Methodology

What "tier 1 VCT" means

Everything on this site is drawn from tier 1 VCT, the top, internationally-relevant level of Valorant Champions Tour play. The guiding rule is simple:

All internationals, plus the events that qualify teams into those internationals.

What that looks like in practice depends on the era, because Riot changed the structure of the circuit at the start of 2023.

2023–present (franchised)

From 2023 on, VCT is franchised into three international leagues (Americas, EMEA, and Pacific, with China added in 2024) that feed the global Masters and Champions events. The whole structure is tier 1 by design, so every match from these leagues and internationals is included. Nothing is filtered out.

2021–2022 (pre-franchise)

Before franchising, the circuit was an open pyramid. Anyone could enter regional Challengers through huge open qualifiers, and the field narrowed down to the teams that actually reached the internationals. Including all of it would flood the database with amateur and semi-pro teams playing in 256-team open brackets, which badly distorts every leaderboard.

So for 2021 and 2022 we curate by hand to the same "tier 1" principle. We include:

• Internationals: Masters (Reykjavík, Berlin, Copenhagen) and Champions.
• The events that qualified teams into them: regional Masters / Challengers Finals and Playoffs, the regional leagues, and the Last Chance Qualifiers (LCQs).

And we exclude the open-bracket feeder stages that sit below that level:

• Open Qualifiers and Closed Qualifiers
• Preliminary and Seeding rounds
• Anything that's effectively an amateur open bracket (Round of 256 / 128 / 64, etc.)

Where an otherwise-included event bundled open-qualifier stages alongside its main bracket (a few regional Challengers did), we keep the Group Stage and Playoffs and drop the qualifier stages, so a kept event contributes only its tier 1 matches.

Why it's curated this way

Tier 1 is about a consistent strength of competition. A career rating or ACS average only means something if every map in it was played against comparable opposition. Letting open-qualifier stomps over amateur teams into the same pool inflates small-sample players to the top of all-time leaderboards, exactly the noise this scope is designed to remove.