Update brings new Valve Rankings, seeding and terminology changes

Earlier today, Valve updated the Counter-Strike Github page to update their regional rankings. In addition, this update brought along a revised formula for calculating the rankings, changes to the seeding of Major Swiss matchups and RMR games, and new vocabulary for the Majors.

The Contenders, Challengers, and Legends naming scheme is gone. Now, in their stead, rise the Opening, Elimination, and Playoff stages of the Major. The new names do not change how the stages operate apart from the initial seeding matchups. The Contenders and Challengers that play in the first Swiss stage of the Major still do.

As for the seeding, Valve has changed the initial pairings of the first round of Swiss stage, the former Challengers and the newly renamed Opening Stage. Instead of the first seed playing the sixteenth seed, second playing fifteenth, and so on. Now, the first seed plays ninth, second plays tenth, third plays eleventh, and so on. This aligns with the "Dutch System" that other sporting bodies such as FIDE use for pairing in Swiss Stages.

How teams perform at the RMR to qualify for the Major no longer affects their seeding for the Major. Once all 24 teams qualify for the Major, they will be re-seeded according to their Valve Ranking, which will be updated accordingly after the RMRs. For example, if a team ranked in the top eight goes 3-2 and just barely makes the Major, they will still receive a bye through the first Swiss stage, while teams who go 3-0 in the RMR are not immediately given byes to the Elimination Stage.

This also removes seeding matches such as the paiN vs FURIA match for the sole Americas Legends slot at the Paris Major. Instead, that slot would be given to the highest-ranked team of the five Major attendees from the Americas.

Last but not least, Valve has made more changes to the model by which they rank teams, weighing LAN matches even more so than previously and reducing rank decay. Plus, with the update, more matches have been added to the model and we have a new best team in the Americas, Complexity!