[2021] Valorant Ranked Hotfix

Hiko has been complaining about ranked for a while, and this change was targeted at all ranks not just Radiant :)

Our competitive data analyst just had a great response to a Hiko feedback video; I highly suggest checking it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/nbqpep/hikos_thoughts_on_current_state_of_ranked/gy1vobs/

I see this feedback a lot that "Season X was better, why did they change it" or "Match making was so much better in a previous season"

We actually have not changed how the game determines MMR, or match-making, since launch. We did make one tweak, to help high MMR players(top 50 players in the world at the time) find matches faster. BUT that being said, the system isn't making different matches than it was in Episode 1.

You are getting the same matches you would have gotten 6+ months ago. The most significant difference now is that the community has been getting better since the launch of Valorant, and of course, we've added a bunch of content.

We also measure all of this, to see how often games really are a "stomp", skill gaps between players on teams, the skill fluctuation of players(if you have a good/bad day), and tons of other ways to try and measure "Ranked Health". Lastly, we also survey you, the players, and ask questions about ranked and gather data on the sentiment of the systems.

Again, if you haven't read it I highly recommend our analysts comment on how often stomps actually occur: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/nbqpep/hikos_thoughts_on_current_state_of_ranked/gy1vobs/

While I understand you're frustrated, Valorant has actually seen improvements in lots of the areas I've listed. While I think we can do better, I think there are often ideas that aren't really true thrown out without understanding the full picture. I'm not saying that your feedback, or how you experience the system, is a lie. I'm also not saying that ranked is perfect and should feel good for you, because for you it isn't.

What I am saying is that lots of times ideas get perpetuated, because people are looking for an excuse for why they aren't winning. It's very hard to hear that "sometimes players have bad days" your teammates aren't always boosted, or "sometimes players pop off" they aren't always smurfs. But that idea is hard to believe, when you want a reason why you may not be climbing or why you lost X game.

While ranked systems will probably always have negative feedback, because when players feel like they belong at a higher rank and aren't climbing it creates frustrations(I challenge you to find a ranked system where the community doesn't have complaints). We have to be able to take in feedback and see how we can make the experience better. Is the system perfect, no there is no perfect system. Is it as bad as people say it is, honestly no there seems to just be a few ideas that keep getting repeated over and over - which when we investigate end up not being true so we can't fix a problem that doesn't exist. But there are very real issues we want to fix, issues that I think cause complaints and the community starts snowballing them into bigger problems than they are.

I could write a ton on all the investigations I've done into specific players about boosting, smurfs, "I'm hardstuck" - all the beliefs on what the system is doing when in reality that's not the case at all - or even just influencers being mad they aren't #1 on the leaderboard, because they can't out grind a player of higher skill. We are constantly looking at all feedback, on top of surveys, on top of our data, upkeeping problem statements, and investigate if they are real issues and if we need to make solutions. We have some fixes planned to issues we believe can make the experience better, and we will continue to have discussions with the community on how to make it better for them(and us because we love playing Valorant as well).

My point is that we get feedback, like the above comment, where "Valorant is broken because of X" - when that X isn't true or doesn't exist. So then it becomes a "why does the player feel this way?".

We can't solve problems that don't exist. A great example is winners/losers queue. There is no such thing in Valorant matchmaking that does this, or even a reason matchmaking would make you think this occurs. So we wanted to figure out why people thought it did. After we investigated this issue, it seems to be confirmation bias that this happens. It doesn't matter how much it doesn't exist; if someone is adamantit does, they blame something that doesn't exist for why ranked is terrible.

Such issues like that, along with people that may not be climbing ranked because they reached their peak, perpetuate problems that aren't true and makes the space harder for navigating. Also, these ideas that don't exist or aren't true spread. A new ranked player gets upset about a losing a few matches, comes to Reddit and sees "Valorant ranked is broken, match making is busted since X time" then starts to wonder if that is why they are losing matches too. That player then goes on to believe ranked is broken, because of something that wasn't true to begin with. It's a vicious cycle, that is seen in every game that has a ranked system.

