Valorant vs CSGO rank comparison: Which rank should you be?

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.

Riot Games

There’s a total of 22 ranks in Valorant, with Gold 2 being the average rank in terms of player distribution.

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.

• Read more: Riot interview: Valorant devs on new skins, crossovers and lore

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.

dragonitor (Reddit)

Here’s how both CS:GO and Valorant ranks stack up against each other.

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.

• Read more: Top 20 highest earning Valorant pros of all time

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.