VCL SA - What are they hiding? What went wrong?

Valorant Challangers League is the promotional tournament for all subregions to enter Ascension where the winner gets a spot into respective Franchise league and the South Asian version of Valorant Challengers League, seems to have had a lot of chaos and confusion.

The confusion started the day when Ominous(Analyst at Bleed Esports) released a report of possible South Asian VCL format along with the tentative dates and Nodwin had still not announced anything despite the other VCLs starting.

It felt like there was a gap between the audience, organizations and the organizers. To many people's surprise, Nodwin came up with a tweet announcing the open qualifiers for Valorant Challengers League South Asia on February 20th, 2023.

Underdog teams, being confused, registered themselves and started to battle their way to the main event and then came the first controversy.

Nodwin did not confirm the number of teams that make into the Main Event, and as Nodwin did not announce anything officially and hence it was assumed it would be the winner who will make it to the main event. But then suddenly, a third place matchup was held, hinting that the 2nd and 3rd place teams would make it out too, which was later confirmed when the #2 and #3 teams were called on a meeting and were informed that they were making it to the Main Event. 

Throughout the situation, Nodwin chose to be silent and let the teams announce themselves at the Main Event, the list of invited teams was the next confusion and it was assumed to be the top organizations of the region.

At first, Nodwin decided to have 12 teams into 2 groups with all games on LAN setup as their initial plan, but nothing was confirmed/official.

Sources close to ODM said that Nodwin tried to find an organization for the 9th invited spot 

but failed to find one and hence decided to change the team count to 10, where the lineup for the 12th slot would have been the #4 team from Open Qualifiers (Orgless5).

The criteria for the selection of the 10 orgs is still unknown, which led to another controversy, as Revenant, who were frontrunners to make it to the tournament were left out.

Sources close to ODM revealed that Revenant were not satisfied with a few clauses in the contract which they had to sign initially but when they decided to go with it they didn't have enough time to do so due to legal compliances. 

After a lot of confusion, chaos and controversies VCL SA has finally started, so far so good. Hopefully, Nodwin will be much more responsible and responsive to the community from now on.

Thanks for reading,

Peace ✌️

- CROSSFIRE