The organizers of ESL: Road to Rio are going to make changes to the rules regarding the order of communication between teams and coaches. ESL recently sent out a letter to participating teams asking for their opinion on whether coaches should be allowed to be present on the server during a match and communicate with players without restrictions. Such a decision will only be made if all teams vote in favor of it. If at least one team is against it, the coaches will be banned from the server during the match and will not be able to communicate directly with the players.
Many professional players criticized the voting procedure. In their opinion, decisions should not be made unanimously, but by simple majority, otherwise those teams that play without a coach will simply vote against it to deprive the opponents of the coach's support during the match. In addition, in the context of online tournaments, compliance with this rule will be difficult to monitor.
The last time such changes were introduced was in 2016, when Valve suggested limiting communication with coaches to warm-ups, time-outs and tactical pauses. Initially, these rules only applied to events sponsored by Valve, but were quickly adopted by other tournament organizers.
ESL: Road to Rio will begin this week in Europe and the Americas. The competition for CIS countries will start on April 30.
