EvrMoar

About 4% of all ranked players are above plat, about 7% of players are plat.

I've seen people say there are a "ton" of smurfs, when we investigate we see that players just have a good game. I've seen players with consistent 10 kill games, randomly, have a 30+ kill game for reference - these are players with less then 40% winrate as well.

Even if every single player above plat smurfed, they wouldn't even be able to fill half of all games that occur in plat - let alone all the ranks because they are only 4% of all players. Yes smurfing occurs, I'm not denying it, and we also have systems in place to try and reduce their frequency and how long they can sit in low ranks. I think it's just overblown, because in tac shooters players can have insanely good games. I am about Plat/Diamond, and play against immortal/radiant players every day in playtest - even I have games where I'm 20-30+kills in those games(against players way above my skill level).

That being said,...

Great video!

I often talk about consistency, because that's a big factor to climbing rank. I also like to follow the "2 Loss" rule. If I lose 2 games in a row, I'm done with ranked for the night - or extended break.

Also this article is fascinating! https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-tilt-to-win-more-games-league-of-legends-347de832a5b1

Basically if you do lose a game, you should take a 5-20minute break. At least in their data it seems to increase your win rate!

Again...

Congrats and keep it up!

As lots of people commented on this thread, we did it because of toxicity/gameplay concerns.

People would dodge to manipulate queue, trying to have the highest ranked teammates possible. This, when lots of players try to manipulate queue in this way, can severely effect match making.

People would target players based on their rank. If you were top rank on your team, but bottom of the scoreboard, you would be more likely to get flamed.

Players would avoid bombsites, or areas, based on the ranks of players. If you were the highest rank, and sitting on B site, teams would avoid B site. Or teams would focus on sites guarded by lower ranked players.

It also put a lot of emphasis on ranks, without much benefit to the players. Our goal is to make sure you are playing ranked to win, not to focus on the ranks of your opponents/teammates. Because you can control your performance, that's what should be your focus.

https://imgur.com/riwzfaL

Performance bonuses are always possible, except for Immortal+.

It's usually a +3-5 points-ish(can go higher, rarely), to your total Ranked Rating gain from that match. You can also get that on a loss as well, so you lose 3-5 less points!

How MMR works is you get more per a win against more difficult opponents, and less for less difficult opponents.

So technically you could have a 75% win rate, but that's because 3/4 matches are lower MMR opponents and you win against them. When you do get matched against higher MMR opponents you may not be winning against them and it's making it hard for your MMR to increase because you aren't proving you are better then the players above you.

Technically, if out of some random act of chance it occurred(it's near impossible), you could only get matched up against lower MMR players and still climb because you are always going up in MMR for a win.

The reason I gave above is why you saw C0M in one of the top leaderboar spots but he had a 54% win rate overall. Where as some people around him in the top 5 had 60+% win rate.

Also remember that you have very few people ahead of you. You may be doing well, but you need to be doing better then them. Your rank...

Valorant uses Unreal, so that's the engine we work in!

I actually do a lot more "paper design" then implementation currently. Not that I couldn't, but I'm just designing very big systems so lots of planning is required to make sure everything is working. I also need to get better at Unreal, coming from COD I'm more comfortable with text based scripting(unreal uses visual scripting). We also have some amazing engineers on our team, that are super talented and when working with math(like ranked/match making) that is very important.

So right now I don't really work in engine much, but that will probably change in the future :) - I actually use to design, and create, almost everything I worked on in COD with engineers helping with the extremely complicated things.

I actually came from working on COD, and before that was in eSports for Modern Warfare(well what you would call eSports back then).

I've noticed, because of my playstyle and coming from COD, I do better being aggressive. I'm so use to just supergluing my finger on the "W" key and just pushing non-stop. Even in COD, when you had to be patient, you were constantly in motion. That being said, I wouldn't worry about skill getting worse. Aiming is aiming - while you may have to adjust how you think about crosshair placement your skills transition pretty well. After being pretty good at both COD and now Valorant I can switch between them comfortably.

I will say I avoid ADS in Valorant. I don't know why, if it's because it feels different then COD, or maybe my brain just doesn't like bluring the games together. But I pretty much avoid ADS unless it's a gun that has an alt fire(like the stinger) where I need it. Just personal preference, ADS is technically valuable in lots ...

Ummm, I've only been at Riot since last November! My first day I got to make the new ranked system, which was pretty wild.

But my favorite thing is something that hasn't launched yet :) - because I've only really worked on Ranked, and all the changes you've seen since the new Episode started.

Before Riot I was a designer on COD and I was one of the core designers on warzone, and I also was the original creator of Prophunt :). Prophunt was probably my favorite thing I worked on, on COD, it was meh baby.

First off, I find your ideas really interesting. It's always nice to read an interesting breakdown on ranked beliefs or concepts. Thanks for spending the time writing it up!

What does the system use to decide "you deserve more/less"? Changing the RR rewards artificially pushes you to what "the system thinks" you deserve, which is simply not fair.

