My best friend introduced me to valorant a little over a month ago (before this, i had little to no FPS experience whatsoever). We enjoyed playing together, until our circle for valorant widened as we found out some of our other friends had been playing and were higher elo/more experienced.

We 5 stack, usually me and my friend (who are lower level players) with 3 more experienced players (silver - plat elo). At first playing all together in unrated was fun, but now me and my lower elo friend feel really bad playing rounds. Even if we win, we usually have only 6-9 kills, 20 deaths and the rest of the scoreboard at least have 15-20 kills per game. It’s just so hard to go against enemies when we play unrated, and feel like no matter how hard we train and try we just die in 1v1 duels, or if we try to strafe just get one tapped.

My other more experienced friend says playing in harder games will help us improve faster, but tbh it makes us feel like shit every game.