LONG POST WARNING. THERE IS NO TL;DR. BUT YOU SHOULD READ ANYWAYS BECAUSE THIS IS DRAMA AND WHO DOESN’T LIKE DRAMA!!

Link to original: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/sbg8zy/misinformation_about_the_ranked_reset/

So u/A_RandomNerd made a titular post explaining how most people misunderstand a simple fact about ranked resets. However the irony of him failing to understand some other basic principles himself, and even quoting an Eggwick-video where he advocates for MMR-resets forced me to make this post for the sake of my own sanity.

Frankly, this post explains the MMR-RANK-system and the Pros/Cons of it. It’s not an overly complicated topic but it’s not too simple either, shown by how little acknowledgement of it's existance is out there.

EDIT: While reading, note that this is for soloq. Stacking almost certainly has something more going on with merged player MMR values that I don't understand enough to explain. I assume it's noticably different to prevent boosting, I don't know how well it works to that end...

MMR vs VISIBLE RANK

In chess there is something called Elo. Elo for all intents and purposes is MMR; they’re systems made to represent player skill and match players against each other.

In betting, the odds depend on likeliness of an outcome. If a betting horse is an underdog, then their odds are big, if a horse is expected to win then their odds are low. This applies to players and Elo as well. If your Elo is lower, that counts you as an underdog and you have more to gain, less to lose. The same is true the other way around.

Simple example of two players and their gains/losses

In VALORANT?

Lets for a moment pretend your rank didn’t exist and Valorant used Chess’ Elo system.

To be clear, in this example “Radiant” or “Gold” wouldn’t exist, they would just be numbers next to your name. “Oh, we’re an average 2000 team vs a 2200 team. They’re slightly better, but we have a bit more to gain”. Compare this to chess “leaderboard”. This would be Valorant’s MMR-system without the Rank-system on top of it.

I'm a top10% chess player, rated 1329 :)

WHY DOES VALORANT USE RANK ON TOP OF MMR??? (AND WHY DO RANK RESETS EXIST (AND WHY MMR RESETS SHOULDN’T EXIST))

Ranks are shiny. Ranks look cool, numbers are boring and maaath blergghh. I can’t even read dude I just want to shoot heads and see badge color go shiny. Kidding aside, this is a genuine purpose of ranks. Ranks have character to them, however little you might believe so. But then why not just make ranks strictly based off of MMR? Why couldn't Diamond just be 1500 MMR etc.?

I didn't finish 1900s, I finished Diamond 4.

RANKS exist to facilitate RANK RESETS without touching MMR. Sometimes in chess you have a lucky 10-game winstreak. The opponents might make abnormal mistakes or simply forfeit for other reasons. At this point your Elo is higher than your skill level. In the equivalent case in Valorant, both your MMR and Rank would increase above your actual skill level. However, unlike in chess where people put way less value on Elo, in gaming culture ranks have prestige and bragging rights attached to them. Their rank can very much define their gaming experience.

As such, people will claw on to their rank with all they’ve got, even if it means to stop playing. This is apparent with many high radiant players going to their smurf-accounts after hitting a high rank. They know they can’t lose if they don’t play and other players have the initiative to try and outclimb them.

The reason WHY MMR RESET IS A TERRIBLE IDEA is because it is every problem with smurfs currently, but made global and out of players’ hands. Currently Rank reset puts your rank down, but your MMR is the same (and afaik it doesn’t decay very fast over time). This means that if Radiant Elo is 2500 (random number), then every ex-radiant player will keep playing against 2500 players, no matter their rank. They could take a 6-month break and miss two rank resets, go down to gold, and still play against 2500-players.

Compare this to the idea that a Radiant-player would take that 6-month break and have to involuntarily smurf gold-games. It would force people to play in the very beginning after resets and bite the bullet of having many many coin toss games where you hope for better “smurfs” in your team. You have to understand that a massive reason why ranks exist is so we could have these resets without messing up MMR and creating this hellscape of smurfs.

First 2 weeks of an Episode after MMR reset (2022, colorized)

YEA BUT WHY THE RANK RESETS THO?

Valorant wants ranks to have “integrity”. Whether that integrity is worth the resets is up for you to decide. Like in the example above, it partially stops drifting. This means someone hits a lucky break or goes on a hot streak and has a feeling that they can’t keep it up. Then they make a smurf or feel disincentivised to continue knowing that they hit a spike in their rank. At best it means they play very infrequently and quit after a single loss, at worst they stop playing completely.

