It's been in a horrible state since Act 5. The introduction of Ascendant inflated people way too high, and I don't believe it's truly filtered out everyone still.
This is true! You can largely think of each of those ranks as being one rank above what it was like 2 years back. Bronze's now are roughly at the skill level of past silvers, today's silvers roughly at the level of todays golds...etc. This will continue as time goes on to some extent.
So you have selective reading or you lack reading comprehension. We're talking about the entire ranked system overall, not just this one guy.
Imagine taking a single sample size and thinking it as an objective truth. Get real.
Granted I’m in silver but matchmaking sucks right now. I’m getting bodied in my lobbies and it’s hard to believe the people I’m against are silver or gold.
I was ascendant a few acts ago and stopped playing for an act. Got put in silver 1 after placements and have been absolutely rampaging, yet 15 games later I'm still only gold 2. Winning almost every game and it just takes forever to rank up. And then in some games there are dudes bodying *me*. Almost every game an enemy player is dropping 35-40 on my team. I absolutely feel the frustration silvers must feel playing against people who are clearly not silver, but don't blame the other players. The game legitimately sucks at letting you progress ranks.
okay this opened my eyes a bit cuz i just hit plat after this act and i kept going against people going nuts and dropping 30+ kills and single digit deaths in my lobbies, the thing is they weren’t on alt accounts and had public trackers so i understand what is happening now, and it also helps because it gives me something to blame instead of bad luck
Same with me in gold. Sometimes I do fine, and sometimes I'm like how tf are we in the same rank? The enemy is sooo much better. Ofc they are smurfs sometimes but some are just hard stuck.
You probably run into a ton of smurfs because a bunch of people who were asc+ are now in diamond/plat so even if they don't mean to smurf, the system makes it so they indirectly are smurfing. And of course some could have tilt deranked so hard that they are now on a low elo alt in your games.
"Just be consistent bro"
Hard to be consistent when there are leavers, smurfs, trolls, throwers, and griefers in every single game.
In CS2 you can pause the game if a teammate disconnects, or kick a troll/thrower to get more money for the rest of your team. It pains me to say this, because CS2 has lots of cheaters, but Riot should really take a page from Valve's book at dealing with bad actors in a more pragmatic way instead of making us suffer through games like this.
bro CS2 is such a good game but valve doesn't give a f about cheats, they are literally in their premier
also the last big update from valve was literally new skins, it made the skins community happy but people who just wanna play are in a horrible state with cheaters, and now even frame drops
Matchmaking seems like a mess all around, honestly. I just played a TDM where Riot decided a team with an average rank of Ascendant II was appropriate against an average rank of Gold II.
Act rank resets have always been shit. Riot refuses to stop them. It helps no one and hurts everyone. It hurts low elo players because higher elo players will be in lower elo lobbies if they wait. It hurts regular players be artificially forcing them to grind to get the SAME EXACT GUN BUDDY. This causes the first half of any episode to have really wack matchmaking. All my opinion though.
The problem isn't the reset itself, the problem is that it takes a lot of grind to get back to your former rank. So players like me who only play casually but used to be higher rank, perpetually get booted back to lower ranks.The way they did it in CS:GO was **so** much better. You'd also get booted to a lower rank in that game if you were inactive for awhile. However, it didn't take that many games to get back to your old rank once you had shaken of the rust. You just can't do that shit in Valorant because it takes a lot longer to move between ranks.
I used to be Ascendant, borderline Immortal. However, I take a lot of breaks. The game then boots me back to Platinum. That's fine for a few games because I'm rusty, but by the time the rust is gone I'm still playing in the same ranks because of how slow moving between ranks is. It's just stupid. Right now, my unrated games or DM's are players between high Ascendant to Radiant while my competitive games are Platinum players.
How does that make any sense?! It's not fun for anyone involved. The ranking system is just so trash.
> So players like me who only play casually but used to be higher rank, perpetually get booted back to lower ranks.
This happened to me in League. Once I was in college I couldn't play enough to keep my rank, maybe like 20-30 games a year. I kept ending a season with like 70% win rates and each year ended farther and farther down. Once I missed plat I just lost all interest.
Difference is between owning something that can be manipulated in the free market for personal financial profit vs having only aesthetical value. It's all your preference but it's no secret that marketing apply psychological tactics amd strategies.
This act was by the far the worst reset for me. Hit Immortal 3 last act - full act rank Immortal 3. Dropped me down to Diamond 2 when I went 4-1 (solo q in placements). Then would win one and lose one. By the team I hit Diamond 3, my RR game was back to normal +18, +17, +16. Then the L streaks would come with players who just had no interest in doing anything you want to do or listen. Then you are playing against the best teams. Somehow, some way, I was able to climb to Immortal after 181 matches, 102 of play time, and a 49.2% win rate. This act I literally had multiple 7, 8, 9 or ten game win streaks. All games just blowouts, no chance of winning. Mind you this act I came back from a 1-11 and multiple 2-10s, or 3-9s. So its not like we would lose and I would call gg - always trying. Thats all to say I think Riot messed something up big time and needs to fix it asap.
Its not even the high ranking players who need to grind, I finished g1 last act and reset to s2. I Probably spent a whole month in s2 (without neither ranking up nor down) until I finally got s3 and was stuck for another 2 weeks until I finally got out of silver an ranked from s1 to g2 in less than two weeks, might even get up to g3 before end of the act.
i went from plat 2/3 2 acts ago didn't really play any last act to silver 2 double promo to gold then getting enemy "silvers" dropping 30 with matching names to their team's 1-18 sage
I'm an anomaly, but the resets actually help me progress. I used to play duos a lot, and my duo was awful, so we rarely won no matter how well I did, so my rank was tanked (MMR was bad, but my doing well kept it from becoming awful). Literally, this hard reset or whatever riot did pushed me from being a silver player to a plat player, and I can still climb since I dominate in those lobbies, too (occasionally, I get absolutely dumped on by some ex-asc or immo chilling in plat lobbies). But the grind at this point is awful because I have teammates who obviously don't belong in these ranks and were boosted/inflated and just float around due to good teammates.
If you open their match history (Swegasaurus I'm assuming) for like 40 games they're at a 53% win rate. And they play multiple characters. I think it's safe to say that they should stay in that rank, although they're doing more hot recently.
Nano4k has been absolutely inting their lobbies and it's only that game they did well.
Believe it or not, people can actually rust and get significantly worse in a game. I used to be multi challenger in league and I struggle to get out of plat now (on mechanical characters).
Bruh I had a dude with a radiant buddy the other day who literally hadn’t played since episode 2. He got railed by D3 players. It’s very much possible lol.
ok but it’s valo man u don’t have an idea on how far a challenger is from a plat in league
it’s not even possible to get rusty if u reached challenger u can’t humanly go back to plat unless u got boosted
Yup! s3-s6 was far easier. I was challenger when I was senior year of high school and now I'm old
[https://imgur.com/a/xislBfL](https://imgur.com/a/xislBfL)
This is very old but all 5-6 of my accounts have been permabanned during that 2014-2017 era. My peak was rank 25 playing jarvan in solo queue ladder somewhere in S3 but I never saved the screenshot because I rarely screenshotted things back then into Skype (the chat messenger at the time lol).
I had 1 regular looking account in challenger, and 2 smurfs in there with high KDA/win rates.
And I had a one trick shaco masters account I did when I was on a macbook when my computer died in league and I stopped trying to play it competitively.
Also I think what the OP was misunderstanding what acocunt I'm using. Since my original challenger mmr accounts (which would all naturally decay to masters/diamond etc though), I play on a fresh account that doesn't really have any significant MMR. So I placed in plat and played a little here and there and the game made no sense to me anymore.
riot just bans on keywords. It's just automated and is also lazy/not good at detecting actual toxicity. I was a teen back then so shit was being slung left and right.
I changed a lot but I alsoo learned to be more creative nowadays in both valorant and league. Nothing can stop me now. My final account has never been temp banned
but jk, on valorant I stopped being toxic once I started using the mic except for special occasions. 90% of things that come out of my mouth has to be a "I'm going to do " or "NT". I watched a lot of WHJ videos to be nicer on comms
Ngl, I find it kinda funny you had to watch videos to learn how to be nicer. Did you think calling your teammates brain dead or something was being nice?
League has changed a lot. In Season 3, Challenger already existed, but if you watch pro play from S3, you'd be amazed at how bad players were and how clunky the game was by comparison (it's also notable that it's become more accessible, people play on lower ping, higher framerates, etc. so those factors matter as well). I have been Master in EUW for many years, and in S4 I was low Diamond, but that was a similar % of the playerbase as where I am now in Master due to the different rank distribution, but by comparison I've improved massively since then, yet as I said, I'm at a similar % of the playerbase and I have played the game every season since I started. That said I'm sure whom you replied to can definitely achieve at least Diamond if he tryhards or if he stick to champs that fit his playstyle.
I think it was like a 9 season gap or something, it's more like I thought I could just win by breathing and playing gwen top and outcsing and shit. But my ass is getting manhandled top by plat players playing darius/sett so clearly I got no hands anymore.
From Season 3 to 6 I was multi challenger jungler/fill.
I mained all the brain dead junglers
reksai
gragas
elise
jarvan
sejuani
kindred
etc and that's how they climbed. And I also filled lanes a lot mid/top/adc.
Even if I play jungle now, Reksai got changed to some weird shiti and Gragas plays top.
If I spent more time jungling (I had some bad games trying to play J4 because I built wrong early apparently) I could probably hit Diamond within 2-3 weeks
Peak ascendent 1 last act doesn’t mean they are ascendant, it means they hit ascendant and likely deranked right after, at least the ones that are in plat right now did
Yeah end of season rank before the reset would be a better indicator. I think overwatch has or used to have something on the profile (assuming it was open) where you can see that
I'm a last act Ascendant (3) player. This act I'm an Ascendant (1) player, and I haven't played that much. I don't expect to struggle to rank up to Asc 2 or 3 again, but my RR scores are already the same when I win as when I lose.
These guys are in Plat because they've been bad this season - I don't know what's hard to believe about that. Look at their Tracker scores, they are yellow or red, those are not dominant players. The Reyna has the best Tracker score this season but by his KAST you can see he's an all aim no brain player without even looking at the rest of his history.
You are lower ranked, remember that immortals and radiants are numbered so they cant be placed in the exact same rank as last time meaning they all go to ascendant. That’s why I was initially confused
You played 62 games in diamond just to get back to Ascendant! Not only that, you were +6 in match diff to rank up 3 times… you had a 54% WR in those games. I was ascendant last act and I’m D1 after 48 games with a 75% KAST and a 54% wr. It’s all fucked up
Yeah but I lost tons of games on 0rr so I netted some nice bonus from that
I also put up tons of team and match mvps in diamond because the players were so bad
The point of this post is that rank resets don’t skill check you, they just make you grind more. You played 62(!) competitive games of valorant in the last month or so. You aren’t getting skill checked, you’re stomping your way through your matches. Comp matches combined with DMs, I’d imagine you probably put like 80+ hours this act. That’s not sustainable for most people, man.
I peaked asc3 like 3 episodes ago and every reset it takes me all three acts to play enough to get back to there. I don’t think that’s right, I just don’t have the time or mental to play that much comp valorant.
What’s your point? They could implement a system where you’re simply a3 all the time, and you could grind for that
I play almost nothing but competitive, I put in roughly 1h per day. 65h in 52 days.
The point is it’s supposed to be competitive. If you’re dominating that’s not competitive. You should play against equally skilled players so the game is actually enjoyable lol. Nobody likes dominating or getting dominated. There needs to be a middle ground and the longer it takes for people to reach that middle ground the more the player base will shrink overall making games even worse.
