CS:GO Matchmaking undergoes rank recalibration

In the newest update to CS:GO, you might see your skill rank doesn't appear. In a new blog post, Valve announced that matchmaking ranks were in need of some recalibration. Now, everybody's skill rank is hidden until they win their next competitive game. This is similar to when players are absent from the game for a while, they lose their rank and must win a game before receiving their new rank.

In the release notes for this patch, Valve says that this rank recalibration ships alongside "multiple changes to the competitive matchmaking algorithm", which hopefully will make your next competitive game exactly that, more competitive.

North American fans along with our Oceanic brothers will be happy with this update, as it might bring an end to an issue they have been facing for a while now, uneven rank distribution. While the ranks in Europe, Asia, and South America follow a bell pattern, NA and Oceanic ranks are heavily skewed towards the bottom end of the graph. This means players who play at a level much higher than the average silver are matched versus actual silver-leveled players, leading to uncompetitive and unsatisfactory games. Thanks to Leetify, we can see exactly how skewed the ranks are, shown below.

You can find all these distributions and more on Leetify's YouTube video highlighting the discrepancies.

This is reminiscent of the December 2015 update to CS:GO, the last time Valve did a proper rank reset. Ranks have been untouched by Valve since then, until now. One can hope this also leads to more competition among the top-tier of CS players. Before today, Global Elite was practically a joke for finding players with any professional promise. You would have to go to a third-party matchmaking service to adequately separate the good from the great. Maybe now, Global Elite will actually mean something.