I'm just here to be transparent with the community, ranked isn't as bad as people think, but we are making it better where we can. I'm not here to make a system to give you a free rank you don't deserve, which unfortunately causes a large amount of negative feedback. I can try and make the frustrations or experiences better where there are known issues, and investigate and keep trying to solve for players that feel like there are problems. We are measuring data, player feedback on social media, surveying players directly, and constantly monitoring ranked queue health. There will always be things we are working on, and improvements we want to make, and ranked will always need updating in our eyes.

Right now we are investigating smurfs: https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/ask-valorant-may-6/

Investigating match making, working on a way for teams to play together competitively, looking into boosting, ranked health, and tons of other things all related to ranked. So maybe Valorant ranked is upsetting you, it happens we can't make everyone happy. But hopefully there will be an improvement that you feel makes the system better for you and solves your issue in the future. I wish we could get changes out quicker, but unfortunately, this stuff takes time and Valorant has been out less than a year(and we've already reworked ranked based on feedback).

Nah, it's a "might" because of how the change works and affects match-making.

It was actually two fixes; we wanted to make two tweaks, which affected low and high ranks differently. The diamond and below change probably won't see a match-making time change. immortal+ might, but it doesn't seem like it. We just wanted, to be honest, there is a chance.

When you tighten match-making, you are saying, "Grab from a smaller pool of players." so now, if there aren't enough players in the pool, you have to wait until there is. So that's why matchmaking time would increase.

On your first point, I agree that this feels bad. We are looking at making this "I'm above my MMR and getting pushed down" and trying to make it feel better. The hard part is that no matter what we do or what system we use, something like this will occur. This is because you will be held accountable to the rank you belong to at some point, and this is touching your second point a little bit, but there isn't secret math holding you back or holding ranks down. If a player groups with friends, and gets boosted, or if you are just win streaking, but that win streak is not enough to raise your MMR(but you end up ranking up from pure win/loss) there is a chance that you end up a rank above where you belong. Getting above your MMR is worse in our system because we eat your points when you hit 0 RR of a rank, which means we are deleting Ranked Rating from your rank without penalizing you for it, which leads to inflation of your ranked rating; but if we didn't have demotion protection, it might be a worse player experience so we accepted this.

Still, you have to think about what this looks like in any ranked system on your first point. Let us say we just showed your MMR; When you won a match you would get +3-10 MMR, and when you lost you would get -30. Sometimes you may win and get +15, or lose and get -10, this is because MMR fluctuates very hard and depends on your opponents MMR. But in the end, if your skill isn't good enough to raise your MMR(which is why the +16/-23 occurs), you won't climb. So it isn't easy because it doesn't matter if we sell the system differently to you; you will still eventually get to the rank you deserve. The idea "I'm getting +16/-23" doesn't go away, it just shifts blame to whatever part of the system is still holding you back. If you were around for the old system, this was essentially the same feedback "Why am I getting only +1 Arrow and -3 Arrows?" at that point, the system was pure MMR. So looking at your first point, there isn't a ranked system that has a solution for this because we have to hold you accountable for your actual skill. If you aren't actually performing and beating players above you consistently, then you won't climb and will be held to your actual skill/rank.

This leads to your 2nd point. MMR may seem like a magical thing and a problem for why you aren't climbing, but the concept is pretty simple. MMR is a ladder; when you do better and beat people above you on the ladder you climb up and push them down. The math we do is complex, but at the end of the day, beating players higher up the ladder will make you climb. I've seen so many ranked systems, ranked developers, and studios try to tell players that this is how it works and "Elo Hell" or being "Hardstuck" doesn't exist. Unfortunately, you end up feeling like you are hard stuck because eventually, you will get to your point in the ladder where you can no longer beat players above you. When you get to that point, you end up just sitting in that area bouncing up and down, because you will win and lose games, and that's the feeling that you are hard stuck or in "Elo Hell".

