ESL Will Rework Its World Ranking System For Next Year
Published: Dec 4, 2017 - Last Updated: May 30, 2024
In deciding which teams will receive those coveted direct invitations to top Counter Strike: Global Offensive tournaments, ESL’s rankings are the master key.
With tournaments like the Intel Extreme Masters and ESL One now offering huge prize money, ESL has reevaluated its current ranking system. It will be used for the first time in 2018.
Jonas “bsl” Vikan, ESL’s tournament director, explained the thinking behind revamping the rankings in a statement:
“The aim of the world ranking is to provide fans with a tool to determine who is the best team in the world. The ESL World Ranking system does that objectively and in the spirit of transparency by using numeric values to rule out bias.”
The main thrust of the changes is to more accurately reflect how competitive one tournament is against another. The new method focuses on the quality and number of teams taking part, as well as their current level of play.
Introducing the Quality Rating system
For starters, the quality of an event will no longer be decided by counting the team ranks from a variety of different regions of world rankings. Instead, ESL will debut a Quality Rating system, which ranges from zero to 102.
Each team will be allocated a World Ranking position. The tournament Quality Rating comprises the sum of the world rankings positions from each of the qualified teams.
For example, if there was a four-team tournament and the four teams in that event had World Rankings of 5, 17, 28, and 35, the total Quality Ranking for that event would be 85.
Tournament quality is graded on six levels. The rankings range from the top level of AAA down to D. Each of the six levels is tied to a multiplier, 15x up to 100x. This affects the amount of points available within that tournament.
Tourneys will also be categorized by size: Huge, Large, Medium, Small, and Tiny. This designation also impacts available points.
Changes to how points are awarded
Instead of a 20 percent decay each month, a team’s point total will decay by 5 percent each week.
It’s a small change but one which will likely be welcomed by tournament organizers whose events take place near the end of months. This addresses the issue of these tournaments’ awards holding weight for shorter periods of time. ESL feels this change ensures greater ranking accuracy at any given time.
Miscellaneous changes
ESL announced a number of other small changes, which include:
- Tournaments will now be evaluated for a quality rating at their starts rather than upon completion.
- Teams finishing in the last position in a tournament will now no longer receive any points, regardless whether the team qualified or was directly invited.
- Club ratings are now only being treated as a bonus feature within the World Rankings system. The final power ranking is considered more important.
Why the need for change?
The ESL has reasoned that its old system did have some inherent faults. Some tournaments had been unfairly penalized. They could be relegated to a lower tier if, for example, they were small, even if the level of play was very high. ESL has worked around this by trying to ensure fair weight is given to both aspects.
The ESL has also moved to use the multiplier to encourage teams to compete in events offline.
The new World Ranking system is scheduled to be rolled out on Jan. 1 when further details will be available via ESL’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Since: August 10, 2015
