ESL Cologne 2016 is the next $1 Million Major!

Esl One Cologne 2016: Qualifier & Legends

The top eight of the MLG Columbus Major (NIP;Fnatic;CLG;Virtus.Pro;Astralis;Team Liquid;NaVi and the major winner Luminosity Gaming) will automaticly qualify for the Esl One Cologne 2016 Major. The other eight spots are for the team, which qualify through the offline qualifiers. In order to get to the offline qualifiers, teams need to go through a big online qualifier system.

The Qualifiers(also called “minors) will be held by different organisations, here is a list of them:

European Minor: Dreamhack

CIS Minor: Starladder

Asian Minor: PGL

American Minor: no information on who hosts the american minor yet.

The Lanxess arena:

The Major will be hold in the Lanxess arena in Cologne, Germany, which can take up to 20 000 people at max. The Lanxess arena is not only popular for the ESL One Cologne, which is held there ever year, but also popular for the “Videodays” which is an big Youtube event, where the most famous youtubers in Germany (and some other countries aswell) meet their fans and do live performances on stage.

The OCE Scene is “left out”: 

According to various players from the oceanic cs:go pro scene, they weren’t informed on time that the Asian minor will be  hosted in korea, which would mean they had to play with high pings or had to travel closer to korea for the qualifier. 

The host of the Asian Minor PGL released a statement on Reddit stating that: 

We did make mistakes on how we approached certain aspects of the qualifiers. However, the feedback received isn’t falling on deaf ears and all the issues brought to our attention will be taken into account for the next Asia Minor.

With this kind of issue the only OCE team having a chance to qualify for the next Major is going to be Renegades, who currently live in north america and can participate in the american qualifiers because of that. 

But not only the OCE Scene is left out also the brasilian scene will be forced to play in the north american qualifiers, which basically means a 70+ Ping for them in each game and that is a big disadvantage. 

Fallen stated the following on his twitter, regarding to this issue: 

Any info on South America receiving a proper Minor qualification? Last time they had to play in US servers (online).. It would be awesome