Drifting isn’t just a product of normal people getting lucky or having fiery day. Lots of cheaters get to high ranks and then stop cheating and play just to maintain that rank. They might also sell the accounts to worse players who’ll do the same.

And it’s not just the drifters either. Some people simply don’t play a lot, and the game keeps evolving and growing. A Radiant (Valorant) player in the Beta might not even hit Immortal anymore. But if there were no resets and they were an infrequent player, they could still be in there.

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN MMR AND RANK IS BASICALLY ANOTHER INTERNAL MMR-SYSTEM. Now that sounds quite convoluted, but basically think of it like your MMR and Rank playing against each other, from the perspective of the Rank. If your Rank is lower than your MMR, then you have more to gain and less to lose, and vice versa. This is the mechanic that defines how much RR you gain/lose after a match.

This also explains why after resets everyone’s gains are higher than their losses. Their rank went down a lot but their MMR is the same. If your g/l is not massively positive, it means that your rank was actually above your MMR (you didn’t “deserve” it).

PROBLEMS WITH RANK EXISTING ON TOP OF MMR

CLARITY. This is the clear #1 issue with ranks being on top of MMR. Ranks offer incredibly little info compared to community belief and as such they’re used to flame people and flame the system.

FOR EXAMPLE: Say you’re in a full Diamond-lobby, but your team has one Plat-player. The general response? “Why tf is Rito putting worse players into my team!?” But factually that player should have close to same MMR as you currently. Going by the fact that they’re the only plat in a full diamond game you have to assume their MMR is above their rank as opposed to all the Diamond-players having lower MMR’s. This means that the Plat player has just recently been on a climb. It could mean they’re a smurf, or it could mean they’re a really talented player who has recently started playing. In both those cases, they might be a genuinely better player than one of the other Diamond-players who might be long-term stuck in Diamond. It is very unintuitive to think that the most skilled player in your team might logically be the lowest rank.

TIME-INVESTMENT. This is basically the question of how fast does your MMR and rank change with performance. For example in a skewed (500vs1000)-Elo game do you have +100/-1 odds or +60/-40 odds? How much do you need to play for the game to find your rank? In online chess this is a lot. Partly because it improves the integrity, but also the games are quite a lot shorter and less mentally taxing than in Valorant. But if you had to play 100 games with +30/-10 odds to go from silver back to plat then your rank reset would define your entire season climb. No matter the amount of games, that number might be all the time someone has to spare during 6 months.

BIG TAKEAWAYS AND LIFE ADVICE FROM A NO-LIFE REDDITOR

Rank resets aren’t a bad thing. Due to the Rank-MMR-dynamic you should almost always gain more RR after reset. The game is actively trying to help you to reach your “correct rank”. This is important. YOU ARE NOT TRYING TO FIGHT AGAINST THE GAME, THE GAME IS TRYING TO HELP YOU AFTER RESETS. Tarik said it’s fucked that even though ranks reset he could’ve probably made it back to Radiant with a 30% winrate. But that’s the entire point. The game doesn’t want you to do the same grind from the beginning, you continue from where you left off and if it’s adequate, you will gain your rank back by force.

Not only do resets purify the ladder of filth like cheaters, it also guarantees that your rank more closely represents your current skill level from the past 0-6 months with some amount of playtime. It should ease your mind that you haven’t accidentally cheated the system and don’t actually belong in Diamond or Gold or wherever. It should also be noted that if you hit Gold in every Episode, you’re actually improving with the general playerbase. You’re not a Gold-rank from 2 years ago, you’re a 2022 Gold player, which is a higher skill requirement. And you know you’re a 2022 Gold player because you’ve gotten back there every 6 months.

The main point in the original post made by u/A_RandomNerd was that it sucks to play against same tier opponents but have a lower rank. While this is a pain point for many players and a definite downside of rank resets, this needs to be said: You can’t affect your rank, you can only affect how you play. Your MMR is the hard work you put in, your rank is just the pay you get out of it. You can define how hard you work to improve, you can’t define what rank you have. It does feel like terrible advice to say “don’t look at your rank” in a game where that is the only visible info you have for your improvement. But frankly that is true in these games always, not just during these resets where it is amplified. Maybe the easiest way to think of it is like eSports seasons. The first games in the season have little importance, but the last ones are crucial. Your rank matters incredibly little early episode, but converges closer and closer to your real skill over time.

While I don’t directly disagree that this sucks, I felt like the original post just missed every bit of nuance you can with this topic and made a very rash statement based on it. Honestly I hope someone makes a well presented video that doesn’t massacre the topic so more people get easier access to the concept. Even better if that someone is Riot.