In very low ranks, a Diamond+ play can almost always easily climb from Iron to Gold 3, even if they solo queue, with very little losses.

The win rates of a Diamond smurf are going to be somewhere around 70% at these ranks, which shouldn't be surprising, as they are much better than the players at that elo.

You'd expect that they would be able to maintain a pretty high win rate in Diamond, perhaps just 5% or 10% lower than that their win rate in Gold.

Especially given that these Radiant players definitely have better aim, map awareness, and agent mechanics than the other players in the Diamond rank bracket.

However, once a player gets to Platinum 2 to Diamond 3... even the best Immortal and Radiants can struggle.

Don't get me wrong, it is true that most of the time these players can still average a higher KDA and ACS than the other playrs in the same lobbies do.

However, the overall win rate of a Radiant smurfing can be anywhere from 45% to 60% in Diamond, assuming that they do not play in a party with other high elo players.

As an avid Valorant player, this strikes me as very odd. I would have expected there to be a huge gap in skill between Diamond players and Radiant players.

Such that a Radiant player would be able to frag out far harder in Diamond lobbies than they are currently actually able to do.

This has made me wonder... why are these players, who are in the top 500 of the region, struggling to win more than around 45-55% of their game in Diamond?

Does Valorant simply not reward players who are more skilled than others enough?

Is the emphasis on "team play" too strong, such that even these players cannot easily win games in Diamond without forming a "stack"?