This is not a post arguing whether or not the way RR is calculated is good or bad. This post is discussing why downward trending players are becoming rightfully frustrated because the way they receive RR is not being correctly communicated to them.

What's the Problem?

When a player plays ranked, there are a few things they get to see that influences their own idea of how they should be rewarded with RR. Here are a few that most people will look at:

• How did I perform in this game, and where am I placed on the end game scoreboard?
• How many rounds did I win and lose this game?
• What are my wins and losses on my career page?

Now here is a list of things that are used in the calculation of RR for a game, put together from various Riot posts, responses, and comments (please note that we do not know the real way it is calculated, which is part of the problem):

• How did the player perform compared to their previous games, not the players in their game?
• How many rounds should the player have won in relation to the opponents and teammates they were given?
• What are the player's wins and losses for their overall winrate in the past few acts?

Hopefully you see the issue here. If I was a player who MVP'ed my game, 13-0, and was on a 3 game winstreak, I would think my account is glitched if I ended up receiving only +15 RR. But what I can't see by just glancing at my match and account are that I have an overall 45% winrate, my team had players with MMR way higher than the opponents and were projected to win regardless, and I always play duelists so MVP is my usual performance and gets no special bonuses.

How Does Riot Fix it?

• Let players see more of their match history or have a way to know their account winrate without having to use a third party site that uses Riot's API
• When given a performance bonus, make it clear in the description that it is because they outperformed their average, not their teammates
• Give players a percentage breakdown of their RR. Show them that (and these are made up percentages since we don't actually know how it works) 50% of it came from winrate, 30% of it came from their game round score, and 20% of it came from their utility, KDA, and plants.

Edit: For those of you who read this post and are a bit confused on how rating and MMR works, there is a (slightly outdated) compilation post made by u/Boryalyc that includes summary responses on ranked questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/lrfdpp/ranked_faq_and_common_questions/. This is not the topic of this post, but is helpful if you'd like to look at it (they're also a lot of my own writing, so keep in mind that I'm biased).