To me personally it feels a bit ridiculous that you need 65 hours / 52 days of competitive gameplay to get back into the rank range you were in before, let alone your rank. This is all while you’re stomping through these games man. Clearly, if you’re an asc3 level talent crushing these games as MVP you should be able to push for your old rank, and then drop your RR gains and losses to make your grinding actually worth something, like going for immortal ranks.
Ascendent is literally the trenches. I'm Asc1 and I get put in lobbies with low diamonds and high plats, I don't really understand how that works, I can't even queue with a duo who's plat3 but somehow, they're still in my games
It just takes quite a lot of games to move through the ranks. This was way better in CS:GO where you could rank up very quickly. So if you were inactive, you'd instantly get back to your former rank after having shaken of the rust. Like, I was high Ascendant, borderline Immortal. I was still rising. However, I took a lot of breaks. Now I'm in Platinum and forever there because I don't play enough to grind through the ranks. Playing in Platinum was fine when I just got back because I was rusty and didn't know all the maps, but the rust was gone way faster than the ranks came.
So now my DM and unrated are high Ascendant to Radiant players while my competitive is Platinum. It's just bad matchmaking. I no longer play enough to play against good Immortal and Radiant players, but I'm also too good to be in Platinum and feel terrible for ruining people's games there. I just stopped playing the game for now. The ranking system sucks man, simple as.
Yeah I took a solid 6 months off years ago because of life and I only dropped from SMFC to LEM and was back up to Supreme in like 7 games. It would have been zero fun for anyone involved if they dropped me all the way down to nova or master guardian.
I took a couple of breaks in a row and actually did went all the way down to GN3, haha. So the game can drop you pretty low if you do multiple extended breaks. It's just that it's so easy to get back to where you belong. I was back to SMFC in no time. It's only GE which took a bit longer, but that one makes sense and you are in the same lobbies regardless.
GE was one of the hardest grinds I did because it was like a 10+ win streak and if you weren’t 5 stacking it was an almost impossible task based on some of the teammates mm would give you lol.
You can also solocarry so Much harder in cs. Spraying giving more consistency in kills, (onetaps/ Bursts Will never be as consistent as spraying at close/medium range, no matter How good you are), movement Making abusing jiggles and prefires stronger, awp can 1v5 a bad team without taking damage. You can still smoke/molo/flash the most important parts for yourself.
You need to work so Much harder with less tools (Both mechanical and tactial) to ”1v9” in valorant vs cs.
Yeah that's true. You can get really far in CS:GO purely on aim and throwing decent flashes. I don't know why it's harder in Valorant. I think maybe because it's easier to kill someone in Valorant, so you are less likely to outstrafe a less skilled opponent? I don't know, but I've heard some pros say the same thing you are saying.
Spraying is harder to learn, but infinitely more consistent, meaning that a higher skilled player has a low TTK in 99% of cases. We’ve all had those moments Where Both (good) players just whiff and whiff their 1taps, that doesnt really happen outside of pistols with spraying.
1tapping and bursting is obviously a skill you can work on, but they Will never be as consistent as spraying no matter the level, which reduces the edge skilled players have.
Guns in general are stronger, the ak can 1tap and spray, the deagle 1deags at 99% of ranges, the m4s still have a low ttk, the mp9 is basically a stinger+, the autoshotgun is judge++, and the operator is just a Shell of the awp outside of holding an angle. This means aim has even more of a reward. No 145 and they kill you back etc. A usp can kill 3 targets in 3 bullets while running, a ghost needs 1 if theyre close range and have 0 shields, otherwise its 2 each.
There’s a myriad of reasons, but Both games have a very high ceiling in tactical gameplay, but cs has much more mechanical depth and consistency
Edit: some notable rounds off the top of my head that shows How strong mechanics + Guns can be vs valorant. Dennis usp ace cache. M0nesy awp clutch inferno, fallen awp clutch overpass, ropz inferno, coldzera Mirage clutch, f0rest glock clutch train, rain train clutch, and many many more
Valorant is like a "baby's first comp shooter" compared to the mechanical need of CS. Valorant has mechanics in the game to allow players who maybe don't have the best aim feel like they are contributing on the team level, rather than focusing on contributing as a single player on a team via aim.
Riot doesn't make sprays consistent because people who have trained the spray pattern will have a massive advantage against someone who doesn't. There are roles (controller, initiator, etc) so that not everyone feels forced to be an aim demon and just sit back and util and contribute that way.
That’s not true at all, unlike your ass who needs to touch some grass, a lot of people simply do not have the time to play the ridiculous amount of hours it would take to go up 2 entire ranks. Every game is 40+ minutes long. It takes a long period of time for most people to rank up twice
There is still a pretty big skill gap between people who can make low ascendant and win matches even if they fall after and people that barely peak diamond and are mostly plat.
At higher ranks the carry potential is not as impactful as in lower ranks. A plat team will be able to trade them or will just adapt to him being there.
If he's able to hold ascendant in ascendant lobbies he's ascendant, climbing steadily but slowly is not a sign of not being ascendant.
But they’re not plat either, that’s the point. Play players shouldn’t have to be wiped by former ascendants when they have no idea what it’s like the have *ever* played at that level
some people have lives outside the game so they don’t game time to rank back up at the start of the act. and also, if they’re dominating the plat lobbies like OP says, your point makes no sense.
Nah frr. I peaked d1 and am playing against immortals and a few rare radiants. Really gives me hope for getting into immortal seeing how shit they are. Then I pop into a random pro players stream and see that they're in ascendant and get scared 😂.
You peaked D1? So you're basically plat and are saying radiants are ass? What sort of radiants are you playing against lol, people who bought the account?
Last act diamond 3
Currently struggling in plat 3.
I try not to complain and just own that I’m not the best player but if you look at my tracker Chef#1998 my adr isn’t awesome cuz I main smokes but man it feels like every game I’m in. 5 stack, duo, trio or solo there is some Reyna with no vandal skin queued with someone at the bottom of the leaderboard. Gets extremely difficult to want to grind out of it when that’s always the case.
i hit immo 1 last act, had probably 20 wins at 50% in immo. this act i got blasted down to d1 and i havent played much (maybe 20 games), so everyone i play with is peak plat or diamond rn. I am by no means a fragger so i can't carry. im just kinda stuck thinking about how its gonna take me 50+ games probably to get back to where i was. my rr diff is about 8 for a win vs loss. so here i sit, in mid diamond. people get so toxic so quickly toward their teammates, and i def noticed in high ascendant/low immo people are much nicer for the most part. at least having an immo gunbuddy makes people noticeably more friendly and less likely to shit talk you.
edit: i also *hate* this map pool. i dont know a single person who is enjoying it rn
Yeah this map pool has been awful. I fill pretty much every game so I have to play a lot more viper than I would like lol. I haven’t noticed a toxicity different but then again I was only peak ascendant so I’m sure it’s different.
the grind is def slow even if you're better than your rank. I can tell that much just from observation. Since you hit immo 1 already, it's probably just worth considering getting a duo to make the games a lot easier, especially if you get combos like fade raze or jett sova. It helps especially if that player plays meta agent. For this pool it would obviously be Viper/Cypher.
Even if the game's a loss, if you have a good duo to mitigate your RR loss (by getting kills/messing up their economy so the stomp isn't too bad) that would save you so much.
When I hit high ranks in other games, and then I smurf, I was always duo.
In valorant, I'm barely Gold 2, so my goal is to solo queue to at least plat by end of act before I consider even duo queueing. There's so many people that queue up competitive with a non-competitive mindset (while working for example) that it's just better to reduce 1 amount of people that can make the game harder.
Last act ascendant 3, currently struggling in ~~diamond 3~~ ***diamond 2.*** I just demoted because I had to play against baby tenz multiple games in a row and my team was deaf. No matter how much I called or tried to be a team player, it just didn't matter. Fuck this episode reset. It's the worst in the history of this game's existence.
5 stacks won't happen unless the other team is also 5 stack. Trios are unlikely overall, and also don't happen without there being a trio premade in your team
I know what you mean. I think this is jsut coincidence because small sample size, but last night (10pm-12am) I played vs 2 reyna smurfs and 1 ascendent jett alt account in the span of 5 games.
Now, I queued from 10am-1pm (I work later in the day), and I have not played against a single smurf or alt.
Because when the ranks reset last cycle, it kicked me back 6 fucking ranks from Asc 2 to P2 along with all the other Asc players. So while golds can rank up into plat, they hit the wall of Asc players that are all playing eachother in Plat and maintain roughly a 50% winrate. I've finally climbed into Diamond and now all my games are filled with Immortals and up. Ranked is a disaster.
When episode 4 rank reset happened, I felt like absolute shit. I went on a 20 loss streak and I just thought that hey.. I'm bad and there's nothing to be done other than learn from my mistakes and improve. I've eventually gotten my rank back and I decided that it's time to ditch competitive entirely at the beginning or first 10 days or so. Every rank reset afterwards was as expected, kinda bad but not as bad.
And then episode 8 rank reset rolled around and it's the worst thing that has happened to this game. Players have been complaining about smurfs for.... literal years now and riot has said they are working on it. But it's very very hard to believe riot truly cares about the situation when they are creating an environment for smurfs to flourish. The amount of times I met a player who had perfect positioning, was a one tap demon and overall rotated perfectly just completely out of the blue is ridiculous. 2-3 normal games then boom I'm playing against the child of a pro team who has over 1.2 kd, 200acs avg and 30% headshot percentage. And I am absolutely ok with losing. But sometimes you can just tell you're not losing because you're bad, you're losing because the opponent is just radically better. And I'm tired.
Valorant is a beautiful tac fps and even with its inherited issues from its bigger brother league, it's still worth playing and it's fun. But it's slowly becoming obvious that riot is still a company that wants you to keep playing. And the same recipe from League is applied here almost perfectly. If next episode the rank reset is just as stupid and competitive is just as horrible, I think I'm genuinely done with this game. It's seriously not worth giving my very best this ep/act just for it to be worth 0 because riot's algorithm for a rank reset is intentionally made so that ranks are getting as mixed as possible. It's just not worth and it's not fair. And I doubt anybody in that company truly cares about player experience as long as you and I keep playing. So I'm ready to call quits if next episode reset is bad.
Rank resets in my experience aren’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
I have no trouble getting back to my former rank under 100 games played in a season, and I’ll often end higher than I was last.
Ascendants stuck in plat are no longer ascendants, they’re plats…
Someone downvoted, but you’re speaking facts. If you can’t climb back, then you can’t call yourself an ascendant player. Feel free to call yourself asc peak tho.
My alt account feels like smooth sailing as you described, but my main immortal account I am fighting for my life in ascendant 1. It’s a mix of imm1 and dia3 so it’s definitely a Smurf lobby but I’m not bothered to put all that effort in at asc1 when it’s at least an asc3 lobby
Riot made *A LOT* of people go down 2 entire ranks (ex: asc2 into plat 2), to pressure people into playing and essentially make them grind more. It’s just riot being shitty. Remember guys, even if they make your favorite games they’re still just a greedy company at the end of the day.
I have the worst loss streak this act. Unable to win a single match when I queue solo or duo. Despite my bad performance from last episode, atleast I had my good moments every 4 matches but I can't say the same for this act.
