An in-depth comparison of Valorant and CS:GO’s Competitive ranks reveals exactly where you should be in Future Earth, providing you’ve played a Counter-Strike to acquire a rank.
It’s no secret that Valorant and CS:GO share some resemblance to one another. Aside from the high-fidelity gameplay, weapon mechanics and game mode similarities, Riot have created a tactical first-person shooter that puts competitive integrity at the forefront of its priorities.
And it’s that integrity that is reflected in a badge which players wear with pride — their Competitive rank. Players have been grinding in Future Earth since Competitive was first introduced, all in a bid to reach the coveted Radiant rank.
Act-based seasons offer players a unique opportunity to continually seek improvement, and offer the ability to wear their rank with pride. But given how Counter-Strike and Valorant share similar qualities, how do both titles’ Competitive ranks weigh up against each other? Let’s find out.
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dexerto-assets-production-cbbdf288/uploads/2020/08/14054910/valorant-ranks-changing-again.jpg)
Is Radiant the new Global Elite?
For starters, there are 18 individual ranks in CS:GO, compared with 22 ranks in Valorant. So it’s worth noting that a direct comparison is simply not possible. What is possible, however, is to see how much of the player base is beneath a specific rank, to roughly gauge how both sets of ranks compare.
It’s also worth noting that Valorant is currently region-locked, meaning that your rank is local to the region you play in. Whereas Counter-Strike’s ranking system is reflective of its global playerbase.
Based on a report by Esports Tales which detailed both the distribution and the percentile of players relative to their rank, Redditor ‘dragonitor’ drafted a comparison using similarly sourced data from CS:GO.
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dexerto-assets-production-cbbdf288/uploads/2020/09/06153016/valorant-csgo-ranks.png)
Based on their estimations, Gold Nova 2 in CS:GO is the equivalent to Gold 1 in Valorant — both of which mark the ‘average rank’ for each title.
Similarly, both Distinguished Master Guardian and Diamond 1 mean that you’re in the top 10% of players in the world/your region.
One caveat to the above, however, is that the Valorant data was obtained via Blitz. This data is likely top-heavy and therefore, probably biased to the higher ranks. Until Riot removes the mask covering the accessible player data — such as Elo — player-sourced data from sites such as Blitz is the best bet.
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