VALORANT's ranked gameplay is no longer about personal skill or growth. The ranking system is inadequate and does not track your actual performance and actively inhibits growth.

The new update to the competitive gameplay system is incredibly flawed. The hidden MMR system does not promote growth in rank and instead punishes those who are hardstuck or are at a lower rank than they should be. Here are a few examples of the majority of my last three weeks playing ranked.

-27 RR from Match MVP, 2 bottom fragging duelists

4 and 19 silver II sage

outperforming all platinum players in the lobby

Silver I, 11 and 24 instalocking Jett

Outperforming most duelists in the game as Killjoy

These matches represent the horrific luck-based mess that is the matchmaking system. Whether I win or not is completely dependent on my teammates' ability to actually do what they are supposed to do. I should not be out-performing duelists as sentinels if I belong in gold.

All of these losses resulted in me losing 27 RR or more. On rare occasions, I am able to win a game, and I only gain 20-23 RR despite performing just fine or better than the rest of my team. The game is actively trying to derank me despite me performing higher than most players in the match. Now, I'm not saying I don't have my off games, there's plenty of games where I will in fact go negative. But the majority of my games are ones that you see above. Riot has stated previously in its competitive update that it will reward players who "pop off" and "most of you should see an increase in RR gains if your rank is below your MMR". This system only works if the game believes your rank is below your MMR. The system does not work with players whose rank is higher than their MMR, even those rightfully so, and punishes players who legitimately improve. It is also incredibly punishing to players who whiff their placement matches yet deserve to be a higher rank. It also punishes players who carry their team and still lose.

I was Diamond I at my peak in Act I Episode III, and I am having a hard time seeing how I belong as a Gold III player. I understand that the Riot devs are working very hard to make competitive a good experience, and this is in no way meant to be an attack at all. This post is just highlighting my personal frustrations with it. I hope Episode II will see some changes. I believe there are plenty of other players that share my same frustrations, but let me know.

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EDIT 1: There was some confusion about the # of kills being the only factor, and that was not what I was going for. I'm posting my original reply here:

"Yes. I illustrated this in the number of kills as I didn't really have any way to show contextual performance, but let me clarify.

I can't show context for these games as I don't have recordings of them, but I'm not just talking about kills. I used the performance on the scoreboard to emphasize the struggle in knowing how the game works, how to get your team poised for game-winning rounds, and then having them lose that round. I attempted to demonstrate this by using kills as a general method to show differences in skill, but I understand how that didn't really get through.

This does not apply to just kills. This applies to win conditions, map placement and knowledge, and strategies. There are only so many win conditions for me to do when I attempt to communicate strategies with my teammates and them either not listen at all, or simply not having microphones. There are also only so many win conditions when my teammates have roles to fill and they do not fill them. I understand VALORANT is not only about kills, and I only used kills as an example because in these cases it reflected the overall performance of the players. I hope I'm making sense here.

TLDR - It's hard to win games when you are the only one willing to contribute information, effort, and able to get decisive kills to win rounds, and being punished for playing fine is frustrating"