For VALORANT players playing competitive, the rank reset at the start of each ranked act is supposed to represent a refresh. But for many, it’s just a repeat of the same struggles they experience every few months. And to start off the new episode, it’s apparently worse than ever.
Since the start of Episode Six, Act One, there’s been a spike in posts on sites like Reddit and Twitter about the negative effects of the ranked reset on competitive players. As always with a rank reset, players get dropped a number of ranks to start the new act, but the climb back up has supposedly gotten harder.
Several players have said that matchmaking feels more “random,” with a higher differential between the best and worst players in a server. Because the reset for this act was supposedly bigger than previous ones, with all players receiving a reset, there are supposedly more instances of players having to play people who were ranked multiple tiers higher in the previous act.
This has resulted in far fewer close matches, according to these players, with more lopsided victories and defeats earlier in the act than in previous ones.
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Unfortunately for the players looking to climb ranks quickly to get back to where they were, these wins with large round differentials are less valuable to rank rating than in the past. Players were experiencing “too wide of RR gains/losses from match to match based on the round differential,” according to the notes for Patch 6.0.
That patch also changed RR gains for players “whose ranks are far away from their MMR,” making the rating changes more dependent on individual performances than on round differential. But against lopsided opponents, this will mean getting to the ideal rank will still take longer.