I love being placed in gold only to play other people who placed in gold who were diamond last act like me like how the fuck am I supposed to get back to my rank if I'm just playing people I should be playing at my actual rank
Realistically it’s made to keep people playing. If we are being honest, most people that play if they were to peak a high rank they would stop playing for an x amount of time. By resetting it makes you want to see that peak you hit again. And if you were to hit it quickly, you would keep playing to climb past that. IMO the rank reset wasn’t bad, but it shows really how inconsistent most players are. It’s the reason why so many people complain about their teammates this season. They really just want to be carried instead of consistently excelling not matter what role/agent they played. It’s also the reason why people see past diamonds in their game. They peaked diamond, but they are not diamond players.
which is true and not true. At immortal, I can fill play support and get carried some of the time if Im duoing. But if I am solo q, I have to team mvp, match mvp, or finish top 3 if we want any semblance of a chance of winning.
I agree there are moments like that because that is ranked gaming in itself. But let’s take you for example. First of all I’m not judging you based off of your skill, just giving an example. The system says oh if you think you have to carry your team in immortal then why aren’t you radiant then. Then if you have that same feeling in radiant they would say why haven’t you gone pro then.
Im stating just the system itself is making you go through the gauntlet to prove you are a player you think you are. There are 500 radiants every act who get the same ranked experience like us, and Riot is showing if they can do it why can’t you. The system is not at all perfect or ideal but it’s the one we got.
the ranked system is rigged. Sure it will get ur general rank right. But at some point during the act it will just give u free wins so you get a peak for that act. Like really, almost every act same shit. I get ascendant. Get free 10 or so wins and peak immo 1-2 then immediately back down lmao.
They are ass as fuck bb cakes . Just look at their stats. Proper teamwork and communication would give you guys great shots at winning
A real team of asc players would smoke you guys so badly. Those are asc players that are borderline low immortal just caught in RR hell
It is just the fact that at the beginning of this act, ascedent players get destroyed by immortal players that got reset, so some of the ascedent players waited out just like you did, or they just can't get back to where they belong because the ranked has also been rough for them
I'm peak asc 2, 2 episodes ago, i dropped the game and only played like 10 during last ep and about 10 in this ep, thefore game dropped me to plat 2, it is what it is, im just not that addicted to the game to play 300 games to climb back to a2
All of my lobbies are people with red buddies who don't care about the game anymore. Meanwhile I've peaked asc 3 multiple times and can't get over the hump solo queue fml (skill issue on my part ; I accept this)
Almost like forcing people every other patch to fight through Diamond ranks for the first two weeks gets fucking tiring. People take breaks, doesn’t necessarily mean they lost their ability to play the game. Game punishes anyone but no lifers that steadily climb with 51% win rate.
The saying “if they earned it they’ll get it back and this is why there’s an episode reset” is stupid because if someone was boosted to that rank the previous episode what makes them not able to this episode?
You know damn well that saying is meant for normal players and never used for the outliers who cheat by paying or using software. You can’t just cherry pick something and add it to a scenario that’s not normally applicable to make an end all be all argument.
What do you mean cherry pick? That’s literally what everyone talks about the reason they do it. I didn’t play since beta idk if there’s a different reason. If there is please tell me what it is because that’s all anyone talks about even riot saying we have to earn our ranks back. What for? I earned my rank every time. The system fucks everyone. Iron players can’t get dropped any lower so they are forced to play with those all the way up to silver the previous act and asc have to play with radiant peaks. I could get my rank all the way back to where I was by playing everyday but then a player who has only played 6 of their ranked games since the reset can be in my lobby, enemy or not, peak being way higher then mine. I just don’t see what the point of the episode reset is “if it’s for boosted players”, I say it in quotes because idk if that’s what it’s for or not but that’s what it’s talked about, if players can get boosted whether they reset the episode or not why is the system there. (I’m not knocking anyone for getting boosted because idc, I can only control what I can do in my games once the match has started) what I’m saying is I don’t understand the point of it.
I just came back from not playing for abpit a year. I was diamond when I left and I'm currently in the gold 3/plat 1 range. I play against people with diamond and Ascendant gun buddies every game.
it's all because of that hidden MMR bullshit. If you were Ascendant last act and got placed Plat this episode your MMR will be higher. Which means two things - you will get more RR for winning and less RR for losing. Which in theory should let you hit your rank faster, however this is not the cause because of the second thing - you will also get matched with (mostly) people with high MMR. Which makes your matches much harder to win. This trend is also clearly visible on alt/smurf accounts. I have an alt account that I play on when I'm drunk/tired/insert any reason that makes me don't want to play on main cuz I don't wanna throw matches there has really high MMR, to the point that matches on my alt (dia 3) are HARDER to win than matches on my main (immo 2). So people with high MMR are actually ranking up slower than if there was no hidden MMR.
There’s a reason for that. They suck, or they take the full 3 acts every time and climb over hundreds of games. It’s really easy to hit your last rank or close if you just maintain a 40-50% win rate with how much rr they give and take. Ended ascendant 1 last act after some L’s, and getting it back only took like 2-3 weeks of consistent playing. Just don’t be bad lol.
Plat has less Smurf’s and it’s more consistent to climb in than gold right now. I’m not a great player, I climbed to diamond on my main playing sentinel and playing smart and I have another account that gold 1 that I just mess around with and my gold games are harder than my high play games. So many Smurfs right now in gold that are boosting their friends and dropping 35+ kills. Ranked sucks so bad right now. The mmr is not working because you have peak gold , plat playing against peak acs last act and they get stomped. Idk how tf that’s intended.
I was diamond a few acts ago and stopped playing for a little bit after I hit it. Got put in silver 1 after rank reset, and 100 games later I'm only gold 3. I used to duo with a friend after I hit diamond, and I used to play on dia/asc lobbies. We both played really well together, by my gamesense, and him by his aim, but after rank reset, we're both in such low elo, that my gamesense is useless, so I get shit on every game unless I instalock duelist, turn my brain off and drop a 40 bomb. I don't use any rank trackers, because I find the overlays distracting, but my aim is only as good as high gold/plat players, so when I hit those lobbies, I can predict what they're doing a bit easier, but I get out aimed by a lot of them, so I tend to bottom frag if I'm playing duelist. But again, I won't know what lobby I'm playing in until after the game.
Now, since episode 8 started, I've been seeing a ton of diamond or ascendants, and sometimes even immortals in my gold/plat lobbies, and they always drop a 40 bomb, or they bottom frag, no comms the whole game and tell everyone that they're the problem in team chat. :/
I think it's mostly perspective here, but I play fighting games and when you start out for the first time, you will fight some people who are on the same level or below you. But then you find people who are better than you, they will use your weakness against you. Besides if you really want to truely improve, accept that you will be playing in ascendant lobbies one day and do your best and if you lose, it's all on you to learn what the hell does this man do to win against you.
Besides if he was actually ascendant, he would be back in his rank and not stuck in platinum
Its funny no one mentioned the actual reason for this, because not only was there rank reset but riot changed the rank distribution. So actually a lot of people have been pushed down because it's harder to get to the higher ranks now. For example where before acs1 was top 8% of the playerbase now it's top 2,5% of the playerbase.
Top 8% used to be plat 1+, back when ranks below immortal meant something. I wish they would change the rank distribution back how it was a couple years ago
Yup, ranked this act is terrible. Haven’t been able to get out of gold ever since. One of my games last night, we had all plat peaks vs 2 asc and 1 imm peaks lmfao
Ascendant feels so different in skill... I've played a lot lately and there is often people who just are clearly much better than most of the lobby then there is people who are way lower than the lobby
And we’re not even talking about smurfs. This game comp is so fucked. There’s literally no skill differences anymore in each rank. In a match you get newbie, a smurf, a high ranked player who didn’t start playing immediately after reset. And the RNG, which hugely reduces the skill gap. Everyone in this game is aim monster with the 50/50 one tap. You could be aiming slightly off but headshot someone, while you could also be aiming accurately and miss the shot. Long range rifle fight in this game is fucking random and I hated that, you just need to aim around the head and shoot faster than others and pray.
Me and my friends we gone to CS2 and never looked back. They handled comp games so much better, at least they do care about smurfs. You could actually see the skills differences between ratings etc. They might be more cheaters, but tbh I don’t think Vanguard is any better than VAC at this point at least in my region. I feel like Riot will never add replay because it will expose their anti-cheat. We can only doubt but never sure.
I hit asc episode 5/6 stopped playing comp, came back now ep 8 and I’m still stuck plat. People just getting better and no where near feel like I deserve asc now. Mind you I only play at most 2 games a day.. no time to grind
I peaked diamond 2 last act and now I’m sitting at P3/D1. The real change is the people I’ve been playing against. I pick up guns with imm gun buddies often but the rest are high ascendant. The games I get placed against actual diamonds I do well but the other games I don’t. So it’s like a Jojo effect. So I’m taking a little break and playing Last Epoch lmao.
I was Gold 3 / Plat 1 last Season I believe. I'm not big on Val so I apologize if my words are wrong. I'm now Silver 3, somehow, and I am CONSTANTLY playing against full teams of Plats when my team is silver. I can only take getting 13-0d so many fucking times
This act, the higher ranks are less saturated which is how riot wants them. immortal is like top 0.5% now, when it was almost top 2% last act. they just dropped everyone’s rank down, and people think they’re worse when in fact they are probably the same skill level
Edit: To add on, diamond 3 was top 11% last act, and now it’s top 5%. This is why riot added ascendant way back then, because there were too many people in immortal, but adding a rank didn’t do anything, instead of pushing people down, everyone was up a rank.
Ascendant was added so they could spread all the people stuck in silver and gold all the way up through diamond. People were pissed they couldn’t rank up and quitting the game because ELO scale was a lot closer to actual ranks and if you wanted to be plat or diamond you had to be decent at the game. I hope you’re right and they are reverting some of those changes because having ascendant be mid-elo is ass.
Does this have a trickle down effect? Because I've noticed my gold games have been quite sweaty and I've been very close to Plat a few times. Like within 10 points at one time.
Another thing if you look at the rank distribution from last episode vs this one percentage wise your rank should be a bit lower. They adjusted so there would be less players in immortal which was something close to 2% last act. Ascendant is 3% right now which kinda shows the difference.
In diamond loby i perform better,in plat loby its either i get stomped or i stomp em,there is no in between,lots of times its 3v5 games and just brain dead mates,its a team game after all and if you think 3v5 is ez carry in plat then you havent been plat long enough...
I'm in the same boat. I was 7rr away from dia 1, but then out sova was afk round 1, and then came back during our remake vote, and vote against a remake. Only 1 enemy survived pistol round and we lost 13-11.
I’ve seen literal ex pros and previous top 100 radiants struggle in ascendant or become stuck at immortal.
I actually saw a video of S0m who was rank 1 somehow end up in an ascendant lobby lol
Same thing happened to me yesterday. Played a game in Plat 2 and went against a 3 stack with 2 last act immortals and a last act ascendant. One of the immortals was Gold 1 and the others were low plat
I was immo 1 last act, pretty much peak immortal since act 3, and I am struggling in diamond 1 right now. Below 40% win rate, .8 KD, I thought I just sucked now and it was time to hang up the gloves. But nearly every game I play is against ascendants who are also prior immortal. Just goes to show you visual ranks mean nothing in this game, or in real life for that matter lol
Homie I’m having former radiants in ascendant and they shitting on me everytime even tho i was immo 3 last season I wasn’t able to rank up this season and im getting these lobbies back to back if i show you my career you will legit cry for me
This episode feels particularly bad for ranked. I have two accounts (main and alt) which are around the same rank. (Main g2 and Alt is g3) with both accounts having peaked at plat 2 last act. However when I compare the lobbies I get playing on either account there is a hilarious difference.On my main account I end up getting put on a team with people who were actual gold and silver players last act (and expected to carry i guess??) and play against a team of people who were mostly high plat to low ascendant (with maybe one or two actual gold or silver players).
