I've been playing Valorant since release, mostly with a group of friends that I used to play WoW with. There are 6 of us in total. We're generally able to get a group of 4-5 every time we play -- most of the time we won't even play unless we can get 4-5. We're not the best players around, but we take the game seriously, play as a team with a balanced mix of agent roles, and try to win.

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During season 2 my rating hovered around plat 1 to plat 3. Three others on the team hovered between around plat 2 and diamond 1. The last two were generally between gold 1 and plat 1. There were a few situations where one of the lower players was 1 rank out of range of being able to play with one of the higher players. That was a bit of an annoyance, but we'd just queue without the top rated player for a few games or the lower player would play solo and we'd all be back within the 6 rank range again so it wasn't too bad.

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Then season 3 started. We weren't able to all queue together even for placement games so we played in smaller groups or solo. Two of us were placed in plat 2, two in gold 3, and two in silver 2.

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If it were merely a case of working up 1 rank to rejoin the team that would be doable, but the lower players have lost motivation to play since they're too far away from rejoining us, and the rest of us have lost a lot of motivation because we seem to have such bad experience with random players we get matched with -- mostly insta locking duelists and baiting all game, no mic/no communication, being toxic, not buying/saving with the rest of the team, etc.

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Some possible suggestions:

- (other than the obvious of going back to the 6-rank difference allowance) Perhaps relax the rating differences if you have a full team, like was the case in CS:GO.

- Perhaps scale the rank difference allowance as you go up and down ranks. For example, perhaps you should need to be within 3 ranks of immortal 1, 4 ranks of diamond 2, 5 ranks of plat 3, etc. This would keep the upper ranks more competitive while allowing the more casual ranks to play with friends.

- Either removing the individual performance impact on rating changes entirely or substantially reducing it so teams like ours don't move out of rating sync despite winning and losing the same amount of games. This would also stop 90% of solo queue players from insta locking duelists and baiting their team all game. People would be more focused on how they can individually best contribute to the team rather than how they can min/max their KDA at the expense of the team.

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Anticipating likely responses:

- no we don't want to just ditch our lower level friends, and we don't feel we should have to. We've all known each other for years and years and had so much fun with this game during the first two seasons. Surely there must be a lot of other people in a similar situation who are no longer able to play with friends too.

- I get that a lot of people enjoy the solo or duo queue experience, but honestly we don't. While there are a lot of decent people around that we get teamed with, the community generally seems like there are enough toxic/antisocial players to make queuing without a full group a pretty unenjoyable experience.

- we don't want to make smurfs and spend another 10+ hours playing 20 unrated games to queue with them only to have ranks drift out of sync again.

- we've tried unrated and it's a joke.