As reported by Dust2.us, Valve did not release the official VRS update on the first Monday of September as expected, affecting the invitations and seedings for some tournaments. The organizers of the ROMAN Imperium Cup VIII later stated that they were allowed to use the VRS rankings published by HLTV on September 7 to determine the seedings, but this handling has raised further questions.
Valve has not yet updated its September rankings on GitHub
The controversy began after the event organizers announced the group draw and the four teams that received direct qualification to the playoffs. VRS observer Finn (MischiefCS2) inquired about which ranking the organizers used and pointed out that if the World Basketball Tournament was using the lineup listed on the HLTV page, that lineup had no ranking in the latest official invitation ranking he cited, meaning the related seeding arrangements might violate Rule 3.4.3 of the tournament rules:
Roman Empire S8 Roster
Carlos Martins subsequently responded that the matter had been discussed privately between both parties, and the event organizers were authorized to use the VRS rankings from the HLTV website on September 7th. He explained that with less than two days remaining before the tournament began, this decision was made to avoid putting the participating teams in a difficult position. However, he did not clarify in this response who had granted the authorization.
This explanation did not quell the controversy. 100T team manager Graham Pitt responded by sharing the post, arguing that using this ranking is problematic. He pointed out that HLTV's version of the ranking includes points from events that have not yet concluded, whereas Valve has explicitly stopped using this calculation method. He questioned, "Who approved this?"
Dust2.us pointed out that as of the publication of its report on September 8, the first Monday of September had already passed on the U.S. West Coast, but Valve still had not released the update. Besides the ROMAN tournament, events such as Stake Ranked Episode 5 and the second season of the 1win private club had originally planned to distribute invitations based on this update.
In the history of VRS, there has never been a situation where a Valve mistake prevented tournament organizers from complying with Valve's tournament rules, so it remains to be seen how the entire venue will address this error. One possible solution proposed by MischiefCS2 is for Valve to directly revert this update to yesterday, though this too would be an unprecedented approach.
Many speculated that Valve took time off for the U.S. Labor Day holiday, yet last year Valve seemed to manage to make time to push out an update during this break.