There has been a ton of posts complaining about ranked and now also pros such as TenZ are saying ranked is the worst it has ever been. I am neither a pro nor am i very good at the game. At the time of writing this post i am going up and down between diamond and immo (Tracker). So i think i know what i am talking about and i agree that ranked right now feels terrible. I find myself more often than ever thinking "Why am i even still playing this game? This is not fun at all." and here are the reasons i think are making our experience worse. In this post i will showcase a few problems and also propose a possible solution to this problem. However, i have no experience in developing competitive games and this is just my point of view as a player.

Toxicity and Throwers

In my opinion, these players are what impacts the quality of games the most. Even in dia3+ you get these people almost every second game and it seems that they never get punished for what they do. It's sad that even the slightest bit of critique hurts their ego so much that they decide to throw a completely winnable game.

Solution 1: Introduce a visible honor system. Let team mates rate all their other mates after each game on how nice, communicative or supportive they were. Every person can give every other person a rating only once and only after the game is over to prevent friends from giving each other good ratings. People that have bad honor will be taken away the ability to rate other team mates. People with very good honor will be rewarded titles, cards etc. and their ratings and reports will be given more weight. Last but not least, let honor play a role in matchmaking.

Solution 2: Introduce an Overwatch system as in CSGO. Let people watch other players that have been reported for sabotage etc. and decide wether they were toxic or not. If they find him guilty of toxicity give him a warning and adjust his honor. If they find him guilty of throwing a significant amount of rounds, punish him accordingly and give the other mates their lost RR back. Also reward the players that look at overwatch cases.

Cosmetic Rank

In Valorant, you basically have two ranks: Your cosmetic displayed rank (eg. Diamond 2) and your hidden MMR. Hidden MMR is basically an accumulated amount of elo points, which similar to your rank goes up and down. However, MMR is not bound to only going up and down in a certain limit. Actually, the way MMR is calculated is only known by the Valorant Devs. However, it decides which players you will be matched with/against and how much RR you gain/lose from a game. Ideally, your MMR should match your cosmetic rank, but in reality it often does not match. So it could potentially be that you are in a rank, the MMR system does not think you belong to and this can be extremely frustrating, because of either one of the two following scenarios:

1. You win many games in low elo. Your MMR will skyrocket and then match you against players way above your rank. You cannot win games easily anymore, which results in you staying in your rank even tho MMR thinks you should be higher. Frustrating.
2. You climbed all the way up into a rank MMR does not think you belong to. Even if you win games by a big margin, you will get very few RR and if you lose with even the slightest difference you will lose a lot of RR. So even if you hold your place in this rank, you will keep going down, because MMR sees you somewhere else. Frustrating.

Solution: Here the solution is not that simple, because in theory this system should work. However, i personally don't understand why we need a cosmetic rank, when the whole system only depends on MMR anyways. My solution would be: Matchmaking based on cosmetic rank (not MMR) and RR gain/loss based on their performance only and a MMR bonus. This means try to match people with similar rank (+/- 2 ranks) and give them Ratings based on their performance, also give an MMR bonus if their MMR is way higher. To show that this should be better, let's look again at the two examples:

1. You win many games in low elo. Your MMR again skyrockets. However, you will still be matched against players in this same rank group, so you should be able to pertain your performance until your cosmetic rank comes closer to your MMR. Additionally, your MMR will pull you towards that rank, making ranking up easier.
2. You climbed all the way up into a rank MMR does not think you belong to. You will now be matched with people in this rank, and can show that you belong here. You will get Ratings independent of your MMR, but solely based on your performance and the score.

Account Sharing

Everybody in Valorant has multiple accounts in order to be able to play with friends. While wanting to play with friends is fine, having smurfs on the enemy team or boosted teammates on your team is very frustrating. However, people still want to compete for rank when playing with their mates and, hence, resort to making alt accounts. Also some people, just want to have some easy games on a mates account, boosting them into an elo they cant hold themselves in.

Solution 1: Make 2-Factor Authentification a must for competitive queue. This won't completely stop account sharing but it will make it significantly harder. Also the creation of alts will be harder as ppl cant reuse their phone number for multiple accounts.

Solution 2: Introduce a "Searching for x amount of players" functionality. If you want to queue with a friend but cant because of rank difference, simply enter how many people you are searching for to get a 5 stack and then play as 5 stack disregarding rank.

Solution 3: As there is some sort of 2FA already available (email authentification does not seem appropriate as it takes a few minutes to make a new email), introduce a "Trusted" queue for players that have that enabled.

Summary

To sum it up toxicity, throwers, the discrepancy between cosmetic and actual rank and account sharing seem to be impacting games negatively the most right now. I proposed a few solutions, which are not perfect in any way, so feel free to bash me for it. Let me know what you think or how these solutions will not help. How would you try to solve these issues?