TLDR below. This could be a longer post.

I started playing Valorant very consistently around January of this year, Yoru was coming out and icebox was still being dodged like it was the plague. During this time I rose quickly from low silver to my peak, a single game off of Plat 3, but then it happened. I fell far, fast, and at the time without knowing why. I fell to P1 on my derank game, won, and then didn’t win a single game until I was Gold 1, still playing in the same upper plat lobbies the whole time.

By the time the act ended (Episode 2, Act 3) I had regained my place in upper Gold 3 but never touched plat again, I started to wonder why I was worse than I was a couple weeks ago. So I started VOD-reviewing, Aim Lab training*, and it only got worse. My individual play was better, but the W/L was worse. After a small break of a week me and my queue partner realized I was just getting upset that we were losing, we fell to a place we thought we were better than, I mean we were almost pushing for Diamond right? We had to be better than some Gold 2/3’s right? Well, obviously we weren’t, but by the end of the season we accepted it. Either we were worse or the Fortnite kids had taken us over, no longer were we Plat players.

With the new episode came a fresh start though, (Episode 3, Act 1) placements we knew were going to be lower and I placed Silver 3 after finishing in low gold the previous season. Gold 2 was our home now, and every game was a coin flip if the Jett who is cracked is on your team or theirs. After about 40ish games played, we stopped playing. We didn’t mean to take a break but organically it happened, and not a single game of Valorant was played. No unrated, no DM, no competitive. Until Berlin.

Masters Berlin triggered our want to play Valorant again, we started queuing with a completely different mindset. If nobody wants to play smokes and we don’t oh well no smokes. We want to have fun again, we didn’t care about if we won or lost, didn’t care if someone went 3-24, which did happen, good for him for having the computer on at least, we just queued up games and chilled in discord. (Don’t worry we gave calls and still played to win.) which brings us to yesterday.

After playing for 2 or so weeks with a break of just over a month we’ve returned to plat. I couldn’t tell you what I’ve changed, or that I’m never going to be in gold again because I know I will. But after hating to queue games knowing that I was a higher rank before and I can’t climb because, “Gold just play so weird” isn’t in my head anymore. The break we took helped me improve in Valorant. I got out of the day-to-day cycle of trying to find what I am doing wrong.

The point of this novel is this, if you are losing and not enjoying yourself just take a couple days or weeks off, play something else, because when you come back, all of the things you focus on when constantly playing go away, and you can actually improve. Or possibly I’m just getting carried and lucked my way back into Plat, I’ll leave that up to you.

Oh also, don’t backseat :)

TL;DR - Fell from high plat to low gold, got stuck in gold, took a month break, came back and climbed back to plat after