While the developers behind Riot Games’ competitive shooter Valorant have gone an extra mile to maintain transparency in their ranking system, a portion of it still remains shrouded in mystery.
However, it seems like players might have a few more answers now since a Riot developer has revealed how the MMR system in Valorant really works.
A recent Reddit post on the Valorant subreddit saw user ‘hardstuckbabe’ complaining about the ‘booster’ players in the Gold bracket. The Reddit user claimed that a lot of ‘Bronze level’ players had been boosted to Gold ranks due to recent matchmaking changes by Riot.
In this post, Riot developer ‘EvrMoar’ explained what really went down and also explained how the MMR system actually works. He started by using a made-up example that explained where players having a certain MMR would be placed.
How Valorant ranking system works?
The Senior Competitive Designer behind Valorant explained, “‘You are Iron 2 if you are between 400-500 MMR.’ Turns out, iron 2 had too many players in it, we overestimated how many players would end up at that 400-500 MMR. So, to fix it we now say ‘You are in Iron 2 if you are between 400-420 MMR, and Iron 3 421-480 MMR, etc.’ The player that is 450 MMR would go from Iron 2 to Iron 3, without actually changing their skill/MMR. Because MMR is a reflection of the players’ skill, that number didn’t change.”
From his explanation, it’s evident that Valorant uses an MMR system that’s similar to a lot of other modern competitive titles. It’s also clear that the MMR thresholds for ranking up in Valorant were reduced a bit by the developers recently due to more and more players infesting towards certain ranks.
The ranks in Valorant are:
- Iron
- Bronze
- Silver
- Gold
- Platinum
- Diamond
- Immortal
- Radiant
