EvrMoar

The article answers this, yes it looks like you are converged. You seem to be winning and losing matches evenly, so you are at the rank you belong. If we were to give you a bonus for match mvp, that means we would also have to penalize you more points when you under perform. Again, winning is the goal of the system not kills or match MVP.

We actually have not changed the way you match make, or how MMR is calculated since implementing the new system. So it's just the perception of your matches, maybe the ranked system, that's making you think the match quality has changed.

The match maker has actually gotten better at making fair matches, due to reduction of 5/4/3 stacking at diamond+, as well as not soft resetting between acts so we don't see as chaotic movement in ranks during the season.

You also shouldn't be getting placed as the only solo, next to a four stack, very often. It does happen, but four stacks are not as common as other group sizes, so you should encounter them less on average.

The article is the best example of what is going on.

MMR is a ladder, if you win against opponents you climb and push them down. If you lose, you go down the ladder and your opponents climb up.

Because lower rank has performance, and win/loss MMR, technically if you are performing better and losing you can still increase MMR. For example you could win duels against higher MMR opponents, or use abilities more effectively then most other players at that MMR.

We don't want you to focus on anything except winning your match, to increase rank and MMR. So at the end of the day just playing your best, and trying to win, is how you climb. We purposefully try to make the system hard to exploit, and avoid players trying to focus on one thing to climb, because winning should be the goal.

Also it's hard to carry/boost friends, especially because if they don't win duels and are winning but not actually having good games their performance MMR holds them back. I'm ...

I will say, even if players smurf they don't win every game. That being said, because we have performance based MMR, which is more effective in lower ranks, you can lose a match and still increase in MMR. Especially a player that is just constantly winning duels against players.

The system looks at the MMR of everyone in the match, along with ability usage, etc. When you win a duel it looks at who was suppose to win that duel, based off MMR, as well as how ability usage may have helped. Smurfs, very quickly, are pushed up in MMR.

Unfortunately it's hard to detect intentional losing, vs having a bad game, if a smurf tries to purposefully maintain a low rank. We are getting better, and lots of it comes from help from the community by reporting players that talk about, or seem like, they are intentionally throwing.

What's interesting, in shooters one player can have a huge impact on a team. Because it's not like an MMO, or Moba, where sometimes gear and number ...

Thank you for all that you do, I see you in many posts linking responses and offering information. I know I told you it directly, but I really appreciate all your engagement with the community!

EvrMoar is such a great person

No u.

As for smurf talk, I do think the perception of smurfs is a little overblown(as I stated in my other comment). That being said it doesn't help that there are still smurfs. Every time we talk about design changes, smurfing is considered and I never want to push design that incentivizes smurfing.

Group restrictions loosening is a great example. While we got overwhelming feedback, people want to play with their friends, we also saw people felt the need to smurf to do so. Since ranked puts you into Iron, Bronze, and Silver most often after placements - it makes it easy to roll a new account and end up smurfing in those ranks. So by restricting those ranks, we were incentivizing players to just make a new account and get dumped out in one of those lower ranks to play with lower ranked friends. By opening up the group restrictions we actually get more people playing on their main accounts, and then we...

We did just drop this article!

https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/ask-valorant-rank-rating-edition/

But I think messaging could be improved in lots of ranked systems, it's a good callout.

I should definitely say sorry for false acquisition.

No worries! I don't respond to posts when I get the sense they are just hating to hate, or enjoy bashing something because they are upset. I like to try and respond if I see that people are "passionately frustrated". When you can tell people really enjoy the game, when they give feedback that sounds upset they do so because they care about the game so much. I think it's valuable to engage that feedback, because if someone just hates to hate it makes it very difficult to improve the game(they already made have their opinion, they just find reasons to keep adding fuel to it).

So no worries, I didn't take it as you being toxic!

Because in worst case scenario when MMR ratio becomes 2:1 or 3:1, the account becomes un-playable and an immediate soft reset is required for the account to keep continuing.

This is true, but can also be changed pretty quick...

You can look at my post history to get info about how the ranked system works.

We didn't use the league system, we had a new system created for Valorant. In fact people with brains way more wrinkly then mine, with masters and phd's in mathematics, helped build the system - this is also true of microsofts true skill(most games use this) and other MMR systems, they are extremely complex.

Also, even tho the math is complex the concept of how MMR "works" is I think a little beat up and over analyzed. MMR is just a mathmatical way to determine how much you progress over an opponent when you win/lose to them - MMR is also used to match players against each other fairly. MMR is just a ladder, if you win you go up and push others down. While yes, the math is complex, the concept is very simple.

This new ranked system post is interesting, but the biggest issue is that it does allow ranked inflation. The problem is there are usually 3 reward types players look for: Mo...

This is my personal opinion, but I believe it's a problem with being at the rank you belong at, regardless of what you focus on or even what game you are playing. This is the same complaint we saw with the arrow system when people would complain about getting 3 down arrows, and one upwards green arrow. This is also the same complaint you get from systems that are pure MMR driven where you get +3 for a win and -30 for a loss.

