Snappi accuses BLAST of 'manipulating world rankings' with its CS:GO circuit format

BLAST Premier Fall Groups 2023 finished on July 23, and the results impacted HLTV world rankings, the most prominent in the game. After the tournament organizer tweeted about the change, Snappi called it out for “manipulating the world rankings.”

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In the eyes of ENCE’s in-game leader, having tournaments such as BLAST Premier Fall Groups 2023 impact the world rankings is a negative thing for CS:GO competitive scene. Only partnered teams are able to participate in Fall or Spring Groups, so Snappy likely views it as a damaging influence on the scene.

As if manipulating the world rankings with a franchise league with 0 entries is a positive thing. Lol https://t.co/j7BLTTAqKn
— Marco Pfeiffer (@SnappiCSGO) July 25, 2023

Snappi also underlined how the last event before 2023’s summer break was Spring Finals in Washington. The entire Spring season had the same format as Fall, which began with Fall Groups in July.

In BLAST’s circuit, non-partnered teams are only allowed to qualify for Season Finals via BLAST Showdown. But, in order to qualify for Showdown, teams need to be directly invited by the organizer or win a second-tier online tournament with which BLAST is partnered. So, eventually, the road to participating in either season finals is just incredibly long, time-consuming, and exhausting.

This isn’t the first time Snappi has criticized this aspect of BLAST’s format before after ENCE had qualified for BLAST Premier Spring Showdown 2022. Back then, the European team had to come out victorious in two qualifying events to even get to the Spring Showdown, which was itself a qualifier for BLAST Premier Spring Final 2022.

After qualifying from the qualifier, we qualified through the next qualifier. Now we are in the partner team relegation qualifier, happy we didn't have to go through the qualifiers before the qualifiers like Mad Lions and Wolsung. GG to all the teams we played in the qualifiers.
— Marco Pfeiffer (@SnappiCSGO) March 27, 2022

The discussion about how broken the partnered teams system is in CS:GO has been going on for what feels like years now. Many fans and players, especially from non-partnered teams, believe there is an urgent need for many changes, including more open circuits for tier-two teams.

Luckily, there have already been reports about possible changes. In June, Richard Lewis reported that Valve demands BLAST and ESL to do away with their closed tournament systems for a healthier competitive circuit in CS2.