There’s no doubt that ranked mode in Valorant has always had issues, especially in lower ranks. From high skill disparities and smurfs to unpredictable gameplay, this article will examine such issues and why it's hard to rank up.
Many people feel like they simply do not belong in their current rank in Valorant, and some even feel like the system is really against them. Riot have often addressed this issue within their patches and patch notes. Most recently in one of the Ask Valorant blogs in August, Riot have admitted that the ranked distribution is lopsided, and they hope to come up with a solution for it.
Ranked distribution is the population of players in each rank. Ideally, the goal is to have a normal distribution where the majority of players are located around the middle, being Silver or gold, and gradually less players are located in the far tails of the distribution, meaning the least or highest skilled players. An example of the perfect distribution can be seen below.
Looking at the actual distribution in Act I released by Riot below, the ranked distribution is far from perfect, with most people being in Silver and relatively few people in the ranks around that. Instead of a gradual increase or decrease, we see a large increase between Bronze and Silver, or a strong decrease from Silver to high Gold and Platinum.
Riot is aiming to adjust the ranked distribution to reduce the number of players in Silver and move everyone to more evenly balanced ranks.
One might ask, why is this happening? With all the people stuck in Silver, it proves there’s something wrong with the system. It's not uncommon when you play in a game, and you have that one person who carries the whole team who seems to be two ranks higher than the rest of the team. Or the other way around, one player who shouldn’t be able to play in the same lobby due to their lower rank. The top frags aren’t ranking up quick enough and the bottom frags aren’t losing enough MMR, so they all end up staying in that same rank, be it Silver or Gold.
There seem to be plenty of issues, but I will be discussing the issues that you can’t control. It doesn’t take too much to not be toxic, but you cannot control getting put into a game with two smurfs. Although this problem isn’t unique to Valorant itself, they seem to be elevated with the fact that some agents make it easy to pub-stomp games.
For example, you have agents like Reyna, whose kit design allows her to smurf without needing help from her teammates. Specifically, the fact that she can heal and disappear allows smurfs to easily stomp the game without relying on help from her teammates.
This problem with smurfs also causes the cycle of smurfing. When a player is constantly playing against smurfs at one point they’re going to get frustrated and eventually create a smurf themselves, and then someone else will do the same, thus repeating the cycle.
There is also the fact that Valorant doesn’t allow for third party matchmaking servers like FACEIT and ESEA in CSGO, which means that the top players don’t have an alternative to public matchmaking so it's not a huge stretch to think that they would just decide to stop try-harding and start smurfing with their friends for an easier time.
Another problem in Silver is the unpredictable ways people play the game. A player may struggle in Gold but breeze through Platinum, so it really depends on a case-by-case basis.
When a large portion of players are stuck in Silver, it's likely that the gap between the least and most skilled player in the server is pretty large. The people on the team with the best player might have an easy win, while the other team feels like the match was unfairly balanced. All the more reason for developers to aim for an even and smooth rank distribution, as people will be more likely to get grouped with evenly skilled players.
Riot is quite aware of these issues, as they have almost always discussed it in their developer blogs, so the question is what they can do now to address the problems with ranked to make it easier to find the right rank. As stated by Riot in October 2020, they have tried to implement a system to address this for anyone placed between Iron and Diamond.
The way the system works is that it tracks every player’s individual performance and notes when a player has a high impact on a game. With this info the system will automatically boost them to harder ranks up until they end up in their ideal rank. The system doesn’t work in Immortal and Radiant since they believe that there isn’t enough skill difference in these ranks for people to smurf.
Let us now wait and see if this system ends up improving the ranked distribution over time.
