[2022] Riots placement for this season makes me not want to queue up for ranked.

I've seen a few posts, and I addressed this in a small post on twitter but I really want to make sure to be open about what's happening and why.

First, I understand it's frustrating to go from a rank you spent lots of time achieving and then get dropped back down. Rank is part of your identity in Valorant and when ranked reset occurs it can be very upsetting depending on how hard you drop. While it may be rough to get dropped, know that the entire playerbase of ranked is getting dropped the same amount following the same rules. We aren't dropping you more, or singling you out, the whole community gets hit with the reset.

Second I want to talk about the reset itself. I believe we could have done a better job messaging the Episode reset was occurring, I will ensure going forward it's included in the patch notes. It's a standard formula we now have for ranked but the rules for reset are as follows:

1. Every episode the highest you can place is diamond 1, and we will squish all ranks downward. You can expect to drop(usually) 1-4 ranks from where you were last episode. Higher ranks get dropped harder due to leaderboard ranking, boosting concerns, skill atrophy, etc.

2. Every Act we only reset the leaderboard, dropping all players to 10% of their current RR(if on leaderboard). Everyone else is only required to play 1 placement and will earn their previous rank back from the prior Act.

These rules have been in place since Episode 2, so expect them going forward and any changes will be announced.

We have multiple reasons we do a reset, and I want to make sure I make that clear so you can understand why we have a ranked squish. One thing to remember when talking about Valorant, and ranked, is that the entire playerbase is improving in Valorant all the time. Skills like default smokes, how to entry, default plants, etc. start to become common knowledge and trickle down through the ranks. In beta a Platinum player might not have known the default plant for A on Bind, but now it's something most gold players probably have an idea of in the current season(for example). You can even see this in League! Wave management is something expected of ranks above gold, and in the early seasons not even high rank players knew wave management to the level we know now.

This knowledge means that the player base is evolving and average skill is going up. It may plateau someday, but as we are a younger game it's constantly shifting and moving faster than a game that's existed for many years. This is one of the reasons we have a ranked reset. Players may be gold, platinum, diamond, etc. but kind of coasting at that rank. They may not be playing Valorant regularly, improving with the community, or they may just be doing the bare minimum to ensure they don't decay. By resetting we are ensuring that if you are Diamond in the current episode you actually are a diamond player right now. There are no questions about how long you've sat at that rank, or if you've been coasting at that rank. You've been reset within the past 6 months, you have achieved diamond in the current season.

The above point only looks at the community's average skill, but another reason is the general game balance and competitive changes to the game as a whole. Every episode is very different from the episode prior. New maps, agent balance, weapon balance, map changes, etc. will affect the communities skill levels as a whole. Again, as the point above, we expect you to prove that in the current competitive atmosphere you belong at your rank.

Lastly, it also helps us clear out boosted or botted accounts. While we will always try to combat bad actors in Valorant ranked, it would be foolish to think we will always detect all of these accounts. It helps clear out accounts that may have abused the system and have gone undetected, and if they try to abuse the system again potentially get caught in the process >:D

On a side note, I want to address the statement "Riot just does this to increase the grind to make you play more". I am the designer in charge of ranked, and as a competitive team we work out what we want to do to create a positive ranked experience. Our team does not have a requirement to increase playtime, or any expectation that we must enforce a grind; we also do not have anyone above us pushing these ideals or goals. Creating an artificial grind is a bad thing, in fact we try to avoid it as much as possible. We play and love Valorant just like everyone here in the community, we want to have a game we all can enjoy. If you make a fun game, where the players just enjoy playing it, you don't need a fake grind. In fact I would argue that a fake grind would turn players away, and maybe tarnish a fun/positive gaming experience. Our goal is never to enforce a grind, and if we could find your true rank after 1 match we would do it. Remember, the primary goal of ranked is to figure out your skill compared to the rest of the community and that's our guiding light when making decisions.

These answers don't make up for the fact it can still feel bad to have your rank taken away. That being said, we aren't taking away you or your skill. If you truly belong in gold you will get to gold, the system is designed to find your true rank based on your skill. It also does not stop you from improving, getting better, and surpassing the skill you had in a season prior. My hope is that you can get your Episode 3 ranked gun buddy, say "Man I'm proud of what I accomplished last Episode, but I think I can do better this Episode." and improve from there. At the end of the day, if you can't get back to the rank you had last Act do you deserve to be that rank now?

