Cover-Credits:
- Riot Games had addressed recent issues that pro players have brought up with Valorant's new rank system.
- The team is working on changes but there is no word on when we can expect the changes to go live.
- Higher ranked players are still struggling to find matches and are being forced to create smurf accounts.
One of the biggest issues with the latest Valorant patch is the excessive queue times that is keeping higher ranked players from being able to play. Cloud9’s TenZ was unable to find a single match in 24 hours and other high ranked players are spending over an hour sometimes to find a match. This has also led to a number of lower-ranked players to climb up the ranks easily which has upset the competitive community at large. C9 Keeoh shared his thoughts on ranked and asked for some radical changes including the deletion of the last few days of player progress in Valorant and a hard MMR reset.
What Does Riot Plan on Doing to Improve Ranked?
The issue with the current ranked system is that a majority of Radiant players from previous seasons are unable to climb due to long matchmaking times. The MMR system saw an overhaul which is what caused most of the issues.
Earlier this month a Riot dev explained how the matchmaking system works. He explained with made-up numbers that if you are between a certain MMR bracket you will find players from the same MMR in your lobby. The player MMR did not change with patch 2.0 but instead of taking players’ current rank to find players, the game now uses internal MMR.
The problem with the change is that anyone with a very high MMR will only be matched with someone of similar MMR. And with so few players actually making it to Radiant in addition to the various servers breaking up the player population, it becomes very difficult for high-tier player to find matches. TenZ is not the only player who is facing the issue with other professional player complaining about the same.
A Riot developer responded to TenZ’s situation stating “We are currently talking about how to fix this, and looking into your que to figure out solutions. Unfortunately, it may not be as fast of a fix as we'd like, but know that we are looking into it. I personally feel bad that one of our best players can't engage with the new system.”
There is no word on how long it will take for Riot to make changes to the system. Professional players including C9 Keeoh is also upset over how Platinum and Diamond players were able to get into Radiant lobbies, making everyone’s ranked experience worse. We have to wait a few days for the patch’s matchmaking system to settle down and see if the new system is better than what we had since Act 1 Episode 1.
RELATED: Cloud9’s Keeoh Wants Valorant’s Devs To “Delete” The Ranked Leaderboard