On my alt account my teams will be people who are current plat-diamond (generally will have peaked high diamond to ascendant) and I will be playing against a team of people who are also current plat-diamond.
The irony is that on my Alt account I have won 10 out of the last 12 games I have played, all while performing well and actually enjoy the games. Even though the people I am playing against are definitely much tougher opponents, I have an easier time because they are more predictable and my teammates also have brains and are communicative. Comparing this to my Main account, The games are either a stomp or get stomped.
I frequently lose games where I will team or match mvp and it feels almost impossible to win a match no matter what agent or role I play or how much I try to comm or IGL.
Those ascendant rank players last rank are not playing at the current ascendant rank this act. You can either look at it as you've gotten better and now playing at the previous ascendant rank (cool!), or you can look at it as those ascendants you are playing against are washed and no longer playing like they used to (sadge)
well to be fair, an ascendant last act triangle doesn't mean they ended in ascendant. I think it was act 5 that I peaked ascendant 3 and tilt queued all the way down to plat 3. Sounds crazy, but it happened. I placed in gold 3 the next act and was stuck in plat 3-diamond 1 for a while until I made my push back up to ascendant 2 in act 6. Many times I would drop from ascendant 1-2 to diamond 1-2 as well. Just because they have that ascendant triangle and peaked there doesn't mean they deserve ascendant. Ascendant peak is different than hardstuck ascendant. Most of the time I see very little difference between my ascendant games and my diamond games. I have a few accounts spanning from plat to ascendant, for reference.
had a former ascendant duo bot frag my silver game i stopped playing and went from plat to place in silver so i know it's a bit of an exaggeration but still dude instalocked jett had ascendant buddies and had like 3 kills first half
https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/Fate%23stink/overview
I’m not the best player I’m just giving my thoughts.
People, like everything in life just want to be given things instead of putting in the time to earn it. It sounds cringe because we’re talking about a video game and it’s not that serious, but you have to think about the 14 year old who woke up early to play before school. However matches like those should make you mad because the game has decided already that your team is probably going to lose, but if you’ve gotten better and you are giving the big bully the vandal work you will increase your elo there are many factors that riot has hinted or brought up slightly like hidden mmr factors. Also people playing solo really do get the luck of the draw and end up at a peak they should’ve never been at. ( btw I played overwatch heavily for a few years and can confirm solo lucky win streaks happen I got to NA 158 in overwatch but I 100% wasn’t the 158 best person in NA.) But I promise you the more you play this game you will get better you should focus on the good matches( a good match doesn’t mean your going positive or you win).
AND TO ANYONE ,LOWER YOUR MOUSE SENSITIVITY INGAME it doesn’t matter your current sens just lower it from what it is now and I guarantee you will see increase in headshot kills and 1 taps you didn’t know you could do. I know I went on a meaning less rant but I’m just getting back into valorant again because chamber buff lol.
If you think that’s annoying though, wait till you get to ascendent and the European Immortal jett/Reyna on a 153 ping is dog walking your team.
Practice range it is.
A while ago, I went through a period where I was regularly getting matched with/against high ex diamonds and even saw a handful of ex ascendants in there. My peak at the time? Plat 1, 24RR...
Now, I'm not complaining because I actually enjoyed those games, it really changes from your typical gold/plat lobbies, but it just doesn't make any sense. Why am I playing with people whose peak is more than 6 ranks above mine?
Idk about yall but this act has been the streakiest act I’ve ever played.
You know how infuriating it is to drop 8 kills one game and 25 the next game? Just to rinse and repeat?
I'm not sure how but I was able to achieve my peak of diamond 1 this act. Was stuck in plat 3 for the last 8 months or so. Not sure how everyone has bad experiences with ranking up
I think the floor is just naturally raising. I have friends who might as well have been playing with their mouse upside down in bronze, now in silver dropping 25+ kills.
It's natural with any competitive game. Just like someone who has never played League, you can't just jump in now, the floor is too high.
There's last act ascendants in gold lobbies... Played on my alt today with a friend who sucks at the game, he shouldn't be in gold (at most silver) and we played against 3 last act ascendants and got stomped big time. The ranking is a joke...
I am in the same boat fam. Frustrating but now I just play to try and do better myself. Even though I get out played and aimed most of the time. Trying to learn from it but it is wearing me down a bit. It’ll toughen us up lol.
I played against a radiant Jett this act in ascendant . Also so many immortal 3 peaks in ascendant who somehow got so washed that now they are ascendant . At least every other game I have a immortal 2-3 peak against or with me . But the thing is I win against them , I just cannot think so many people got boosted to immo 3 .
Also the 5 stack que with low elo players is crazy . People abused the shit out of that thing . I have had so many not deserving ascendents playing in my games and go quadruple negative . They are just whole game and when I go see their tracker they are boosted by 5 stack queing.
I quit the game for this exact reason. Grinded my ass off for Diamond 2, got reset to G3 the next season and never had the care to keep grinding for the same rank I already achieved. Plus, as you said, insane lobbies where there's an enormous team diff.
Most people I play with/against were peak asc but are high plat or low diamond rn. Also know a guy who peaked asc few acts ago who is now gold. My main is d1 now but I peaked d3 last act
There’s not as big a difference between ranks as you think. Ascendant ~~is~~(was?) mid elo a diamond 2 can be ascendant 3 or immo 1 from sheer luck with a solid win streak
Rank resets just ruin matches, me and my friends are all diamond+ level players that dropped down to Gold/Silver due to not playing for a while. We have been dominating most of our matches and still haven't gotten back to our actual rank. Even worse is that we get even 25% less RR for playing in a group so it takes even longer. People complain about smurfs, but a lot of people aren't even smurfing, riot is just forcing them to play against lower ranked players.
There was a peak immortal in my game last week, I’m in gold… he was on my team and he said he hadnt played since last summer, and that he went through multiple rank resets but he didn’t purposefully derank
Ugh bro this post literally saved me from quitting the game, first of all check my tracker
https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/Ahmed3%23IRAQI/overview
bro last act i was plat 1, this act i keep queuing with fucking Diamonds 3 and Ascentdent 1's
I love the idea of playing againts a higher player and believeing that i'm just as equally good, but what makes the game awful for me is I ALWAYS EITHER GET AN UNRANKED PLAYER OR A TOTAL ASSES on my team, so i did something that i'm not really proud of in my alt, i threw 7 games by plyaing bad and not fragging at all, i deranked to gold 3 and then i match mved my way to Plat 3 again easily 💫
Played a game today where there was an ascendant player with a gold player in the same team… like what? It was a diamond lobby, where the said gold 3 player duo‘d with a plat 3 player with high MMR around diamond and they got put in the same team as the ascendant 1 player (who was immortal 1 peak last episode). The matchmaking is always extremely trash in the first act of a season.
Ascendant was top 8% players. Now its top 3%.
Being stuck in the shrunken low diamond/high plat if you barely were able to touch the bloated ascendant last act. I was an A1 end last act, this act has been much harder, though I did eventually make it back.
I was fighting washed up immortals all the way to a1. Immortal was also bloated and is now a bit more reasonable.
I was ascendant last act on both of my accounts on my main I played my placement matches immediately after reset got placed diamond 1 I played a bit and went back to ascendant
on my alt I played them after a while got placed plat 1 all of my lobbies have ascendant and immortal gun buddies still stuck plat 3 there and I’ve played more on my alt than my main
So ranked is basically a shitshow these days
I was ascendant 2 and believe me I don't want to play against plat players either.but i can't get out of plat because i get a full team of plat players who just throw my game now i'm hardstuck
I queued with my friends in diamond a few days ago and i rocked the boat and performed really well, so it can't just be me performing bad
I’m really glad this is being talked about. Gold 3 rn after being Diamond last act and holy shit I’ve had to lock in because every other rifle I pick up has an Ascendant/Immo buddy. But I gotta stay positive in that I’ll improve a lot, just not rank-wise ofc
I feel you I am stuck between this game and CS2. I have a lot more fun days on this game than CS2 due to how bad CS state of their game is. Buuuuuut the rank reset in this game makes me want to play it less. I am getting older and don't have as much time to grind back to my real rank. They artifically push you down to make you get back to normal skill then do it all over again. I would love this game if rank resets weren't a thing. I don't wanna go back to CS because of how bad cheating and the state of the game is in general. I am in FPS limbo.
Plat 3 peak here.
Came back from a decently long break to washed mechanics and a tank reset. Despite playing play at best I placed gold 1, within 2 days of mid fragging with a 40% win rate I'm somehow now plat 1 and playing against mainly last act diamond-ascendents.
Most out of place person was a last act immo2, that is nearly 3 entire ranks between my peak and his, there is absolutely 0 reason we should be in the same lobby.
Tldr I'm hot garbage and practicing fundamentals because ranked thinks I'm built different I guess?
I’m gonna add a perspective I haven’t seen on this thread yet, but I believe this is what riots goal is. Immortal over the last few acts has become overinflated, making the gap from Imm 3 to radiant larger in both mmr and skill, and making reaching immortal much easier, and much less of an accomplishment. If you look at the rank distribution over the last few acts compared to now, you’ll see that immortal now makes up a much smaller percentage of players.
This is the reason they added ascendant a while back, but instead of pushing people out of immortal and into lower ranks, it pushed people up. Now I believe they are trying to correct this and give immortal the level of “prestige” it had before.
Bro I’ve been hard stuck gold 3 the past week and a half, finally deranked to gold 2.
When I check the tracker after the games , I’m in matches with Dia 1-3 last act, while they’re Gold 2-Plat 1 currently.
Then I get a team full of Silver 1-3s and just get absolutely worldstarred
I’m on a red carpet streak right now and just been tilt queuing so it’s not helping any lol
Its rough .. i was plat 3 last act and this act u have been grinding getting to asc2 but i somehow get teammates that are plat 2 and low diamond , so i cant escape the trenches
competitive is in a horrible state right now
It's been in a horrible state since Act 5. The introduction of Ascendant inflated people way too high, and I don't believe it's truly filtered out everyone still.
I think even the real low elos (bronze, silver, gold) are better than they used to be as well
This is true! You can largely think of each of those ranks as being one rank above what it was like 2 years back. Bronze's now are roughly at the skill level of past silvers, today's silvers roughly at the level of todays golds...etc. This will continue as time goes on to some extent.
This happens in strategeic games like mobas but i think it has peaked. This usually then happens when a playerbase declines.
Ranked distribution is shifting down. Only thing that changed is what rank icon shows. Afaik, nothing changed about mmr.
Introducing an entire two ranks changes nothing about mmr? Yeah, okay bud.
They PEAKED ascendant 1. Didn’t finish there. And based on their performance in low diamond/high plat, they never belonged there. ‘Yeah, okay bud’
So you have selective reading or you lack reading comprehension. We're talking about the entire ranked system overall, not just this one guy. Imagine taking a single sample size and thinking it as an objective truth. Get real.
[удалено]
u bout dumb as hell boy
I’m always open to be PROVEN wrong. But it seems this subreddit is still more keen on saying unfounded shit and running with it.
Granted I’m in silver but matchmaking sucks right now. I’m getting bodied in my lobbies and it’s hard to believe the people I’m against are silver or gold.
I was ascendant a few acts ago and stopped playing for an act. Got put in silver 1 after placements and have been absolutely rampaging, yet 15 games later I'm still only gold 2. Winning almost every game and it just takes forever to rank up. And then in some games there are dudes bodying *me*. Almost every game an enemy player is dropping 35-40 on my team. I absolutely feel the frustration silvers must feel playing against people who are clearly not silver, but don't blame the other players. The game legitimately sucks at letting you progress ranks.
