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.

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.

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.