So I had an increasingly bad time in my ranked game for a while now feeling more and more empty every time I had to regrind my rank to immortal culminating last act when I truly felt nothing when i got there. Every game feeling the same, a coin flip of who's got the best aim/mentality. Did someone just got out of a bad match ? Well now it's your problem ...

Anyway I felt burn out and quit for a week, returning to test the new agent and played unrated not expecting much. Sometimes unrated can feel like the sweatiest game without the stakes of gaining RR and without a proper team composition, but for once I stumbled upon nice people, funny people and I had a great time.

I strongly believe that Valorant like all modern competitive shooter is devoid of any fun (on purpose). The game is meant to be balanced, to be fair and, well, competitive but it means that the goal of your game is not for you to have fun playing but to have fun winning. This is even more palpable when you go to the valorant category on twitch and see only titles like "rush to radiant" "radiant ranked" "immo 300 rr" "road to immortal" everyone is obsessed with the grind and i get that viewers wants to see someone playing well but that only reinforce the pressure and the idea that to be able to enjoy the game you have to take it that seriously. Meaning that even when you hop on your iron game you will have someone screaming at the top of their lung about how bad you are (sometimes even in unrated), because everyone plays to win because the game isn't fun if you don't win, fostering the toxic community.

But hey it's ok because it's just more content for the grind, it's more eyeballs behind the screen, it's more controversy, more engagement to a product you designed to be a complex skinner box to trap people in a false sense of accomplishment because it's not a game anymore NO it's a product you have to sell, an investment that you wish to see a return from.

I truly enjoy playing this game or I wouldn't have played as much as I did but it's not without flaws (or intentionally not putting more diversity in your game modes to avoid splitting the number of people playing to make queue time faster and force people into the cheap controlled proved to make money and drive engagement game mode that is plant the bomb 5v5)

Sometimes it really feels good to shout into the void what you are feeling about something you are passionate about.