!pin

There is no MMR system that knows your rank from your first handful of games. Technically the traditional ELO system would require 1000+ matches to get an accurate picture of your true skill.

The system will always push your rank to your MMR, you can't stop it. We are just forcing your rank to display the lower end of where your MMR range is, rather than the average or where the system thinks you may belong right now. When you play 10-30 games it will converge and match.

We do this on new episodes, again just to make sure you aren't boosted, to force you to validate your rank, and also to ensure based on the new game balance you actually belong at those ranks.

So in the end as long as your rank ends up matching your MMR, it doesn't matter if it shows your true MMR or not, it will still take X number of games to get an accurate read of where you belong.

This is a huge concern from the team as a whole, and we have a whole team focused on it. There are lots of things being worked on, and we even patrol and escalate issues we see on social media. Definitely a space we are constantly evaluating, and we have a whole team dedicated to the space.

This is a problem of all ranked systems, even if you displayed MMR.

Lets take two players in a pure MMR ranked world:

Player A - Has played 5 ranked games

Player B - Has played 50 ranked games

Both players are ranked silver. While Player A actually belongs in Gold, they just haven't played enough games for the MMR system to adjust them there. Player B belongs in Silver, and has proven this by playing 50 games. Technically, in a pure MMR system, they are still both silver. The rank of Player A is wrong, because their MMR is wrong, because they haven't played enough games.

The same problem exists in any ranked system, because both systems require you to play X number of games until your true MMR is reached. In a system that separates rank from MMR all it is doing is putting your rank below your MMR and letting your rank slowly adjust to your MMR, instead of letting you see your MMR wildly swing over your first handful of matches. They do the same thing, but the experience is better. It also allows us to have penalties to your rank without affecting your MMR, thus affecting fair match-making.

It doesn't matter if you wait and play in two weeks, or play now, the system will be able to push you to your appropriate rank. It depends on how superstitious you are of the first few weeks of the season. Rank/MMR doesn't care about time of season, or if you've been reset or not; you will always be pushed to where you belong. Not playing won't do anything to change your MMR or the skill of the opponents you will play against when you come back.

I'm sorry, that's a rough experience and I understand how this can be extremely frustrating. (btw I read both of your posts so I may give feedback talking about things you said in both of them)

I'm never going to say our ranked is perfect, in fact you point out the very struggle of ranked systems. There are people that are going to get to the rank the system evaluates them at, then if they feel like that rank is not justified they will look for reasons or stats to validate their idea that "this rank for me is wrong". Changing how we display rank, showing MMR, etc. will not change this experience or this feedback, in fact if you are truly playing against bronze and iron players your MMR is probably below your current rank. This isn't giving an excuse for your case, we should talk about YOUR experience, I just wanted to point out this issue is common in every game in every rank system.

So I really want to address all the issues you raise. The first issue that's easy to talk about is instalocking. I'm not a fan of it, but it is actually a controversial topic in the community. We have announced, and are working on, a Cascading agent pick that will prevent instalocking. This will help sure, but I don't think we will ever solve the issue of:

a. A player wanting to pick the same agent as someone else.

b. A player feeling like their team is lacking a certain type of agent and feeling forced to pick that agent type, or complain their team to try and get someone else to pick it.

We can do things to reduce them, sure; games have tried role selections, different pick and ban styles, role queuing, you could even argue a Mastery system is trying to combat knowing if a player should play a certain agent or not. At the end of the day our teams core belief is that the cascade pick will help, and we don't want to enforce roles in the way other games have tried, and the SPD(Social and Player Dynamics) team has been tackling agent select reports. This isn't a solution for insta locking now, but it will get better as we keep rolling out things that should reduce the occurrence.

I think the next thing to talk about would be your perception around your level, rank, and the rank of those around you. This is probably some of the most common complaints I see "Why is X rank in my game" or "I shouldn't have X rank players on my team". There is a whole topic I won't talk about, which is more of progression vs. fair match, smurf detection, boosted detection, etc. but at the end of the day the reason you see anyone in one of your matches is that their MMR is extremely close to you. Ranked is purely a ladder, if you are seeing other players they are either slightly above you or below you on the ladder. When you beat those players you climb up the ladder, they climb down. There is no secret sauce, there is no win/lose streak matchmaking, the system is purely trying to make the most-fair match possible. I've explained in other posts why we decided to go away from showing MMR and showing ranked, but I also understand the pain points of doing that(just like I understand the pain points of just showing MMR).

