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Are you sick of the “there’s so many smurfs!” posts?
Are you tired of people saying they “top-frag every game but always lose?”
Are you possibly one of the two types of people above and you want a way out of your rank?
Here’s a possible solution:
I know everyone is sick of the smurfing/bad teammate posts, but in fairness, nobody is really talking about a solution. Everyone just asks Riot to “fix the problem.” The issue with this is that Riot cannot, and will not, ban smurfs on the account of simply being a smurf. You can make reports all you want of video evidence of these players literally admitting to smurfing or boosting, and Riot will simply not even respond to the report. I’ve tried several times.
Clearly, Riot has no intention of banning boosters, even if it’s explicitly against their ToS. So how do we fix smurfs and improve the low-rank experience? How do we get some of the hard-stuck silvers/golds/plats into their correct ranks?
Introducing: the Personal Performance Coefficient, or PP for short.
Before I explain PP, let’s talk about the performance bonus system:
What is the already-implemented Performance Bonus system?
Riot already implemented a system that acts like a performance indicator, but it is unfortunately not enough. Even in games that I get 30+ kills, while all of my teammates are sitting at less than 20, I will rarely get a performance bonus, and instead just get flamed for being a smurf. When I do get the performance bonus, it’s ridiculously small - around +3 or +5 for the majority of games.
Performance Bonus is inherently a bad system
The performance bonus only activates on games in which you get more kills than usual. This is really all we know about how to get it. But this is awful for two reasons:
Players will simply have good games sometimes. Should we give players an increase in rating just because they’re “having a good game?” Where is the negative performance bonus for our bad games?
This gives players a reason to potentially throw rounds to get more kills. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve had teammates say “hey let me get the last kill,” or “let me top frag, this is my rank up game!” Even if some of these requests are benign, this means the player is not actually playing Valorant in the intended way (to win), and instead is playing Valorant for an amount of points that is ultimately separated from simply “winning” or “losing.”
What is the Personal Performance Coefficient?
The PP is simple: a coefficient that decreases for every rank and determines the amount of RR you receive based on your personal performance.
The coefficient would be a number between 0 and 1, or a percentage if that makes it easier to imagine.
At Iron 1, the PP is in full throttle at 1.0, or 100%. This means that all of the RR you receive will be based on your personal performance. Did you outfrag everyone on the enemy team and your team, but you still lost? Doesn’t matter - you rank up. Especially for lower ranks, it is essential to understand that some players are naturally more mechanically fitted for higher ranks, even if their game sense or team play doesn’t allow for it.
Coefficients
There are currently 22 ranks (including Immortal 1-3) in Valorant. The coefficients would be as follows:
Radiant - 0
Immortal 3 - 0.0476
Immortal 2 - 0.0952
Immortal 1 - 0.1429
Diamond 3 - 0.1905
Diamond 2 - 0.2381
Diamond 1 - 0.2857
Platinum 3 - 0.3333
Platinum 2 - 0.3810
Platinum 1 - 0.4286
Gold 3 - 0.4762
Gold 2 - 0.5238
Gold 1 - 0.5714
Silver 3 - 0.6190
Silver 2 - 0.6666
Silver 1 - 0.7143
Bronze 3 - 0.7619
Bronze 2 - 0.8095
Bronze 1 - 0.8571
Iron 3 - 0.9048
Iron 2 - 0.9524
Iron 1 - 1.0
What does this mean?
In Bronze 2, about 80% of your RR increase is due to your personal performance: how many kills you received, your Econ rating, etc.
In Gold 2/3, we split the rating about 50/50. Half of your rating is from winning or losing, while the other half is from your performance.
In Diamond 3, only 20% of your rating is from your personal performance, while the other 80% is from your team winning or losing.
In general, your personal performance matters less as you climb each rank, and team play becomes more important.
What this means for lower ranks
Hard-stuck silvers/golds/plats who truly find themselves top fragging every game will actually rank up now! In lower ranks, those who cannot find any kills or don’t understand how mouse movement works will never see the light of day.
I can’t tell you how many of those players have escaped Iron through sheer luck. I know a girl who got into Bronze (I’m not in bronze) without ever understanding that you can hold the mouse button to continue shooting. Not only was she only tap-firing, but she only tap fired with the Ares of all guns. A quick check of her career page would show that in none of her 10+ games she went positive, and in most of them she netted less than 4 kills. Did she truly deserve to rank up?
What this means for mid-ranks
Team play becomes more important as you rank up, as it should, but you should also focus on playing mechanically better. This also means that those of you who are mechanically gifted are able to rank up about equally with those of you with really good game sense but sh*t aim. These ranks treat those two concepts as equal.
What this means for high-ranks
Team play is now essential and the game becomes more Boolean: you win, or you lose. Everyone hates the one guy who flanks every round and gets three kills after the spike is planted, but can’t clutch up. But nobody can sh*t talk him because he’s 34/12 so he’s got a stick up his ass. Well no more! These guys will not receive nearly as much RR for their lack of game sense, and will derank just as fast with you.
Goodbye smurfs.
No longer can a platinum smurf carry some silvers in their own games. Think about it: if one guy is getting all the kills on a team, he’ll rank up faster than his teammates, especially in low ranks. Eventually the smurf will be a significantly higher rank than his teammates, resulting in one of two things: the smurf cannot play with the low-ranks, or the rank of the enemies will increase. It’s significantly harder for a platinum smurf to carry a group of silvers against a bunch of low golds.
TLDR
I don’t have a conclusion, so here’s a TL;DR
As you rank up, your performance matters less and whether you won or lost matters more. At Iron 1, kills are everything; at Gold 2/3, your RR received is split 50/50 for your performance and whether you won or lost; at Radiant, winning or losing is the only way to gain or lose RR and your personal performance won’t matter at all.
P.S. I agree with phone number 2FA and locking ranked for accounts that don’t have a unique phone number. Riot devs won’t do it though.
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