[2021] A ranked complaint template for all of you

This is going to sound harsh, because this is a perception issue and it's still a problem that we may need to solve.

We didn't change match making, or how you find matches. You would get the same opponents, and teammates, compared to the last season. If we kept the rank system the same, and just made people play placements again(like beta to release) people would get the same matches they are getting now.

While you may run into players who have act/current ranks that are above or below you; The matchmaker believes you are close in skill and most of our matches(especially in anything below immortal) are very close in skill.

There is a confidence system, which gets loosened when you are in placements, that will let you shift your MMR harder based on your performance. That's the closet thing that will really change your MMR on a soft reset. That being said, it is healthy because as players play more games the system gets "Confident" in their MMR. Soft resets are nice, because if you play 1000 games in bronze, but maybe have learned a ton and improved, this soft reset may give you a window to raise your MMR a bit faster then normal. Alternatively, if you played on release, got plat, but haven't played since(about 6 months ago) it gives us a chance to put you at the correct rank based on your skill. This system also helps clear out boosted accounts in high ranks and not let them sit at a high rank for more then an episode.

This is definitely a perception problem, people are preciving Act ranks as a players current skill. We saw this after almost every act, lots of posts "This guys has immortal wins in his act rank, but I'm playing against him in plat wtf."

Another thing that is probably happening is immortal/radiant going solo/duo may severely hurt some of those players MMR. If you were use to 5 stacking, and you depended on that to get wins at that MMR, you can no longer do that once you get there. If you start to not perform, when hitting solo/duo at immortal, it could tank your MMR pretty hard and you would start to drop in rank as well.

There are a lot of factors at play. It's been one week, we just completely overhauled the entire ranked system, and the game is still less then a year old. We have a lot to improve, learn, and new features and things to implement. I think the one thing, I hope, that I can assure people of is that we are going to make changes and improve Valorant Ranked. We are listening, and we are also playing. We want the game to be fun, just as much as you, because we also love playing it.

To start off, I don't think the system is perfect. I think if you were to ever believe your Ranked system is perfect, and complete, you'd probably be wrong as a game designer.

That being said, we have investigated multiple people who have made these claims. Looked up their back end MMR, match history, the games they've pointed out issues in. For multiple games. We didn't make it public, saying "hey we are looking into your game." because we don't want to create this unfair perception that we are willing to look into certain players match history over others(that's what player support is for). That being said, we want to gut check feedback and make sure things are working correctly after such a big change.

After these initial investigations we haven't really seen any issues. We are still watching, and looking, but there haven't been any that have really jumped out as the system not matching players fairly.

The reason for the more restricted group is it helps reducing the extreme variance in match making. Yes you may be plat, and get a silver in your game that you couldn't group with. But that silver is considered at your skill, or close to. This also happened in the old system, early on after placements when the system is less confident in knowing your true MMR people could get slightly out of sync with their MMR vs their rank. It's how MMR systems work, you need to prove you belong at a rank and you will climb to it.

The problem is we can't let you(at plat) group with your Silver friend, even if their hidden MMR is the same as you, because your silver friend could also have bronze MMR. By making the grouping smaller, we reduce the potential extremes of MMR that are grouped together. Now, as a Plat1, you could only que as far as Gold 1.

It's also very rare for an MMR to get over 4 sub-ranks away from their rank, and rare for them to get over 3 sub-ranks away. This can happen, especially more often, if people are purposely smurfing or boosting trying to manipulate MMR by losing games on purpose(or starting a new account and the system trying to find where to put them).

So even tho you may get silvers in your game, and you can't group with them, it lets us create fair matches. It's also part of ranked, over the course of your ranked career you will have lower ranked players on your team just as much as the other team. If you are constantly performing above your current rank you will climb. I understand that perception is extremely important, and is what gives value in a rank from the communities eyes. That being said, these tight restrictions help maintain fair match making and lets us keep a tighter grip on rank identity.

We are talking about a few things. I believe there is a perception issue along with beginning of season issue.(sounds a little bit lame to blame it on this but I'll explain)

Our match maker is pretty good at matching 5 stacks against 5 stacks. Or at least 5 stack against 1 + 4 stack. Unfortunately, in extremely edge rare cases, very unfair stacks can get matched up against a split group. I am concerned that people just think "oh their five stack" or ask in chat and get a troll response "of course we're grouped kekw". Alternatively it's natural to want to blame any reason you can find on a loss - which is why people start using rank as a way to target teammates or 5 stacks as a complaint. I'm not saying it's always the case, but there will always be some level of trying to find a scape goat for why you may be losing. That being said, it doesn't mean you should turn a blind eye as a dev, there is obvious legitimate concern and we need to use feedback and data to see if it's an issue.

At the beginning of the season I think it's common to see players group up in 5 stacks more, especially after immortal+ were all dropped into plat3. Slowly that's changing as they get into immortal and can no longer group. Also there is just the hype, and I don't have data to support this, but I wouldn't be surprised if people group up more because they are coming back to the game to check out the new season.

We are talking about fixes, and changes, we always want to improve ranked. No word on what those fixes are, but we will have updates eventually :)

I don't understand your comment, TenZ has always struggeled finding games on his main. His que time didn't jump to four hours, it was four 1 hour queues - I watched the stream he tweeted about his four hour queue time. The reason he has long queues is because we didn't reset MMR, and his MMR is much higher then most people(you can see he was top of the leaderboard last season). If we did reset MMR he would have found games much quicker, because there would be more people around his MMR to match into queue with.

In fact him, and a few other people, were what we had to look at to roll out a change speeding up their queue times(which came out today). Again, I don't understand why you think I'm lying, if TenZ had hour long ques before the new season, then still had them(until today when we got a fix in).

I understand you may have frustrations with the system, or that a lot of the complaints that are popping up make assumptions that may not necessarily be true. I have been an open book about how our system works, and what it is doing. I have no reason to hide our system, or create a fake grind. If our game is fun, and has a ranked system with integrity, that's how you get players - Not by lying, hiding things from players, or creating fake grinds.

Someone who has a Radiant Act Rank triangle could have gotten it at the beginning of the Act - which was over two months ago. They could have not played for two months, came back to the game and had their skills atrophy. The match maker corrected them during/after placements.

Also players that may have been boosted in 5 stacks, came back and were corrected by the match maker.

I'm not saying that's always the case, maybe there is a bug or some weirdness going on. If there is an issue it isn't intentional. Lastly, we have gotten reports from twitter, reddit, devs, etc. and investigate quiet a few. Right now we are not seeing any match making changes that can't be explained by player skill changing, then the system correcting them.

It's only been a week, and we made big changes with leaderboard, turning on solo/duo, etc. Lots of people who haven't played in a while came back to see those changes, lots of players are pushing hard because it's a new episode, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is just beginning season shifting/movement.

That being said, we are looking for bugs. It's only been one week, we are just starting to get meaningful data and edge case bugs are appearing. We will always evaluate ranked and make sure it's healthy and queue looks good. Hopefully we can hit the mark for you with some of the changes we are looking into for future updates.