Riot to make it ‘a little easier’ to climb VALORANT’s ranked ladder next act due to ‘too many people’ being in lower ranks

Now, hardstuck players finally have an excuse.

Image via Riot Games

Grinding to a higher rank in VALORANT may become a bit easier in the next act.

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Riot addressed VALORANT’s ranked distribution in today’s dev blog post, explaining that there are too many people in the lower ranks right now. It appears changes made to the tac shooter’s matchmaker to improve game fairness also affected everyone’s MMR, dropping it “by a small percent.”

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Image via Riot Games

“Now that we have gathered enough data, we can comfortably say our lower ranks have too many people in them, and our higher ranks not enough,” according to senior competitive designer Jon “EvrMoar” Walker. “Since your rank is tied to your MMR, this led to the whole playerbase situated in a rank lower than intended (by a small amount).”

Riot’s goal is to achieve a natural bell curve, with the majority of players in Silver and Gold. As it stands now, though, there are too many players in lower ranks and not enough in higher ones. Iron Three currently houses 6.7 percent of VALORANT’s players, for example. Riot ideally wants that number at 2.7 percent. Similarly, there are only 3.9 percent of players in Gold Three and 2.2 percent in Platinum Three. Riot wants those numbers at 7.3 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively.

To fix this issue, Riot plans on tweaking the system to make it easier to “climb a few ranks” in Episode Three, Act Two. While these changes are aimed at creating more balanced ranked distribution, variables can still skew things a bit.


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Author
Image of Andreas Stavropoulos
Andreas Stavropoulos
Staff writer for Dot Esports. Andreas is an avid gamer who left behind a career as a high school English teacher to transition into the gaming industry. Currently playing League, Apex, and VALORANT.