How Tournaments Work

VALIS tournaments run as bracket-style competitive events separate from ongoing Crucible play. Each year, three minor tournaments are held: open events with prize pools where teams compete for both placements and qualifying points. Once all three minors have completed, the top 8 point-earners across all minors face off in the yearly major.

Tournament teams are region-specific (NA or EU). Teams sign up per-week during qualifiers, and rosters can vary slightly between weeks within roster eligibility rules.

Each minor opens with five qualifier weeks. Teams sign up freshly each week, with no carryover from one week to the next. Each week runs a single-elimination bracket with random seeding among signed-up teams. Brackets that aren't a power of 2 get byes distributed randomly to fill the first round.

Captains (or staff) sign their team up for any open qualifier week. Sign-ups for a given week close when staff advances the tournament to that week's stage and generates the bracket. Once the bracket exists, the participating roster is set for that week.

Higher placements earn more Qualifier Points (QP):

QP is per-minor — it resets to 0 when the minor completes and a new minor opens. It exists only to seed the playoffs of the minor it was earned in.

After all five qualifier weeks, staff seeds the playoff bracket. Teams cannot sign up themselves; playoff seeding is a staff action driven by qualifier results.

A team must clear these eligibility gates to be seeded:

• Roster size gate — must have at least 7 approved members (7v7 format).
• Weeks gate — must have played in at least 3 of the 5 qualifier weeks.
• Roster gate — at least 75% of the team's current roster must have played in 2 or more qualifier weeks with this team (rounded up). The snapshot is per-team: weeks a player accumulated on a previous team don't transfer. Snapshots are taken when staff awards points for each completed week, so a player must have been on the roster at points-award time to count. Players who left the team don't count toward the 75% — only currently-rostered members do.

Among eligible teams, the top 8 by QP get seeded. Tie-break order when QP totals match:

• 1. Higher QP total wins
• 2. More qualifier weeks played wins
• 3. Older team (earlier creation date) wins
• 4. Alphabetical by team name (final fallback)

The seeded teams enter an 8-team double-elimination bracket. All 8 placements earn Tournament Points (TP), which accumulate across the year's three minors to determine major qualification:

After playoff points are awarded, the per-week qualifier roster snapshots are rolled up into a per-minor participation record (used to gate the major), and the week-level data is purged.

After the year's three minors complete, staff seeds the major. As with playoffs, teams cannot register themselves; this is a staff action driven by accumulated minor results.

A team must clear these eligibility gates to be seeded:

• Roster size gate — at least 7 approved members (7v7 format).
• Points gate — at least 1 Tournament Point, meaning the team placed top 8 in at least one minor.
• Roster gate — at least 50% of the team's current roster must have played in at least 1 minor playoff with this team (rounded up). Players who were only on the roster for qualifier weeks but not the minor playoffs don't count; only currently-rostered members count toward the percentage.

Among eligible teams, the top 8 by total TP get seeded. Tie-break order when TP totals match:

• 1. Higher TP total wins
• 2. More total tournaments played wins
• 3. Older team (earlier creation date) wins
• 4. Alphabetical by team name (final fallback)

The seeded teams enter an 8-team double-elimination bracket with the same structure as a minor playoff. The Grand Final crowns the regional season champion.

No Tournament Points are awarded for the major. The major is the championship event: by reaching it, qualifying teams have already used their season-long TP to earn a seat. The major decides bragging rights, prize money, and the champion title; afterward all season points reset for the next year.

After the major completes, the per-minor participation data is purged for that region. NA and EU are tracked and reset independently, so completing the NA major has no effect on EU participation records, and vice versa.

Every bracket match has its own built-in match chat, accessible directly from the live bracket on the tournament page. Click the chat icon on any match card to open it. No Discord setup, no DMs. Coordination happens right where the match lives.

• Who can post: only players on the current rosters of the two competing teams, plus VALIS staff. Spectators and other tournament participants cannot see the chat.
• When it opens: the moment both teams are seeded into the match. If one side is still waiting for an upstream win to feed in, the chat stays locked until the matchup is fully set.
• When it closes: once a winner is reported. Completed-match chats remain visible to participants as a read-only record, but no new messages can be posted.
• What you see: each message shows the poster's name, their team, and whether they're a captain or staff. It uses the same visual language as the rest of the site, so it's easy to tell who's saying what.
• Edit or delete: you can edit or delete your own messages while the match is active. Staff can delete any message for moderation. Edits show an "edited" marker.
• Need staff: a "Need Staff" button raises a help flag visible to staff anywhere in the bracket. Use it for disputes, opponent issues, or anything needing admin attention. Staff acknowledge by dismissing the flag.
• Report match scores here: when your tournament match finishes, both teams report the final score directly in the match chat. A captain from each team confirms the result, then staff records it from the chat and advances the bracket. This applies only to tournament matches. Crucible ladder matches continue to be reported through the existing Discord /match command.

Match chats are ephemeral by design. All chat history is automatically purged when points are awarded for the relevant stage: qualifier-week chats clear when QP is awarded, playoff chats clear when TP is awarded, and the major's chats clear when the major is marked completed. The chat is for in-the-moment coordination, not a permanent record.

Two separate point pools track tournament progression. They live independently and are used for different things:

• Qualifier Points (QP) — earned weekly during a minor's qualifier weeks. Resets to 0 when the minor completes. Used only to seed the playoffs of the minor that awarded them.
• Tournament Points (TP) — earned by placing top 8 in a minor's playoffs. Accumulates across all three minors of the year. Used to seed the yearly major.

Point values for each placement are shown inline in the Qualifier Weeks and Minor Playoffs sections above. Both point pools are tracked separately per region (NA and EU), so a team's NA QP and TP never count toward EU competitions or vice versa, because tournament teams are region-locked.

Before you can play, two things have to be in order: your VALIS identity has to match your console identity, and you have to be approved onto a team.

Your display name must match your Xbox or PlayStation gamertag exactly. Capitalization, spacing, and special characters all matter, because this is how staff and opponents verify you in matches. Update your VALIS name immediately when you change your gamertag. Name changes are allowed once every 14 days from your Account page; if you need a change sooner, contact staff at competitive@valis.gg or on our Discord.

Joining a team works by request. You browse to a team's page, hit "Request to Join," and the team captain (or staff) reviews. A few practical limits keep request queues sane:

• You can have up to 3 pending requests at a time across all teams. Submit a fourth and it gets blocked until one of the others is decided.
• If a captain rejects your request, there's a 5-minute cooldown before you can request again to the same team.
• The moment a captain approves you onto a team, your other pending requests in the same region are auto-rejected (you can only be on one team per region). Pending requests in the other region stay alive, so you can still get on a team there.
• If you submitted a create-team request with a region preference of "Both" and then get approved onto a team in one region, your create request gets demoted to the other region only. You don't have to resubmit; staff can still approve it for the remaining region.

If you change your mind on a pending request, you can cancel it from your Account page. If you want to leave a team, captains can leave too, but the team must always have at least one captain, so if you're the last one, promote someone else first.

• Tournament teams are region-locked — an NA team plays in NA tournaments only.
• Minimum roster size is 7 members for sign-up eligibility.
• Maximum roster is 20 members total, with up to 3 captains per team.
• Captains and staff can sign the team up for any open qualifier week.
• Only staff can seed teams into minor playoffs or the major — teams cannot self-register for those.
• Rosters only lock for teams actively registered in a qualifier week or playoff — teams not competing stay unlocked. Qualifier locks last just that weekend (reopen Monday); playoff locks hold for the whole bracket until it finishes.