Having played their five necessary games to be able to field Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski at the StarLadder Budapest Major during the Birch Cup 2025, Team Liquid have dropped out of the Fragadelphia Blocktober Counter-Strike 2 tournament, and sparked some serious integrity concerns in the process.

This will be welcome news for the teams in attendance who are chasing the trophy so they can gain more lucrative Valve Regional Standings (VRS) points, but it has unfortunately also opened up conversations about competitive integrity and Valve’s own inaction when it comes to enforcing their own system.

Integrity Concerns

As highlighted by former Complexity manager Graham “messioso” Pitt, due to Counter-Strike 2 coverage site HLTV only covering the top 24 of the 48-team event, they had inadvertently created a competitive integrity issue due to the fact that only HLTV-covered games are eligible for VRS points.

Very interesting issue here. HLTV confirms that they won't cover the Blocktober groups, which is… fine.

However by not extending coverage they are artificially creating an integrity issue for @fragadelphia in operating their event.

Since the bracket with 24 teams has an… https://t.co/v0r3sHkFW4 pic.twitter.com/O6eNf8KkvR

— Graham Pitt (@messioso) September 29, 2025

This is because the tournaments format involves a playoff round that is contested by almost exclusively second place teams, meaning that it would be a positive thing if teams were to lose in the unranked group stage. In doing so, they would get themselves into that earlier round and therefore have one extra (and presumably easier) VRS ranked game to play.

As pointed out by messioso in follow up tweets, the blame for this isn’t on HLTV. Although they have been installed as the arbiters of the CS2 scene by Valve, they are still a business, and have the freedom to decide the extent to which they do or don’t cover any event.

messioso continued by explaining that it is instead Valve who should be called upon to enforce these elements, either by making it financially viable for HLTV to cover these events whilst also setting a minimum standard for that coverage, or by taking over the handling of the data that supports their VRS system themselves.

At the end of the day I think everyone is more than happy to focus on HLTV being the problem because it's easier than convincing themselves that Valve is ultimately the one who needs to enforce change, either by setting a minimum standard HLTV has to abide by as their data…

— Graham Pitt (@messioso) September 29, 2025

HLTV Address Issues With Rule Tweak

Fortunately, the integrity issue was quickly resolved. HLTV writer Danish “Nohte” Allana responded to the integrity concerns, saying that coverage had been reduced to the top 16 teams to avoid teams trying to lose in order to gain more points.

Update to this:

Coverage has been adjusted to begin from the Round of 16 to mitigate competitive integrity concerns, as pointed out by @messioso https://t.co/2ggDosmzVs

— Danish Allana (@Nohte) September 29, 2025

This change also brings coverage of the event in line with other recent events, such as the aforementioned Birch Cup or Draculan 2.