Valve revises ranking formula, met with further criticism

The ranking which will have a significant impact on January's qualification for the first CS2 Major continues to be to be targeted by criticism.

On Wednesday Valve updated its CS:GO regional rankings for the first time since July 27 under a revised formula, which now weighs older matches less than before and considers the proportion of wins that occurred on LAN.

The ranking had been faced with criticism ever since its introduction last December and it has now come under fire again following Wednesday's change. This comes just two weeks after the developers announced their plans to put an end to franchised leagues and the intent for the ranking to be used to hand out invites to all tournaments starting from 2025. It has also been used for invites in qualifiers for the BLAST.tv Paris Major and is expected to again on the road to March's PGL CS2 Major Copenhagen.

With the ranking being largely based on prizemoney earned, it gives teams who compete online for decent sums against local or regional competition an edge over some of those who attend top LAN tournaments instead but haven't found enough success in them recently to reach well-rewarded placings. It also still utilizes results from show matches with prizemoney on the line, a key point of criticism from previous versions.

Due to their poor record dating back to the BLAST.tv Paris Major FURIA sit in 21st place of the Americas ranking behind a plethora of teams who only compete regionally, including their own academy team. Complexity are now placed 15th behind the likes of Wildcard and Forsaken.

In Asia, The MongolZ are currently only the third-best team despite their qualification for the group stage of IEM Cologne and wins over Into the Breach and FURIA, due to their inactivity in other tournaments. Ahead of the Mongolian side sit TRAFFIC Tashkent, an Uzbek squad that has only won three matches in the past three months, two of which came against a local opponent, STORM, whose only matches on record are versus TRAFFIC Tashkent.

The European side, which now more closely matches the HLTV and ESL rankings compared to the other two regions, has seen some significant changes following the conclusion of IEM Cologne, which has most notably caused G2 to jump 15 places to No. 2 and Natus Vincere 20 spots to No. 11 in Valve's ranking.

Danish side Espionage also made one of the biggest leaps, now sitting in 17th place of the European ranking after amassing a 7-1 record in the CCT Central Europe Series 7 and Pinnacle Cup 5 since the July 27th update, in which they were ranked 50th.

The full standings can be found below:

Europe
Americas
Asia