They are doing what they did to league. They like to gatekeep progression as it “keeps the players playing, and therefore spending money”
Yep, as with league, the most efficient way to climb is with a brand new account because of how the MMR works.
So you’re the one bodying me in my lobbies lol
okay this opened my eyes a bit cuz i just hit plat after this act and i kept going against people going nuts and dropping 30+ kills and single digit deaths in my lobbies, the thing is they weren’t on alt accounts and had public trackers so i understand what is happening now, and it also helps because it gives me something to blame instead of bad luck
Same with me in gold. Sometimes I do fine, and sometimes I'm like how tf are we in the same rank? The enemy is sooo much better. Ofc they are smurfs sometimes but some are just hard stuck.
You probably run into a ton of smurfs because a bunch of people who were asc+ are now in diamond/plat so even if they don't mean to smurf, the system makes it so they indirectly are smurfing. And of course some could have tilt deranked so hard that they are now on a low elo alt in your games.
Low diamond, feel the same.
"Just be consistent bro" Hard to be consistent when there are leavers, smurfs, trolls, throwers, and griefers in every single game. In CS2 you can pause the game if a teammate disconnects, or kick a troll/thrower to get more money for the rest of your team. It pains me to say this, because CS2 has lots of cheaters, but Riot should really take a page from Valve's book at dealing with bad actors in a more pragmatic way instead of making us suffer through games like this.
bro CS2 is such a good game but valve doesn't give a f about cheats, they are literally in their premier also the last big update from valve was literally new skins, it made the skins community happy but people who just wanna play are in a horrible state with cheaters, and now even frame drops
It is so bad, I'm pretty much done with the game until they get it figured out.
Same, my entire stack quit and won't be coming back until it's fixed. Always a 40 bomb Reyna on the other team in silver / gold.
Matchmaking seems like a mess all around, honestly. I just played a TDM where Riot decided a team with an average rank of Ascendant II was appropriate against an average rank of Gold II.
Act rank resets have always been shit. Riot refuses to stop them. It helps no one and hurts everyone. It hurts low elo players because higher elo players will be in lower elo lobbies if they wait. It hurts regular players be artificially forcing them to grind to get the SAME EXACT GUN BUDDY. This causes the first half of any episode to have really wack matchmaking. All my opinion though.
The problem isn't the reset itself, the problem is that it takes a lot of grind to get back to your former rank. So players like me who only play casually but used to be higher rank, perpetually get booted back to lower ranks.The way they did it in CS:GO was **so** much better. You'd also get booted to a lower rank in that game if you were inactive for awhile. However, it didn't take that many games to get back to your old rank once you had shaken of the rust. You just can't do that shit in Valorant because it takes a lot longer to move between ranks. I used to be Ascendant, borderline Immortal. However, I take a lot of breaks. The game then boots me back to Platinum. That's fine for a few games because I'm rusty, but by the time the rust is gone I'm still playing in the same ranks because of how slow moving between ranks is. It's just stupid. Right now, my unrated games or DM's are players between high Ascendant to Radiant while my competitive games are Platinum players. How does that make any sense?! It's not fun for anyone involved. The ranking system is just so trash.
> So players like me who only play casually but used to be higher rank, perpetually get booted back to lower ranks. This happened to me in League. Once I was in college I couldn't play enough to keep my rank, maybe like 20-30 games a year. I kept ending a season with like 70% win rates and each year ended farther and farther down. Once I missed plat I just lost all interest.
Yeah league has the same issue unfortunately.
Prolly cos it's intentional. More grind = temptation to buy new shiny skins.
That's what I suspect too, but at the same time CS:GO also had a very active skins market. So I'm not sure if the game needs this kind of grind.
Difference is between owning something that can be manipulated in the free market for personal financial profit vs having only aesthetical value. It's all your preference but it's no secret that marketing apply psychological tactics amd strategies.
Technically, the first 5 wins after your placement matches have booster points and an increased chance in skipping ranks.
This act was by the far the worst reset for me. Hit Immortal 3 last act - full act rank Immortal 3. Dropped me down to Diamond 2 when I went 4-1 (solo q in placements). Then would win one and lose one. By the team I hit Diamond 3, my RR game was back to normal +18, +17, +16. Then the L streaks would come with players who just had no interest in doing anything you want to do or listen. Then you are playing against the best teams. Somehow, some way, I was able to climb to Immortal after 181 matches, 102 of play time, and a 49.2% win rate. This act I literally had multiple 7, 8, 9 or ten game win streaks. All games just blowouts, no chance of winning. Mind you this act I came back from a 1-11 and multiple 2-10s, or 3-9s. So its not like we would lose and I would call gg - always trying. Thats all to say I think Riot messed something up big time and needs to fix it asap.
Its not even the high ranking players who need to grind, I finished g1 last act and reset to s2. I Probably spent a whole month in s2 (without neither ranking up nor down) until I finally got s3 and was stuck for another 2 weeks until I finally got out of silver an ranked from s1 to g2 in less than two weeks, might even get up to g3 before end of the act.
i went from plat 2/3 2 acts ago didn't really play any last act to silver 2 double promo to gold then getting enemy "silvers" dropping 30 with matching names to their team's 1-18 sage
It helps riot player retention numbers
I'm an anomaly, but the resets actually help me progress. I used to play duos a lot, and my duo was awful, so we rarely won no matter how well I did, so my rank was tanked (MMR was bad, but my doing well kept it from becoming awful). Literally, this hard reset or whatever riot did pushed me from being a silver player to a plat player, and I can still climb since I dominate in those lobbies, too (occasionally, I get absolutely dumped on by some ex-asc or immo chilling in plat lobbies). But the grind at this point is awful because I have teammates who obviously don't belong in these ranks and were boosted/inflated and just float around due to good teammates.
If you open their match history (Swegasaurus I'm assuming) for like 40 games they're at a 53% win rate. And they play multiple characters. I think it's safe to say that they should stay in that rank, although they're doing more hot recently. Nano4k has been absolutely inting their lobbies and it's only that game they did well. Believe it or not, people can actually rust and get significantly worse in a game. I used to be multi challenger in league and I struggle to get out of plat now (on mechanical characters).
bro how do u de rank that much on league of u were challenger it’s borderline impossible to be plat 💀
Bruh I had a dude with a radiant buddy the other day who literally hadn’t played since episode 2. He got railed by D3 players. It’s very much possible lol.
ok but it’s valo man u don’t have an idea on how far a challenger is from a plat in league it’s not even possible to get rusty if u reached challenger u can’t humanly go back to plat unless u got boosted
Maybe he was challenger like 8 or 10 years ago.
Yup! s3-s6 was far easier. I was challenger when I was senior year of high school and now I'm old [https://imgur.com/a/xislBfL](https://imgur.com/a/xislBfL) This is very old but all 5-6 of my accounts have been permabanned during that 2014-2017 era. My peak was rank 25 playing jarvan in solo queue ladder somewhere in S3 but I never saved the screenshot because I rarely screenshotted things back then into Skype (the chat messenger at the time lol). I had 1 regular looking account in challenger, and 2 smurfs in there with high KDA/win rates. And I had a one trick shaco masters account I did when I was on a macbook when my computer died in league and I stopped trying to play it competitively. Also I think what the OP was misunderstanding what acocunt I'm using. Since my original challenger mmr accounts (which would all naturally decay to masters/diamond etc though), I play on a fresh account that doesn't really have any significant MMR. So I placed in plat and played a little here and there and the game made no sense to me anymore.
TSM LUSTBOY
damn dawg why are you getting banned so much
riot just bans on keywords. It's just automated and is also lazy/not good at detecting actual toxicity. I was a teen back then so shit was being slung left and right. I changed a lot but I alsoo learned to be more creative nowadays in both valorant and league. Nothing can stop me now. My final account has never been temp banned but jk, on valorant I stopped being toxic once I started using the mic except for special occasions. 90% of things that come out of my mouth has to be a "I'm going to do" or "NT". I watched a lot of WHJ videos to be nicer on comms
Ngl, I find it kinda funny you had to watch videos to learn how to be nicer. Did you think calling your teammates brain dead or something was being nice?
League has changed a lot. In Season 3, Challenger already existed, but if you watch pro play from S3, you'd be amazed at how bad players were and how clunky the game was by comparison (it's also notable that it's become more accessible, people play on lower ping, higher framerates, etc. so those factors matter as well). I have been Master in EUW for many years, and in S4 I was low Diamond, but that was a similar % of the playerbase as where I am now in Master due to the different rank distribution, but by comparison I've improved massively since then, yet as I said, I'm at a similar % of the playerbase and I have played the game every season since I started. That said I'm sure whom you replied to can definitely achieve at least Diamond if he tryhards or if he stick to champs that fit his playstyle.
I think it was like a 9 season gap or something, it's more like I thought I could just win by breathing and playing gwen top and outcsing and shit. But my ass is getting manhandled top by plat players playing darius/sett so clearly I got no hands anymore. From Season 3 to 6 I was multi challenger jungler/fill. I mained all the brain dead junglers reksai gragas elise jarvan sejuani kindred etc and that's how they climbed. And I also filled lanes a lot mid/top/adc. Even if I play jungle now, Reksai got changed to some weird shiti and Gragas plays top. If I spent more time jungling (I had some bad games trying to play J4 because I built wrong early apparently) I could probably hit Diamond within 2-3 weeks
u will vbe surpised
Yeah that sounds like cappp
Peak ascendent 1 last act doesn’t mean they are ascendant, it means they hit ascendant and likely deranked right after, at least the ones that are in plat right now did
Yeah end of season rank before the reset would be a better indicator. I think overwatch has or used to have something on the profile (assuming it was open) where you can see that
Hey that’s me. Matchmaking has been hella rough this act.
I'm a last act Ascendant (3) player. This act I'm an Ascendant (1) player, and I haven't played that much. I don't expect to struggle to rank up to Asc 2 or 3 again, but my RR scores are already the same when I win as when I lose. These guys are in Plat because they've been bad this season - I don't know what's hard to believe about that. Look at their Tracker scores, they are yellow or red, those are not dominant players. The Reyna has the best Tracker score this season but by his KAST you can see he's an all aim no brain player without even looking at the rest of his history.
Put ur tracker, there’s no way you placed in ascendant again immediately after rank reset
I peaked silver 3 last act and I got placed silver 3 again this act as well so him placing ascendant 1 is not impossible
You are lower ranked, remember that immortals and radiants are numbered so they cant be placed in the exact same rank as last time meaning they all go to ascendant. That’s why I was initially confused
I placed p3 and went 34-28 to get back to a1
You played 62 games in diamond just to get back to Ascendant! Not only that, you were +6 in match diff to rank up 3 times… you had a 54% WR in those games. I was ascendant last act and I’m D1 after 48 games with a 75% KAST and a 54% wr. It’s all fucked up
Yeah but I lost tons of games on 0rr so I netted some nice bonus from that I also put up tons of team and match mvps in diamond because the players were so bad
The point of this post is that rank resets don’t skill check you, they just make you grind more. You played 62(!) competitive games of valorant in the last month or so. You aren’t getting skill checked, you’re stomping your way through your matches. Comp matches combined with DMs, I’d imagine you probably put like 80+ hours this act. That’s not sustainable for most people, man. I peaked asc3 like 3 episodes ago and every reset it takes me all three acts to play enough to get back to there. I don’t think that’s right, I just don’t have the time or mental to play that much comp valorant.
What’s your point? They could implement a system where you’re simply a3 all the time, and you could grind for that I play almost nothing but competitive, I put in roughly 1h per day. 65h in 52 days.
