I feel SO dumb right now 😭
I was watching a counterstrike video (I don’t play CS) and the youtuber said “…who is one of the best North America players…” while a statistics page showed kill/death, win/loss, etc. But it also showed “NA”. This along with the verbal “North America” was enough for the very lazy neurons in my brain finally make a basic connection that those two things are connected. I always assumed it just meant “somewhere we don’t have an abbreviation for” or “location private” or something.
When combined with other data on the same line and written without the slash, it usually won’t mean not applicable.
If it’s in some sort of published professional context, I wouldn’t read it as not applicable without the slash.
North America is a reasonable guess when specifying region could be context appropriate. Like you said with video game team names, but also company/org names, species common names, or treaties.