Does VALORANT MMR decay?

There is a sense of prestige for reaching the top rankings in VALORANT. But to stay at the top, players have to continue playing and cannot just reach their desired rank and stop playing altogether.

VALORANT competitive designer EvrMoar confirmed on Dec. 9 that players’ Matchmaking Rating (MMR) does decay the longer the game is left untouched.

What is MMR decay in VALORANT?

In EvrMoar’s weekly Ranked Fact Friday, he explained how MMR decay works and how Riot Games has implemented ways to keep competitive integrity intact by a method called “variance.” The longer a player stays away from competitive VALORANT, the more their MMR decays.

“Yes, we have decay, and it does two things,” Riot EvrMoar said. “When you are gone from VALORANT for an extended period we do lower your MMR… We also increase your ‘Variance.'”

MMR is the way Riot tracts players’ performance to place them at a rank that the game believes they should be in. This varies based on wins, losses, K/D, and overall performance and will decrease or increase depending on these factors. As time passes between playtime, the MMR on that player’s account can decrease. But to prevent high-ranked players from leaving their accounts unattended for months at a time to lower their MMR on purpose to smurf, Riot implements variance, which is a measure of how confident the game is in the player’s ranking.

“Variance is how confident we are in your MMR,” EvrMoar said. “The higher your Variance the further you may match up with players, and gain/lose MMR as well. It’s how we tell the range at which you play. If you have high Variance we are probably less sure about where you belong.”

This keeps people within a range of where they should be and does not allow people to intentionally tank their MMR. The simplest way to avoid variance and MMR decay is to keep grinding away at competitive for the best chance of ranking up.