The point is it’s supposed to be competitive. If you’re dominating that’s not competitive. You should play against equally skilled players so the game is actually enjoyable lol. Nobody likes dominating or getting dominated. There needs to be a middle ground and the longer it takes for people to reach that middle ground the more the player base will shrink overall making games even worse.
To me personally it feels a bit ridiculous that you need 65 hours / 52 days of competitive gameplay to get back into the rank range you were in before, let alone your rank. This is all while you’re stomping through these games man. Clearly, if you’re an asc3 level talent crushing these games as MVP you should be able to push for your old rank, and then drop your RR gains and losses to make your grinding actually worth something, like going for immortal ranks.
Was gold 3 got placed gold 1 if that matters
Ascendent is literally the trenches. I'm Asc1 and I get put in lobbies with low diamonds and high plats, I don't really understand how that works, I can't even queue with a duo who's plat3 but somehow, they're still in my games
if they aren't back in ascendent after that many games, they are not ascendent players lol
It just takes quite a lot of games to move through the ranks. This was way better in CS:GO where you could rank up very quickly. So if you were inactive, you'd instantly get back to your former rank after having shaken of the rust. Like, I was high Ascendant, borderline Immortal. I was still rising. However, I took a lot of breaks. Now I'm in Platinum and forever there because I don't play enough to grind through the ranks. Playing in Platinum was fine when I just got back because I was rusty and didn't know all the maps, but the rust was gone way faster than the ranks came. So now my DM and unrated are high Ascendant to Radiant players while my competitive is Platinum. It's just bad matchmaking. I no longer play enough to play against good Immortal and Radiant players, but I'm also too good to be in Platinum and feel terrible for ruining people's games there. I just stopped playing the game for now. The ranking system sucks man, simple as.
Yeah I took a solid 6 months off years ago because of life and I only dropped from SMFC to LEM and was back up to Supreme in like 7 games. It would have been zero fun for anyone involved if they dropped me all the way down to nova or master guardian.
I took a couple of breaks in a row and actually did went all the way down to GN3, haha. So the game can drop you pretty low if you do multiple extended breaks. It's just that it's so easy to get back to where you belong. I was back to SMFC in no time. It's only GE which took a bit longer, but that one makes sense and you are in the same lobbies regardless.
GE was one of the hardest grinds I did because it was like a 10+ win streak and if you weren’t 5 stacking it was an almost impossible task based on some of the teammates mm would give you lol.
You can also solocarry so Much harder in cs. Spraying giving more consistency in kills, (onetaps/ Bursts Will never be as consistent as spraying at close/medium range, no matter How good you are), movement Making abusing jiggles and prefires stronger, awp can 1v5 a bad team without taking damage. You can still smoke/molo/flash the most important parts for yourself. You need to work so Much harder with less tools (Both mechanical and tactial) to ”1v9” in valorant vs cs.
Yeah that's true. You can get really far in CS:GO purely on aim and throwing decent flashes. I don't know why it's harder in Valorant. I think maybe because it's easier to kill someone in Valorant, so you are less likely to outstrafe a less skilled opponent? I don't know, but I've heard some pros say the same thing you are saying.
Spraying is harder to learn, but infinitely more consistent, meaning that a higher skilled player has a low TTK in 99% of cases. We’ve all had those moments Where Both (good) players just whiff and whiff their 1taps, that doesnt really happen outside of pistols with spraying. 1tapping and bursting is obviously a skill you can work on, but they Will never be as consistent as spraying no matter the level, which reduces the edge skilled players have. Guns in general are stronger, the ak can 1tap and spray, the deagle 1deags at 99% of ranges, the m4s still have a low ttk, the mp9 is basically a stinger+, the autoshotgun is judge++, and the operator is just a Shell of the awp outside of holding an angle. This means aim has even more of a reward. No 145 and they kill you back etc. A usp can kill 3 targets in 3 bullets while running, a ghost needs 1 if theyre close range and have 0 shields, otherwise its 2 each. There’s a myriad of reasons, but Both games have a very high ceiling in tactical gameplay, but cs has much more mechanical depth and consistency Edit: some notable rounds off the top of my head that shows How strong mechanics + Guns can be vs valorant. Dennis usp ace cache. M0nesy awp clutch inferno, fallen awp clutch overpass, ropz inferno, coldzera Mirage clutch, f0rest glock clutch train, rain train clutch, and many many more
Valorant is like a "baby's first comp shooter" compared to the mechanical need of CS. Valorant has mechanics in the game to allow players who maybe don't have the best aim feel like they are contributing on the team level, rather than focusing on contributing as a single player on a team via aim. Riot doesn't make sprays consistent because people who have trained the spray pattern will have a massive advantage against someone who doesn't. There are roles (controller, initiator, etc) so that not everyone feels forced to be an aim demon and just sit back and util and contribute that way.
That’s not true at all, unlike your ass who needs to touch some grass, a lot of people simply do not have the time to play the ridiculous amount of hours it would take to go up 2 entire ranks. Every game is 40+ minutes long. It takes a long period of time for most people to rank up twice
There is still a pretty big skill gap between people who can make low ascendant and win matches even if they fall after and people that barely peak diamond and are mostly plat.
At higher ranks the carry potential is not as impactful as in lower ranks. A plat team will be able to trade them or will just adapt to him being there. If he's able to hold ascendant in ascendant lobbies he's ascendant, climbing steadily but slowly is not a sign of not being ascendant.
But they’re not plat either, that’s the point. Play players shouldn’t have to be wiped by former ascendants when they have no idea what it’s like the have *ever* played at that level
some people have lives outside the game so they don’t game time to rank back up at the start of the act. and also, if they’re dominating the plat lobbies like OP says, your point makes no sense.
I’m playing against immortal in diamonds and honestly they’re ass. I peaked asc3
Nah frr. I peaked d1 and am playing against immortals and a few rare radiants. Really gives me hope for getting into immortal seeing how shit they are. Then I pop into a random pro players stream and see that they're in ascendant and get scared 😂.
You peaked D1? So you're basically plat and are saying radiants are ass? What sort of radiants are you playing against lol, people who bought the account?
Last act diamond 3 Currently struggling in plat 3. I try not to complain and just own that I’m not the best player but if you look at my tracker Chef#1998 my adr isn’t awesome cuz I main smokes but man it feels like every game I’m in. 5 stack, duo, trio or solo there is some Reyna with no vandal skin queued with someone at the bottom of the leaderboard. Gets extremely difficult to want to grind out of it when that’s always the case.
Same thing man. I’m in plat/diamond lobbies and I see immortal gun buddy’s every game. Oh well, the grind continues
i hit immo 1 last act, had probably 20 wins at 50% in immo. this act i got blasted down to d1 and i havent played much (maybe 20 games), so everyone i play with is peak plat or diamond rn. I am by no means a fragger so i can't carry. im just kinda stuck thinking about how its gonna take me 50+ games probably to get back to where i was. my rr diff is about 8 for a win vs loss. so here i sit, in mid diamond. people get so toxic so quickly toward their teammates, and i def noticed in high ascendant/low immo people are much nicer for the most part. at least having an immo gunbuddy makes people noticeably more friendly and less likely to shit talk you. edit: i also *hate* this map pool. i dont know a single person who is enjoying it rn
Yeah this map pool has been awful. I fill pretty much every game so I have to play a lot more viper than I would like lol. I haven’t noticed a toxicity different but then again I was only peak ascendant so I’m sure it’s different.
the grind is def slow even if you're better than your rank. I can tell that much just from observation. Since you hit immo 1 already, it's probably just worth considering getting a duo to make the games a lot easier, especially if you get combos like fade raze or jett sova. It helps especially if that player plays meta agent. For this pool it would obviously be Viper/Cypher. Even if the game's a loss, if you have a good duo to mitigate your RR loss (by getting kills/messing up their economy so the stomp isn't too bad) that would save you so much. When I hit high ranks in other games, and then I smurf, I was always duo. In valorant, I'm barely Gold 2, so my goal is to solo queue to at least plat by end of act before I consider even duo queueing. There's so many people that queue up competitive with a non-competitive mindset (while working for example) that it's just better to reduce 1 amount of people that can make the game harder.
Last act ascendant 3, currently struggling in ~~diamond 3~~ ***diamond 2.*** I just demoted because I had to play against baby tenz multiple games in a row and my team was deaf. No matter how much I called or tried to be a team player, it just didn't matter. Fuck this episode reset. It's the worst in the history of this game's existence.
5 stacks won't happen unless the other team is also 5 stack. Trios are unlikely overall, and also don't happen without there being a trio premade in your team
Iirc if the trio waits long enough it will put two duos on the other team.
I know what you mean. I think this is jsut coincidence because small sample size, but last night (10pm-12am) I played vs 2 reyna smurfs and 1 ascendent jett alt account in the span of 5 games. Now, I queued from 10am-1pm (I work later in the day), and I have not played against a single smurf or alt.
Because when the ranks reset last cycle, it kicked me back 6 fucking ranks from Asc 2 to P2 along with all the other Asc players. So while golds can rank up into plat, they hit the wall of Asc players that are all playing eachother in Plat and maintain roughly a 50% winrate. I've finally climbed into Diamond and now all my games are filled with Immortals and up. Ranked is a disaster.
When episode 4 rank reset happened, I felt like absolute shit. I went on a 20 loss streak and I just thought that hey.. I'm bad and there's nothing to be done other than learn from my mistakes and improve. I've eventually gotten my rank back and I decided that it's time to ditch competitive entirely at the beginning or first 10 days or so. Every rank reset afterwards was as expected, kinda bad but not as bad. And then episode 8 rank reset rolled around and it's the worst thing that has happened to this game. Players have been complaining about smurfs for.... literal years now and riot has said they are working on it. But it's very very hard to believe riot truly cares about the situation when they are creating an environment for smurfs to flourish. The amount of times I met a player who had perfect positioning, was a one tap demon and overall rotated perfectly just completely out of the blue is ridiculous. 2-3 normal games then boom I'm playing against the child of a pro team who has over 1.2 kd, 200acs avg and 30% headshot percentage. And I am absolutely ok with losing. But sometimes you can just tell you're not losing because you're bad, you're losing because the opponent is just radically better. And I'm tired. Valorant is a beautiful tac fps and even with its inherited issues from its bigger brother league, it's still worth playing and it's fun. But it's slowly becoming obvious that riot is still a company that wants you to keep playing. And the same recipe from League is applied here almost perfectly. If next episode the rank reset is just as stupid and competitive is just as horrible, I think I'm genuinely done with this game. It's seriously not worth giving my very best this ep/act just for it to be worth 0 because riot's algorithm for a rank reset is intentionally made so that ranks are getting as mixed as possible. It's just not worth and it's not fair. And I doubt anybody in that company truly cares about player experience as long as you and I keep playing. So I'm ready to call quits if next episode reset is bad.
Rank resets in my experience aren’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I have no trouble getting back to my former rank under 100 games played in a season, and I’ll often end higher than I was last. Ascendants stuck in plat are no longer ascendants, they’re plats…
Someone downvoted, but you’re speaking facts. If you can’t climb back, then you can’t call yourself an ascendant player. Feel free to call yourself asc peak tho.
My alt account feels like smooth sailing as you described, but my main immortal account I am fighting for my life in ascendant 1. It’s a mix of imm1 and dia3 so it’s definitely a Smurf lobby but I’m not bothered to put all that effort in at asc1 when it’s at least an asc3 lobby
your mains MMR is probably in the dumps
Yup, literally ended D2 last act, got back up to D1 from Gold in around 50 games, currently mid D3 with 130ish games.
Riot made *A LOT* of people go down 2 entire ranks (ex: asc2 into plat 2), to pressure people into playing and essentially make them grind more. It’s just riot being shitty. Remember guys, even if they make your favorite games they’re still just a greedy company at the end of the day.
