamas 3:1 in the final, pocketed $5,500, and shot up the VRS ladder straight into the third Major stage invite zone — side by side with FURIA. For a weekend LAN, the points felt like a jackpot.
M80, meanwhile, had just played at BLAST Open Fall 2025 in London, a $330,000 spectacle with giants like G2, Vitality, and MOUZ. They battled through to the 5th–6th spot in the playoffs and earned $20,000, yet their VRS reward was still smaller than NRG’s from Fragville.
For pros, the message was clear: a win at a “joke LAN” can be more valuable than a hard-fought run under the lights of a Tier-1 stage. And that’s what set the scene buzzing — not just the math, but the sense that prestige and difficulty no longer matter.
Voices from the Scene
Players and coaches voiced their frustration.
- Rodrigo “biguzera” Bittencourt from paiN didn’t hide his frustration, calling it “one of the strangest in years” and pointing out that a win at a $5,000 event can be worth more than a Major semifinal run.
- Coach Luis “peacemaker” Tadeu took a more pragmatic view. He admitted the flaws of the system but argued that smaller events are often the only way for teams outside the top 15–20 to stay alive in the VRS race: “Today it’s the only path for squads outside the top 15–20 to dream of a Major spot and keep a roster alive.”
- For M80’s Mason “Lake” Sanderson, the whole thing bordered on absurd. His team played in London on a Tier-1 stage against the world’s best, yet according to VRS math it would have been smarter to chase a $10k LAN: “The scene of VRS rn is so interesting… there’s an odd world where we can start declining online matches with a 1m+ prize pool with hundreds of thousands watching, to go to a FRAG 10k tourny and it be better off for our team because LAN wins don’t carry any weight on who you play.”
Conclusion
The outcome of Fragville 2025 underlines just how strongly Tier-2 LANs can influence the current VRS landscape. NRG’s win not only surpassed M80’s Tier-1 playoff run in points but also lifted them directly into the third Major stage invite zone alongside FURIA, while even runner-up NIP gained enough to move into Major contention. This highlights a systemic imbalance: victories at smaller events are shaping the path to the biggest tournaments more than results at elite competitions, raising urgent questions about the fairness and credibility of Valve’s ranking system ahead of future Majors.