No matter what, every ranked system is going to feel like you are running into a wall. Either there are artificial walls, or barriers, or in a pure MMR system just being at your rank.

The reason this happens is because you are at your rank, and we need to stop ranked inflation. In any system, that does not have some way of pushing players down, there is the problem of ranked inflation. If for example we removed you being able to go negative in points, we would have gold players climbing to immortal over enough games. This would break ranked com...

I'll step in here, just to give a brief explanation of why this happens.

There is no fancy wall, or math, holding you back. Ranked is a ladder - if you are constantly winning against opponents at/above your current MMR you will climb. Winning is THE most important part about climbing. Yes, at lower ranks, performance is part of your rank. But, especially in higher ranks, winning is how you will climb. Then, depending on where you are in the ladder, your Ranked Rating points will push you to that exact spot.

At some point you will get to the MMR/Rank you belong. Because you will no longer be consistently winning against opponents at/above your Rank. When you are at your MMR you are most likely hitting a 50%-ish win rate. Because of how Ranked Rating works, there is a chance that you can win streak up into a rank above your MMR, even tho you still are only at a 50% win rate at your current MMR. Because of demotion protection, the system will eat your negative RR losse...

This isn't true:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/m3aa2s/now_that_riot_is_going_to_ban_people_from_rank_if/gqqbnvf/

But I understand the concern - when the system was made, the issue of abusing reports in this manner was known and was taken into account. The team that handles this system has also constantly improved it since Val has launched. If you do, for some reason, get falsely restricted player support has the tools to investi...

I think, the thing to remember, is no game puts you at the rank you belong when you start playing. And almost every big game uses an MMR system.

All ranking systems require you to play lots of games, to truly figure out where you belong. There is no system that can perfectly "guess" where you belong after 5-10 matches. The ELO system requires thousands of games to find true rank.

I think we can definitely do better with messaging, or this issue where you can group a little wider while in placements, and a handful of other things to make this experience just "better".

Ranked isn't the only thing the competitive team works on, and Valorant has been out for less than a year. There are so many things we want to do, it just takes a lot of time and making sure things don't create worse issues/bugs. We make one mistake and it breaks match making, which breaks the game for everyone. Hopefully you'll see some changes you like :)

Okay! So we were concerned when we saw this match, because this is a little extreme for what we expect from the matchmaker. I think this match deserved a little explanation, after we investigated and found out why this occurred.

In short, Hamtaro was in a four stack and was Immortal last time they played ranked(September of last year). When Hamtaro queued with the four stack, the match maker had a couple options to handle this, but ultimately it landed on the edge case of trying to balance the skill indifference with one high skilled player.

This was worsened by the fact that we do not have MMR decay, but a confidence "loosening" when you don't play the game for an extended period of time. We don't know if you've been playing other shooters, and increasing in skill since you've been gone, or not playing shooters at all. So we widen the gap of where we think you could belong, and that allows the match maker to test you and adjust your MMR if you came back and decreas...

For sure, just providing context.

Sorry, I was using your post as a step off to discuss smurfs partially because you said there are way more smurfs now.

I wasn't attacking you, or saying you were wrong. I just wanted to be realistic about it. My main point being, smurfing is not the reason you aren't ranking up was where I was trying to end up.

Sorry if I came off as hostile, or attacking your view. I know it's hard to convey emotion, or tone, through text. I never was upset, or blaming you for anything. I just haven't really talked about smurfs and felt like responding to you was a good chance to do so.

The problem is when one person says "smurf" if I don't target that comment with a response, my response gets lost or you just get chain comments blaming smurfs for why people are not climbing ranked.

I'll definitely try to word things better, and I'm sorry!

You also have to remember that Valorant is young, and is constnatly getting new players. The community is learning together, so you not only have to improve, you have to improve faster then the community and those around you. This becomes more of an issue when a game is younger, because 1 month of playing Valorant right now is about 10% of the total time the game has been out. Even playing less, or not at all, for a month is giving the community 10% more time then you potentially.

So I think a lot of pain also comes from the game is new, people are learning, skill is wildly shifting across all players - while also getting new players that may have lots of CS experience. That's why I think some high rank players are running into "My teammates don't know how to use abilities". Because we have these players from CS that have immortal/radiant aim, but not game sense yet.

I never said there wasn't smurfs, but I also think it's unfair to not give credit to players who have a good game. I say this because I've seen posts claiming that every single game has a smurf, when realistically that's impossible.

Even using your past season triangle example, we have a group of devs that constantly have been radiant and play 3-4 hours every single day, that have been playing more unrated then ranked. Some of those devs don't have an act rank triangle this act.

Also, most smurfs will struggle to stay at low ranks. It's very hard to have an account maintain a rank, while also smurfing on low ranking players. It's kind of a complete counter to how ranked works, because if you are truly smurfing you would increase your MMR and no longer be smurfing. We can detect this very quickly, for example TenZ getting radiant MMR in less then 20 matches. It would happen for anyone below radiant in even shorter time(the extreme high ranks, like radiant, take the l...

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