The system is not as complicated as I think you are assuming it is. Yes we have some fancy math to calculate it, but at the end of the day MMR is a giant ladder. So if you win against opponents you climb up the ladder, and others go down it. Yes we have math that determines by how much you should go up the ladder, but at the end of the day you can break it down to "win more climb more".

The only way to tell you're in the rank you deserve: you play equally well as everyone else in that rank. How do you identify this? 50/50 win/lose rate, easy. And the only way for the RR to rem...

Technically the system thinks where you belong based on who you are winning against. MMR systems are just giant ladders. The higher opponents on the ladder you win against, the faster you climb up and push those players down the ladder. So to raise your ranked rating gains, you just have to win more - OR maintain a decent win rate in matches where you have opponents that are higher MMR then you. There is a chance that you are only beating players at or below your MMR, and when you get placed against higher MMR opponents you aren't winning that often. That would kinda show you are at the MMR you belong at, and why you may feel like you're stuck.

This comment seems to occur a lot during the beginning of an Act.

This could be a mix of players returning, to check out the new Act, as well as people stepping back into ranked if they took a break last season. It's not uncommon to have players play their placements, play a few ranked games, then be done with ranked until the next big update. I haven't seen any shifts in how often extreme match outcomes are occurring, but I'll make sure to watch for it!

We also loosened lower rank grouping restrictions, but our match maker has been handling those well it seems.

The system is based on MMR.

So if you are doing really well and belong at a higher rank, the current system will double promote you. It's a way to correct you if you have a drastic skill change. Good job it means the system thinks you probably belong in plat, keep it up!

The report system actually being meaningful would help dramatically. I'll admit that I don't know it fully and correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as we know players that get reported for toxic behavior enough times don't receive more than a short chat ban correct?

No, there are players banned for toxicity all the time. I don't know the details of how we message this, why we do this, legal issues in some countries with how this is handled etc. I'm not on the team that handles these issues, or a part of player support. But I do know we ban people.

Yes you can say that doling out heftier bans can be exploitable, and it can. But the benefits outweigh the potential negatives don't you think?

I actually don't think bans are exploitable, unless we some how automate them. Again not my area, but I was talking about exploits in the sense of Ranked Rating manipulation. I was pointing out that we are focused on comb...

You're just a beast!

Honestly it might just be an increased player pool allowing us to have more strict match making?(players often come back at the beginning of the season. It could also just be a break really helped ease your nerves and you're just playing better.

We also rolled out AFK and Dodge penalties and have been combating toxicity and those issues. We have seen reductions in AFK and Dodges so maybe you're just having a better experience!

Honestly tho, only being two days in, you're probably just having a good streak of games :) - keep it up!

It seems like you got, some how, your rank above your MMR. In low immortal and diamond, performance MMR exists(just very small in relation to your overall MMR). So either you win streaked up, but you didn't increase your performance MMR so it's holding you back. Alternatively if you grouped up until you hit Diamond 3(solo/duo) you could have essentially boosted yourself up. There is a chance you some how got ahead of your MMR, and it's increasing it just can't keep up with how much your winning. But that's extremely rare and you would need an extremely high win rate for this to happen.

Unfortunately, a lot of things could make this happen. But at the end of the day you need to keep winning consistently, and performing, to raise your MMR so you can increase your ranked rating gains. Right now the system thinks you aren't performing at an Immortal level yet. Good luck!

This is difficult because if we don't push you down to your MMR you could out grind the system. Because we have things like Demotion Protection, and we favor the player in Ranked Rating(instead of punishing) we already are combating RR inflation.

No matter how we simulate various Ranked Rating settings, without convergence players end up getting to a Rank they don't belong in if they were to play enough games. Convergence is how we prevent that - because ranked is not a grind to climb it's about finding your true skill.

Unfortunately we need a way to push you were you belong, and it may feel bad but the alternate would be putting up a wall and saying "You can't promote until you raise your skill/MMR" which would feel infinitely worse. I do have some ideas to help smooth how this feels, but they will take time and we need to make sure the changes won't break ranked.

There isn't a match making fix for this, that wouldn't be exploitable(like lowering RR loss if someone AFK's). It's also not solving the issue of running into Toxic/AFK/Griefing players.

That being said, we have a team dedicated to this space and they are constantly working to help combat Toxicity and issues like these. I'm personally excited about everything they do, and they will constantly be improving the space. It sucks to hear, but this is a situation of we are working on it.

TECHNICALLY, this isn't what you want to hear but you are the constant factor in your matches. If you are not Toxic, and are a positive force on your team, that means you have 4 players on your team that COULD be AFK/Griefing. Alternatively the other team has 5 players that could be AFK/Griefing. So statistically you should have them on your team less then the enemy team. That being said, with random match making and luck that isn't the case. That's also assuming a large amount of games ...

Here is a the tweet responding to this, but yes as u/rocket1615 said he has to start winning more, or beating higher ranking opponents to pass the few people ahead of him.

https://twitter.com/RiotEvrMoar/status/1365777133520515076