Valorant: The emerging problems with the ranking system

Screen Grab from Morello's Upload

What was expected to be one of the best features of Valorant is turning out to be one of the most frustrating experiences for the wider player base.

The ranking system in Valorant, which was meant to keep the shooter fresh and alive till a proper esports scene is established, is slowly becoming a rewardless grind which hardly anyone is looking forward to.

Truth be told, the game's ranking system has recently started to look an awful lot like that of the ranking in League of Legends. What was promised to be a system that would reward players with better mechanical skills- whether they win or lose- is now feeling like a never-ending grind with every game.

Upranking is becoming scarce no matter how well you play and how many matches you win, and tier drop happens as soon as you lose two games.

---

The frustrated Valorant player base

Recently, a Valorant player took to Reddit to rant about how the ranking system in the game is letting everyone down

In his post, the player (who goes by the Reddit handle of TheGaijin1987) stated:

“Honestly, every promotion I've gotten bar one has been on a 13-4 or lower, and it barely mattered the previous games behind it, as long as I wasn't stomped recently that is. As annoying as this'll sound, I imagine if you get a game where you smash the other team with a good scoreline, you'll rank up incredibly fast.”

Screen Grab from Reddit Post

He even shares a screenshot of his match history, which shows that he had 7 wins and 1 loss in the last 8 games of ranked. Even with the wins and an impressive KDA with three-match MVPs, he was still not able to get an uprank.

Riot had previously stated that the ranking system will be rather dynamic and will only reward truly good players. Reducing their rank drop rate and improving the chances of getting an uprank with every win (if they had good KDAs) is what the system is supposed to do.

However, it doesn’t seem like it has been doing so as the Reddit thread proves that TheGaijin1987 is not the only one facing the uprank issue.

---

In Riot’s Defence

Riot has been aware of the ranking issues that have been prevalent in Valorant recently. However, instead of choosing to hide the complications among their development team, Valorant’s lead character designer Ryan “Morello” Scott, decided to be transparent with the player base.

In a recent Twitch upload, Morello talked about the issues that the Valorant development team has been having with the ranked system. He says:

“Nobody owns [VALORANT’s] ranked system right now—this is a huge problem.”

By this, Morello meant that the person who was in charge of the workings on the ranked system (from a design perspective) has recently left Riot Games. This means that they currently have no one to speak to the player base when it comes to problems with ranked.

This was the primary reason why Riot was so silent about the MMR system in rank and hardly ever addressed player queries when it came to tier up-ranks and down-ranks.

However, Riot is working towards a more permanent solution to the problem and players will need to wait it out till the devs start fixing it.