Remember that because ranked is a ladder, you have to improve to beat players above you and rank up; you also have to do it faster than the community. Every player is getting better at Valorant as time goes on. This is a side note, but I think that's why we see lots of debate on how to play the game when people try to compare it to CSGO. CS has decades of strategy, map knowledge, how to play the game, and very established skillsets that the community has solidified during that time. Valorant is almost 1 year old, is a tac shooter like CS, and we have lots of pro players from tons of different games coming to our game. A great way to think about it is that an immortal in beta is probably only about a plat-level player now because the community has learned so much and gotten better at the game as a whole. So again, you have to not only get better to beat players ranked above you; you have to get better faster than the community/ranked players around you as well.

Lastly, while AFK's suck, we want to fight them in other ways to your third point. We saw a massive drop in AFK players in matches when we rolled out the AFK penalties, which docked players -8 RR for AFK'ing. We have more systems to combat AFK and Toxic players, and those are all coming in future updates. Unfortunately, if you start to do things like "Team AFK Forgiveness," you create a toxic environment. What ends up happening is that players will begin to tell players to AFK to lessen the impact of a match that looks lost. AFK forgiveness creates a ton of issues:

1. Players will start to give up more often, and be willing to give up sooner instead of playing out the match to win, because someone can AFK and lessen the impact of a loss. This would lead to an increase in people giving up, mentally, before a match is over that could have been won.
2. Players are toxic and will gang up, usually on the worst performing player on their team, telling them to quit and create extremely toxic situations.
3. Players will have another reason to smurf or make alts to help boost friends, because then a friend could just AFK for you to help lessen the impact of a loss.

So while I definitely see the problem, and understand it's frustrating, we want a more active approach to remove AFK'ing completely from ranked. This isn't really my space, but I do work with the team that handles this. Again they have more coming and you'll probably hear about it in the future.

Also, while I did say I think there are parroted ideas in the community that aren't true and blame rank for things that don't exist - I don't believe that's an excuse or should be used to write off player problems. We are currently investigating match making, to see how we can improve it. We are currently investigating smurfs, to see how we can get them out of your games. We are currently making more systems to combat AFK/Toxicity. The things we are working, and even some of the issues you brought up, are definitely things we think we can improve. So while I can't solve problems like "Wow Riot I can't climb because of Winners/Losers queue" because winners/losers queue doesn't exist, we can solve the issues or make the system feel better that may be causing some of that feedback(or the assumptions that ranked has issues).

I hope that helps! That was long :P , and as always we are never going to stop working on ranked to make it better.

My main point wasn't to say "there isn't problems". There are definitely things we want to change, improve, etc. But I do think there are things that people blame ranked for, that aren't true or don't exist.

So my question to you is how do we fix ranked for someone blaming "winners/losers queue" for why they are losing when it doesn't exist?

We also measure community sentiment, in surveys, data, etc. It's very difficult to measure social media. If an influencer complains about ranked, or an issue, then lots of people will agree with them(even people who don't play ranked or Valorant at all). The stuff that we can measure, surveys and data, we have seen increases in ranked satisfaction since the overhaul and each update we've made. Because of this, we believe that yes there are issues, and things that the community may be upset by, but Ranked is not in the worst state it's ever been(as some claim it to be).

I've worked at Riot for 7 months. My salary or any money I make from Riot is not determined by how much money Valorant makes. In fact, I would worry about how my career would look if I were to leave Riot and people knew me as the "Guy who just designed to f*ck over players, to make money". At the end of the day you need a fun game to engage players, that's what makes you money. If you don't have a fun game, people don't play it, you don't get any money. Riot, so far in my brief 7 month period from them, has never made me or influenced a decision I've made to try and make more money for the company. My job isn't to make us money, it's to make a fun game. I've never met a dev at the studio level who isn't trying to improve the game and make it better for the players. We are making games because we are passionate, love the games we work on, and want somewhere to focus our creative energies.

If I really didn't care I wouldn't be active on social media, I could just ignore all of this. I could ignore the tough questions, give very generic answers, or just not be on social media at all. Hopefully I don't give off that aura, because Valorant and the community means a lot to me. I've never felt more empowered as a designer, to make cool things, then I have at Riot and I hope I can make changes and new content the community gets excited about.

As always, we are going to improve ranked and I hope if there is something that bothers you we can make that experience better.