* but it's impossible to tell since Riot/NerdStreet have horrible communication with zero public-facing points of contact. Scroll to the bold if you don't care to hear me vent about this.
Both VLR and Liquipedia use the points scaling for North America that are in the rulebook (on page 29) for NA VCT, which makes perfect, reasonable sense. (Except for the bit where 2nd place receives points, the rulebook pretends only 1st place went to Masters for some reason) You know who doesn't? Riot. Their official overall points standings use a completely different scaling which is grouped much tighter than in the rulebook. Additionally, 100 Thieves inexplicably has 36 points instead of 35 which must be a typo.
To find another reference for Riot's own numbers (which is hilarious to need to do), I skimmed through broadcast VODs and searched the ValorantEsports twitters and found zero specifics regarding circuit points. Luckily, I did find an article from Dot Esports which corroborated the numbers on the official website (except the 100 Thieves typo). Great job Riot and Nerd Street for ignoring your own rulebook and never communicating NA circuit points (unlike every other region afaik).
Now knowing that the rulebook isn't to be trusted, I ran the numbers based upon the Dot Esports article. In last year's VCT, and in this year's EMEA circuit points, the points for each placement scaled up as the splits progressed to reward recent performance. However, pretending that they don't, I gave every team that qualified for VCT Stage 2 35 points (reward for last place in Stage 1) and looked at the *bare minimum* rankings. Once again having to assume since Riot does not communicate these things at the onset of the season, if there are only eight LCQ spots, both Version1 and Knights have no way of reaching the top 10 needed for 3rd-10th. Meanwhile, Ghost and TSM have plenty of time to make their way through to top 10.
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