Lastly you talked about all your matches being 13-0's or 0-13's. This is a huge concern for me and why I would love to look over your matches. When we are looking at the whole player base, this is actually the most fair season of ranked we've ever had. Matches are the closest they've ever been, with round differential being at an all time low. This doesn't mean that there won't be players that are outliers, or just happen to get a seriously unlucky streak of games. Unfortunately when we look at data it's the average, it doesn't account for every player's experience or players that happen to just get a streak of bad matches.

I think what I'd be interested in is looking at your matches and talking about them, if you'd like. Feel free to post your Tracker.gg and I'd love to take a look to just see. Half of your MMR is encounter-based, which is based on how successful you are in winning duels and helping your team win rounds. That MMR is weighted more heavily in ranks below Diamond, so even if you aren't net-positive win rate if you are really winning duels you should be able to climb or at least stay where you belong skill wise. I'd love to explore it more. I'm sorry you're frustrated with ranked, honestly, it may be worth taking a break. I have had similar experiences in multiple games. I remember in league when I tried to get diamond way back in like Season 3 I couldn't get past gold - after a break and then coming back strong I was able to make the push.

I hope that changes we make in the future can alleviate some of your issues and help you have a better ranked experience. I hope you have a good weekend, and if you want me to look at your matches feel free to drop your tracker.gg

Hey I wanted to say the past couple weeks I know I haven't gotten a chance to respond to looking into your Account.

I will say I looked at your account and saw that for the most part everything looked pretty normal. You had a couple matches that were a little one-sided, but for the most part a lot of your matches ended 13-10 or above. Your overall match fairness based on round difference was actually very good, which is a good indicator your getting pretty fair match-making. I also looked at your account internally and didn't see anything suspicious.

The reason you may be having trouble climbing, or not seeing ranked progress, is due to two things. So our system has two MMR's that make up your one MMR; Encounter and Win/Loss. Encounter is basically every interaction you have with an enemy, looking at both your MMR's, and adjusting your Encounter MMR based on those interactions. Win/Loss MMR is very straight forward.

Looking at Encounter is near impossible, but you can get an idea of it by looking at your end of game report and seeing the duels you are winning. If you are winning duels against higher rank players, or players at your rank, more than you are losing you are going to be increasing your encounter MMR. While those kills matter, so do assists, and other strategic factors when doing things like taking a bomb site or using abilities, but you can get an idea of how you are stacking up against others by looking at that screen. Again it's not always the answer, but it will give you an idea of how you are performing against others in your games.

Win/Loss is super easy, just look at your average win/loss. While encounter is looking at and adjusting your MMR based on every encounter with players, your Win/Loss will adjust based on match outcome. In lower ranks Encounter matters more(it's a system good at detecting smurfs), where at higher ranks your Win/Loss matters more. You're kind of in the center so both are similar how how important they are for you. Looking at your stats your Win/Loss is a little low, and it's around 50%; this is showing you may be at the rank you are playing at. If you should be climbing you will see an increase in your winrate and your MMR will adjust upwards because you are winning more often.

I know these are very generic "Win/Do better to climb", but it looks like that's the only answer I have. I think when thinking about "Match Fairness" the easiest thing to do is to ignore the ranks of players and instead look at the match outcome. The match maker cares about making fair matches, not what rank you are. The rank system is adjusting based on your matches, and where we think everyone belongs. If we detect a bronze smurf, that bronze player may end up in gold but still have a bronze icon; the system will adjust them but until they double promote and confirm they are a smurf they won't be moved(we can't move rank too quick otherwise it makes boosting too easy). Usually if a match ends 13-6 or better that match is pretty fair, which again after looking at your history you seem to not have many one-sided matches.

Sorry for the late response, I'm going to be tossing you a gunbuddy because I didn't respond as quick as I wanted to. I hope you enjoy Valorant and if ranked is still frustrating maybe we will roll out a fix that will help with that someday! Ranked is never finished, and we will constantly be exploring improvements for the system!