NA teams gain ground in latest Valve ranking update

Yesterday, Valve updated its World Ranking once again. Unlike the previous update, which shipped a new model that separated LAN and online play among other improvements, this update purely adds the most recent matches to the data pool. You can see Valve's ranking on their GitHub page.

Previous updates were wildly inconsistent with conventional thinking, placing 9z on top of the Americas ranking. While that has changed, it's not necessarily for the better. 9z are now second in the Americas ranking behind BESTIA, who actually sit below 9z on HLTV's ranking, the gold standard.

Complexity and FURIA, the two teams one would conventionally think on top of NA and SA respectively, do not have their skill reflected properly in the newest ranking, sitting sixth and sixteenth on the Americas ranking. Again, it must be stressed that the model that Valve uses to determine these rankings will certainly be improved upon in the coming months before the RMR Closed Qualifier invites and these rankings do not accurately reflect the strength of teams nor how the model will look come the RMR Closed Qualifier deadline.

The current top ten teams in the Americas region according to Valve are shared below.