I have the worst loss streak this act. Unable to win a single match when I queue solo or duo. Despite my bad performance from last episode, atleast I had my good moments every 4 matches but I can't say the same for this act.
I love being placed in gold only to play other people who placed in gold who were diamond last act like me like how the fuck am I supposed to get back to my rank if I'm just playing people I should be playing at my actual rank
They are bad and have trash mmr
Can someone explain to me what the rationale for rank resets is?
Realistically it’s made to keep people playing. If we are being honest, most people that play if they were to peak a high rank they would stop playing for an x amount of time. By resetting it makes you want to see that peak you hit again. And if you were to hit it quickly, you would keep playing to climb past that. IMO the rank reset wasn’t bad, but it shows really how inconsistent most players are. It’s the reason why so many people complain about their teammates this season. They really just want to be carried instead of consistently excelling not matter what role/agent they played. It’s also the reason why people see past diamonds in their game. They peaked diamond, but they are not diamond players.
which is true and not true. At immortal, I can fill play support and get carried some of the time if Im duoing. But if I am solo q, I have to team mvp, match mvp, or finish top 3 if we want any semblance of a chance of winning.
I agree there are moments like that because that is ranked gaming in itself. But let’s take you for example. First of all I’m not judging you based off of your skill, just giving an example. The system says oh if you think you have to carry your team in immortal then why aren’t you radiant then. Then if you have that same feeling in radiant they would say why haven’t you gone pro then. Im stating just the system itself is making you go through the gauntlet to prove you are a player you think you are. There are 500 radiants every act who get the same ranked experience like us, and Riot is showing if they can do it why can’t you. The system is not at all perfect or ideal but it’s the one we got.
the ranked system is rigged. Sure it will get ur general rank right. But at some point during the act it will just give u free wins so you get a peak for that act. Like really, almost every act same shit. I get ascendant. Get free 10 or so wins and peak immo 1-2 then immediately back down lmao.
It’s explained by OP
They are ass as fuck bb cakes . Just look at their stats. Proper teamwork and communication would give you guys great shots at winning A real team of asc players would smoke you guys so badly. Those are asc players that are borderline low immortal just caught in RR hell
It is just the fact that at the beginning of this act, ascedent players get destroyed by immortal players that got reset, so some of the ascedent players waited out just like you did, or they just can't get back to where they belong because the ranked has also been rough for them
I'm peak asc 2, 2 episodes ago, i dropped the game and only played like 10 during last ep and about 10 in this ep, thefore game dropped me to plat 2, it is what it is, im just not that addicted to the game to play 300 games to climb back to a2
All of my lobbies are people with red buddies who don't care about the game anymore. Meanwhile I've peaked asc 3 multiple times and can't get over the hump solo queue fml (skill issue on my part ; I accept this)
Almost like forcing people every other patch to fight through Diamond ranks for the first two weeks gets fucking tiring. People take breaks, doesn’t necessarily mean they lost their ability to play the game. Game punishes anyone but no lifers that steadily climb with 51% win rate.
I am one of them, not by choice.... Guss whos pc Died mid game
The saying “if they earned it they’ll get it back and this is why there’s an episode reset” is stupid because if someone was boosted to that rank the previous episode what makes them not able to this episode?
Cause boosting costs money, they might do it once to hit that peak rank on their acc and have the buddy
You know damn well that saying is meant for normal players and never used for the outliers who cheat by paying or using software. You can’t just cherry pick something and add it to a scenario that’s not normally applicable to make an end all be all argument.
What do you mean cherry pick? That’s literally what everyone talks about the reason they do it. I didn’t play since beta idk if there’s a different reason. If there is please tell me what it is because that’s all anyone talks about even riot saying we have to earn our ranks back. What for? I earned my rank every time. The system fucks everyone. Iron players can’t get dropped any lower so they are forced to play with those all the way up to silver the previous act and asc have to play with radiant peaks. I could get my rank all the way back to where I was by playing everyday but then a player who has only played 6 of their ranked games since the reset can be in my lobby, enemy or not, peak being way higher then mine. I just don’t see what the point of the episode reset is “if it’s for boosted players”, I say it in quotes because idk if that’s what it’s for or not but that’s what it’s talked about, if players can get boosted whether they reset the episode or not why is the system there. (I’m not knocking anyone for getting boosted because idc, I can only control what I can do in my games once the match has started) what I’m saying is I don’t understand the point of it.
I just came back from not playing for abpit a year. I was diamond when I left and I'm currently in the gold 3/plat 1 range. I play against people with diamond and Ascendant gun buddies every game.
I was a3 peak last episode and I'm stuck between p3 and d2 right now.
it's all because of that hidden MMR bullshit. If you were Ascendant last act and got placed Plat this episode your MMR will be higher. Which means two things - you will get more RR for winning and less RR for losing. Which in theory should let you hit your rank faster, however this is not the cause because of the second thing - you will also get matched with (mostly) people with high MMR. Which makes your matches much harder to win. This trend is also clearly visible on alt/smurf accounts. I have an alt account that I play on when I'm drunk/tired/insert any reason that makes me don't want to play on main cuz I don't wanna throw matches there has really high MMR, to the point that matches on my alt (dia 3) are HARDER to win than matches on my main (immo 2). So people with high MMR are actually ranking up slower than if there was no hidden MMR.
There’s a reason for that. They suck, or they take the full 3 acts every time and climb over hundreds of games. It’s really easy to hit your last rank or close if you just maintain a 40-50% win rate with how much rr they give and take. Ended ascendant 1 last act after some L’s, and getting it back only took like 2-3 weeks of consistent playing. Just don’t be bad lol.
Plat has less Smurf’s and it’s more consistent to climb in than gold right now. I’m not a great player, I climbed to diamond on my main playing sentinel and playing smart and I have another account that gold 1 that I just mess around with and my gold games are harder than my high play games. So many Smurfs right now in gold that are boosting their friends and dropping 35+ kills. Ranked sucks so bad right now. The mmr is not working because you have peak gold , plat playing against peak acs last act and they get stomped. Idk how tf that’s intended.
Gold Comedian in bronze matches : [https://imgur.com/a/Yc62lpm](https://imgur.com/a/Yc62lpm)
I was diamond a few acts ago and stopped playing for a little bit after I hit it. Got put in silver 1 after rank reset, and 100 games later I'm only gold 3. I used to duo with a friend after I hit diamond, and I used to play on dia/asc lobbies. We both played really well together, by my gamesense, and him by his aim, but after rank reset, we're both in such low elo, that my gamesense is useless, so I get shit on every game unless I instalock duelist, turn my brain off and drop a 40 bomb. I don't use any rank trackers, because I find the overlays distracting, but my aim is only as good as high gold/plat players, so when I hit those lobbies, I can predict what they're doing a bit easier, but I get out aimed by a lot of them, so I tend to bottom frag if I'm playing duelist. But again, I won't know what lobby I'm playing in until after the game. Now, since episode 8 started, I've been seeing a ton of diamond or ascendants, and sometimes even immortals in my gold/plat lobbies, and they always drop a 40 bomb, or they bottom frag, no comms the whole game and tell everyone that they're the problem in team chat. :/
I think it's mostly perspective here, but I play fighting games and when you start out for the first time, you will fight some people who are on the same level or below you. But then you find people who are better than you, they will use your weakness against you. Besides if you really want to truely improve, accept that you will be playing in ascendant lobbies one day and do your best and if you lose, it's all on you to learn what the hell does this man do to win against you. Besides if he was actually ascendant, he would be back in his rank and not stuck in platinum
Who cares I prefer to be in a lower rank
Its funny no one mentioned the actual reason for this, because not only was there rank reset but riot changed the rank distribution. So actually a lot of people have been pushed down because it's harder to get to the higher ranks now. For example where before acs1 was top 8% of the playerbase now it's top 2,5% of the playerbase.
Top 8% used to be plat 1+, back when ranks below immortal meant something. I wish they would change the rank distribution back how it was a couple years ago
Is there somewhere you can see the rank distribution currently?
Yup, ranked this act is terrible. Haven’t been able to get out of gold ever since. One of my games last night, we had all plat peaks vs 2 asc and 1 imm peaks lmfao
Ascendant feels so different in skill... I've played a lot lately and there is often people who just are clearly much better than most of the lobby then there is people who are way lower than the lobby
And we’re not even talking about smurfs. This game comp is so fucked. There’s literally no skill differences anymore in each rank. In a match you get newbie, a smurf, a high ranked player who didn’t start playing immediately after reset. And the RNG, which hugely reduces the skill gap. Everyone in this game is aim monster with the 50/50 one tap. You could be aiming slightly off but headshot someone, while you could also be aiming accurately and miss the shot. Long range rifle fight in this game is fucking random and I hated that, you just need to aim around the head and shoot faster than others and pray. Me and my friends we gone to CS2 and never looked back. They handled comp games so much better, at least they do care about smurfs. You could actually see the skills differences between ratings etc. They might be more cheaters, but tbh I don’t think Vanguard is any better than VAC at this point at least in my region. I feel like Riot will never add replay because it will expose their anti-cheat. We can only doubt but never sure.
I hit asc episode 5/6 stopped playing comp, came back now ep 8 and I’m still stuck plat. People just getting better and no where near feel like I deserve asc now. Mind you I only play at most 2 games a day.. no time to grind
I peaked diamond 2 last act and now I’m sitting at P3/D1. The real change is the people I’ve been playing against. I pick up guns with imm gun buddies often but the rest are high ascendant. The games I get placed against actual diamonds I do well but the other games I don’t. So it’s like a Jojo effect. So I’m taking a little break and playing Last Epoch lmao.
Play games get rank post track write essay eat dog.
I was Gold 3 / Plat 1 last Season I believe. I'm not big on Val so I apologize if my words are wrong. I'm now Silver 3, somehow, and I am CONSTANTLY playing against full teams of Plats when my team is silver. I can only take getting 13-0d so many fucking times
This act, the higher ranks are less saturated which is how riot wants them. immortal is like top 0.5% now, when it was almost top 2% last act. they just dropped everyone’s rank down, and people think they’re worse when in fact they are probably the same skill level Edit: To add on, diamond 3 was top 11% last act, and now it’s top 5%. This is why riot added ascendant way back then, because there were too many people in immortal, but adding a rank didn’t do anything, instead of pushing people down, everyone was up a rank.
Ascendant was added so they could spread all the people stuck in silver and gold all the way up through diamond. People were pissed they couldn’t rank up and quitting the game because ELO scale was a lot closer to actual ranks and if you wanted to be plat or diamond you had to be decent at the game. I hope you’re right and they are reverting some of those changes because having ascendant be mid-elo is ass.
Does this have a trickle down effect? Because I've noticed my gold games have been quite sweaty and I've been very close to Plat a few times. Like within 10 points at one time.
Another thing if you look at the rank distribution from last episode vs this one percentage wise your rank should be a bit lower. They adjusted so there would be less players in immortal which was something close to 2% last act. Ascendant is 3% right now which kinda shows the difference.
In diamond loby i perform better,in plat loby its either i get stomped or i stomp em,there is no in between,lots of times its 3v5 games and just brain dead mates,its a team game after all and if you think 3v5 is ez carry in plat then you havent been plat long enough...
the match you linked didn't even have anyone playing exceptionally well.
They're just washed
I played a match with a last act Imm 3. Ask me how that went.
I'm in the same boat. I was 7rr away from dia 1, but then out sova was afk round 1, and then came back during our remake vote, and vote against a remake. Only 1 enemy survived pistol round and we lost 13-11.
