How the VALORANT ranking system works has always been a mystery. Some people get an instant rank change after a single loss or defeat, whereas others have been on a winning streak but still struggle to rank up.
Note: You are reading an old article from 2021. So, the information may not be up-to-date.
There have been some tweaks made to the ranking system in the last couple of months. And that resulted in a lot of players with highly inflated ranks. Also, it’s not an uncommon case where the matchmaking system puts people with a wider rank variety together in the same lobby. A Riot dev has shed some light on these cases on Reddit.
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Riot Dev Reacts to Boosted Rank System
Riot’s Senior Competitive Designer for Valorant EvrMoar said the following as an example:
“Think of it this way. I’m using made-up numbers for this. So let’s say you have a match-making rating (MMR) of 450. Before the change, we said, You are Iron 2 if you are between 400 and 500 MMR.” It turns out that Iron 2 had too many players in it; we overestimated how many players would end up at that 400–500 MMR.”
So to fix it, we now say,
“You are in Iron 2 if you are between 400-420 MMR, and Iron 3 421-480 MMR, etc.”
The player that is 450 MMR would go from Iron 2 to Iron 3 without actually changing their skill/MMR. Because MMR is a reflection of the player’s skill, that number didn’t change.
TLDR: Your forward-facing rank doesn’t determine the players you match with; your hidden MMR does. The full thread can be found here.
Valorant is still pretty new; constant changes are being made to its matchmaking system and agents. It’s going to take a while for them to get things just right, as it is the same with every competitive game. Despite all the little mishaps, VALORANT is still growing its player base at a steady pace.
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