[2021] 16-18 score. Gold 3 in a plat lobby. "Team MVP." 3 arrows down? Huh??

I've been seeing a lot more of these posts recently, I've avoided commenting on them because we have so many changes coming to ranked.

I can probably explain this, it probably won't make you any less frustrated but it can help understand what is happening.

Okay so, as you climb ranks winning becomes more important then individual skill. Essentially you have two hidden ratings(most often called MMR in most games), one for your skill and one for your wins. In lower ranks your Skill MMR is a bigger factor in climbing ranked. As you go up in rank, that skill MMR becomes less of a factor and your wins against opponents becomes a bigger factor.

How MMR systems work is they take into account how likely you were to win/lose the game(since your opponent also has an MMR), which determines how much rank you gain/lose for beating your opponent. Unfortunately, you may have been the higher MMR team/players. So because you lost, you may have lost more because you were the better team with higher MMR. Our matchmaker is actually pretty good at creating fair games, and can get team MMR pretty close, but usually one team will have a slightly higher MMR then another. No two players can ever tie in MMR, so it is extremely difficult to make two teams that have the same MMR average(on top of connection, region, amount of players queing, etc.) - This is pretty standard across all competitive games.

So your win/loss MMR may have thought you were suppose to win, so now we have to look at your Skill MMR. Skill MMR is intensely complex, it can look at individual fights in a game and determine if you were suppose to win them. Yes you may be top fragging, but were you a reason your team took bomb sites? Did you lose lots of 1v1's with opponents that had much lower Skill MMR then you? The skill system, in my opinion, is very impressive. It takes in a huge amount of information from the match, and is constantly analyzing your performance. It also takes into account things other then kills, so that people that are utility monsters get the credit they deserve. Even placing a single smoke can raise your skill MMR in a match, just because your team might make a big play off of that smoke. It's hard to hear, but you may have slayed pretty well but lacked in other areas in this match(especially when put against your opponents). This could be a factor as well which could hurt your rank.

Lastly ties are a tough thing to handle in any rank system. The longer a match goes, technically the match maker did a good job and you guys are similar in skill. The problem is, you invest so much time playing that match and it sucks to put so much time into a match and have it not really effect your rank(even if you win). So if you were expected to win the match, then go into overtime, the MMR system is pretty confident that you were not as good as it thought. It's obviously not as bad as getting stomped by the enemy team, but it still is rough when a game you should have won goes for a long time and then you lose.

It's just a combination of those factors I listed above, which again won't take away the frustrations but hopefully give you an idea of what could have happened. Our team has worked extremely hard on ranked, and we hope that the new changes can alleviate some of the feedback/negative player experiences we've seen.

I'll be around, a ton, watching for feedback on the upcoming ranked changes. Good luck in your end of season climb! I'll be out there trying to get some ranks with everyone!

I definitely think stats, in general, help players understand their performance and track improvement. I also think it's just enjoyable to see numbers go up(Hello my addiction to Gacha and Idle games!).

This is a topic we are talking about, and will constantly be something we are thinking about as Valorant grows.