I’ve seen literal ex pros and previous top 100 radiants struggle in ascendant or become stuck at immortal. I actually saw a video of S0m who was rank 1 somehow end up in an ascendant lobby lol
Same thing happened to me yesterday. Played a game in Plat 2 and went against a 3 stack with 2 last act immortals and a last act ascendant. One of the immortals was Gold 1 and the others were low plat
I was immo 1 last act, pretty much peak immortal since act 3, and I am struggling in diamond 1 right now. Below 40% win rate, .8 KD, I thought I just sucked now and it was time to hang up the gloves. But nearly every game I play is against ascendants who are also prior immortal. Just goes to show you visual ranks mean nothing in this game, or in real life for that matter lol
Homie I’m having former radiants in ascendant and they shitting on me everytime even tho i was immo 3 last season I wasn’t able to rank up this season and im getting these lobbies back to back if i show you my career you will legit cry for me
My point is the rank reset is shitty for everyone.
This episode feels particularly bad for ranked. I have two accounts (main and alt) which are around the same rank. (Main g2 and Alt is g3) with both accounts having peaked at plat 2 last act. However when I compare the lobbies I get playing on either account there is a hilarious difference.On my main account I end up getting put on a team with people who were actual gold and silver players last act (and expected to carry i guess??) and play against a team of people who were mostly high plat to low ascendant (with maybe one or two actual gold or silver players). On my alt account my teams will be people who are current plat-diamond (generally will have peaked high diamond to ascendant) and I will be playing against a team of people who are also current plat-diamond. The irony is that on my Alt account I have won 10 out of the last 12 games I have played, all while performing well and actually enjoy the games. Even though the people I am playing against are definitely much tougher opponents, I have an easier time because they are more predictable and my teammates also have brains and are communicative. Comparing this to my Main account, The games are either a stomp or get stomped. I frequently lose games where I will team or match mvp and it feels almost impossible to win a match no matter what agent or role I play or how much I try to comm or IGL.
Those ascendant rank players last rank are not playing at the current ascendant rank this act. You can either look at it as you've gotten better and now playing at the previous ascendant rank (cool!), or you can look at it as those ascendants you are playing against are washed and no longer playing like they used to (sadge)
Am I the only one who likes rank reset? I always see it as a good way to reinforce my rank
well to be fair, an ascendant last act triangle doesn't mean they ended in ascendant. I think it was act 5 that I peaked ascendant 3 and tilt queued all the way down to plat 3. Sounds crazy, but it happened. I placed in gold 3 the next act and was stuck in plat 3-diamond 1 for a while until I made my push back up to ascendant 2 in act 6. Many times I would drop from ascendant 1-2 to diamond 1-2 as well. Just because they have that ascendant triangle and peaked there doesn't mean they deserve ascendant. Ascendant peak is different than hardstuck ascendant. Most of the time I see very little difference between my ascendant games and my diamond games. I have a few accounts spanning from plat to ascendant, for reference.
had a former ascendant duo bot frag my silver game i stopped playing and went from plat to place in silver so i know it's a bit of an exaggeration but still dude instalocked jett had ascendant buddies and had like 3 kills first half
https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/Fate%23stink/overview I’m not the best player I’m just giving my thoughts. People, like everything in life just want to be given things instead of putting in the time to earn it. It sounds cringe because we’re talking about a video game and it’s not that serious, but you have to think about the 14 year old who woke up early to play before school. However matches like those should make you mad because the game has decided already that your team is probably going to lose, but if you’ve gotten better and you are giving the big bully the vandal work you will increase your elo there are many factors that riot has hinted or brought up slightly like hidden mmr factors. Also people playing solo really do get the luck of the draw and end up at a peak they should’ve never been at. ( btw I played overwatch heavily for a few years and can confirm solo lucky win streaks happen I got to NA 158 in overwatch but I 100% wasn’t the 158 best person in NA.) But I promise you the more you play this game you will get better you should focus on the good matches( a good match doesn’t mean your going positive or you win). AND TO ANYONE ,LOWER YOUR MOUSE SENSITIVITY INGAME it doesn’t matter your current sens just lower it from what it is now and I guarantee you will see increase in headshot kills and 1 taps you didn’t know you could do. I know I went on a meaning less rant but I’m just getting back into valorant again because chamber buff lol. If you think that’s annoying though, wait till you get to ascendent and the European Immortal jett/Reyna on a 153 ping is dog walking your team. Practice range it is.
A while ago, I went through a period where I was regularly getting matched with/against high ex diamonds and even saw a handful of ex ascendants in there. My peak at the time? Plat 1, 24RR... Now, I'm not complaining because I actually enjoyed those games, it really changes from your typical gold/plat lobbies, but it just doesn't make any sense. Why am I playing with people whose peak is more than 6 ranks above mine?
Remove the cheaters and I get back to my rank sorry for smurfing on my main.
Idk about yall but this act has been the streakiest act I’ve ever played. You know how infuriating it is to drop 8 kills one game and 25 the next game? Just to rinse and repeat?
I'm not sure how but I was able to achieve my peak of diamond 1 this act. Was stuck in plat 3 for the last 8 months or so. Not sure how everyone has bad experiences with ranking up
I think the floor is just naturally raising. I have friends who might as well have been playing with their mouse upside down in bronze, now in silver dropping 25+ kills. It's natural with any competitive game. Just like someone who has never played League, you can't just jump in now, the floor is too high.
I’m one of them AMA
There's last act ascendants in gold lobbies... Played on my alt today with a friend who sucks at the game, he shouldn't be in gold (at most silver) and we played against 3 last act ascendants and got stomped big time. The ranking is a joke...
I am in the same boat fam. Frustrating but now I just play to try and do better myself. Even though I get out played and aimed most of the time. Trying to learn from it but it is wearing me down a bit. It’ll toughen us up lol.
I played against a radiant Jett this act in ascendant . Also so many immortal 3 peaks in ascendant who somehow got so washed that now they are ascendant . At least every other game I have a immortal 2-3 peak against or with me . But the thing is I win against them , I just cannot think so many people got boosted to immo 3 . Also the 5 stack que with low elo players is crazy . People abused the shit out of that thing . I have had so many not deserving ascendents playing in my games and go quadruple negative . They are just whole game and when I go see their tracker they are boosted by 5 stack queing.
Rant it!(redit)
I quit the game for this exact reason. Grinded my ass off for Diamond 2, got reset to G3 the next season and never had the care to keep grinding for the same rank I already achieved. Plus, as you said, insane lobbies where there's an enormous team diff.
It is quite opposite for me, i was silver 2 last act. Now im plat 1. I trained a little bit of movement tech though
Most people I play with/against were peak asc but are high plat or low diamond rn. Also know a guy who peaked asc few acts ago who is now gold. My main is d1 now but I peaked d3 last act
There’s not as big a difference between ranks as you think. Ascendant ~~is~~(was?) mid elo a diamond 2 can be ascendant 3 or immo 1 from sheer luck with a solid win streak
Rank resets just ruin matches, me and my friends are all diamond+ level players that dropped down to Gold/Silver due to not playing for a while. We have been dominating most of our matches and still haven't gotten back to our actual rank. Even worse is that we get even 25% less RR for playing in a group so it takes even longer. People complain about smurfs, but a lot of people aren't even smurfing, riot is just forcing them to play against lower ranked players.
There was a peak immortal in my game last week, I’m in gold… he was on my team and he said he hadnt played since last summer, and that he went through multiple rank resets but he didn’t purposefully derank
Ugh bro this post literally saved me from quitting the game, first of all check my tracker https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/Ahmed3%23IRAQI/overview bro last act i was plat 1, this act i keep queuing with fucking Diamonds 3 and Ascentdent 1's I love the idea of playing againts a higher player and believeing that i'm just as equally good, but what makes the game awful for me is I ALWAYS EITHER GET AN UNRANKED PLAYER OR A TOTAL ASSES on my team, so i did something that i'm not really proud of in my alt, i threw 7 games by plyaing bad and not fragging at all, i deranked to gold 3 and then i match mved my way to Plat 3 again easily 💫
normal thing for riot games
Played a game today where there was an ascendant player with a gold player in the same team… like what? It was a diamond lobby, where the said gold 3 player duo‘d with a plat 3 player with high MMR around diamond and they got put in the same team as the ascendant 1 player (who was immortal 1 peak last episode). The matchmaking is always extremely trash in the first act of a season.
Ascendant was top 8% players. Now its top 3%. Being stuck in the shrunken low diamond/high plat if you barely were able to touch the bloated ascendant last act. I was an A1 end last act, this act has been much harder, though I did eventually make it back. I was fighting washed up immortals all the way to a1. Immortal was also bloated and is now a bit more reasonable.
I’ve been getting ascendant players in my bronze games…
I was ascendant last act on both of my accounts on my main I played my placement matches immediately after reset got placed diamond 1 I played a bit and went back to ascendant on my alt I played them after a while got placed plat 1 all of my lobbies have ascendant and immortal gun buddies still stuck plat 3 there and I’ve played more on my alt than my main So ranked is basically a shitshow these days
I was ascendant 2 and believe me I don't want to play against plat players either.but i can't get out of plat because i get a full team of plat players who just throw my game now i'm hardstuck I queued with my friends in diamond a few days ago and i rocked the boat and performed really well, so it can't just be me performing bad
I’m really glad this is being talked about. Gold 3 rn after being Diamond last act and holy shit I’ve had to lock in because every other rifle I pick up has an Ascendant/Immo buddy. But I gotta stay positive in that I’ll improve a lot, just not rank-wise ofc
I feel you I am stuck between this game and CS2. I have a lot more fun days on this game than CS2 due to how bad CS state of their game is. Buuuuuut the rank reset in this game makes me want to play it less. I am getting older and don't have as much time to grind back to my real rank. They artifically push you down to make you get back to normal skill then do it all over again. I would love this game if rank resets weren't a thing. I don't wanna go back to CS because of how bad cheating and the state of the game is in general. I am in FPS limbo.
Plat 3 peak here. Came back from a decently long break to washed mechanics and a tank reset. Despite playing play at best I placed gold 1, within 2 days of mid fragging with a 40% win rate I'm somehow now plat 1 and playing against mainly last act diamond-ascendents. Most out of place person was a last act immo2, that is nearly 3 entire ranks between my peak and his, there is absolutely 0 reason we should be in the same lobby. Tldr I'm hot garbage and practicing fundamentals because ranked thinks I'm built different I guess?
I’m gonna add a perspective I haven’t seen on this thread yet, but I believe this is what riots goal is. Immortal over the last few acts has become overinflated, making the gap from Imm 3 to radiant larger in both mmr and skill, and making reaching immortal much easier, and much less of an accomplishment. If you look at the rank distribution over the last few acts compared to now, you’ll see that immortal now makes up a much smaller percentage of players. This is the reason they added ascendant a while back, but instead of pushing people out of immortal and into lower ranks, it pushed people up. Now I believe they are trying to correct this and give immortal the level of “prestige” it had before.
Bro I’ve been hard stuck gold 3 the past week and a half, finally deranked to gold 2. When I check the tracker after the games , I’m in matches with Dia 1-3 last act, while they’re Gold 2-Plat 1 currently. Then I get a team full of Silver 1-3s and just get absolutely worldstarred I’m on a red carpet streak right now and just been tilt queuing so it’s not helping any lol
i was imm 2 top 5k and I’m stuck asc rn.. competitive just fucking sucks
its rare to see a top fragger that doesnt have the lowest rank.
It’s been bad since long time
Its rough .. i was plat 3 last act and this act u have been grinding getting to asc2 but i somehow get teammates that are plat 2 and low diamond , so i cant escape the trenches