Title.

First of all, much like most of you here, I fell in love with this game since the first day of closed beta. For an esports title that's so early in it's lifecycle, it's amazing. There a couple of gameplay things that need to be fixed, but it's been great and really playable since day 1.

They obviously created Valorant to compete with the most popular FPS ever, Counter-Strike. What's the most noticable thing about CS? That it's an amazing game and that people kept playing it for 20+ years now despite Valve's best efforts to make people quit. They treat CS like an unwanted child.

Moral of the story? If a game is good, people will be playing no matter what.

Now we come to Valorant. Another amazing game that people will keep playing no matter what.

And this is what Riot doesn't understand. Or at least they act like they don't.

Long before Valorant was even a thing, I always detested games with progression reset of any kind. That's a mechanic for awful games to keep pressuring players into playing more by creating fake incentives. Bad games absolutely need to do that because people will stop playing otherwise.

Riot absolutely doesn't need to do that with Valorant. It's an amazing game and if anything, their rank resets (plural because changelog said it will happen every act) are just creating a bad envoriment for everyone.

People are confused, frustrated, don't actually know what's going on and quality of games has dropped off significantly.

Ever since early act2, I was imm2/3 soloq player. Maybe 20% of games weren't playable as in one team being significantly better than the other.

After this reset, that number has gone way up. I'd dare to say to around 50%. And it's not going to be fixed anytime soon. And when it does, we'll get another reset. Infinite cycle of awful matchmaking.

Point being that highest rank players don't need any incentives to keep playing. People just play because they love the game. 99.9% of us won't go pro, we just want to have decent matchmaking and that's it.

Leaderboards should've been created separately from ELO. Was it that hard to create leaderboards that have nothing to do with ELO? Playing soloq imm/radiant gets you points for leaderboard and that's it. Similar to faceit system.

But no, now we're stuck in this infinite cycle of bs where I've yet to see a single pro or high tier radiant player say anything good about the system.

It's obviously nothing that can't be fixed, but hopefully Riot realizes this is an amazing game and that they should just keep matchmaking simple.