A very short summary: this experience just proved to me that the servers will always be more kind to specific players in a game, so there's an RNG limit on how well you can perform and sometimes it's better to just quit/surrender if the servers are acting up

Now in more detail.

I was queuing in a 5stack and got put against another 5stack on fracture. We got rolled, their top fragger had 37 kills and we legit had 2 people with 1-2 kills. All of us are plat-diamond.

Multiple times through the match, our team got the LOW SERVER FPS error and enemies told us they just saw us "watching them and not reacting for a whole second" on peeks. We tried changing strats, flanked, rushed, weapon trolled and nothing worked at all. They gave us a quick loss and didn't really say much else.

Next match, we are queued against the same 5stack. "We ought to surrender" most of us thought... but after just 3 rounds it was apparent that the server was deciding who the winner would be. The enemy team was complaining about "moving headshots" "how did you react so quickly" and I legit most of the time shot before they even got a chance to. The matches perfectly mirrored eachother, but the players were the same ones with only 1 min between matches.

Also, we all live in central london and our pings never exceed 10ms, which is more than ideal.

I think this all comes up to the official Valorant post about their tech saying "The server DOES NOT trust what the user sees or does", which is good for competitive games. What the server does not do is true 128 tick rate. From what i've seen, whenever my team rolls the other team, we all have a solid 128 packet send rate, while the enemy team complains of drops to 90-110. What the server probably does fo the rest of the packets is some kind lag compensation, trying to guess what's going to happen.

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Other shooter games just accepted the fact that 128 tick rate is VERY HARD to attain, while maintaining profits and good experience for the players, so you see a default of 64 tick rate on most games. Can we get less skins and more work on the netcode, as it is very clear that the server sometimes follows non-deterministic programming patterns which in turn make the most wished for feature: "replays" impossible. There are multiple other ways of making money of a free game, but ignoring these basic problems pushes away possible "whales" from the game