Riot Games has hosted another of its monthly ‘Ask the Devs‘ sessions, and one question the team felt was worth highlighting, in particular, pertaining to the lower ranks some players have experienced during Episode 3 and the spread of rank distribution moving forward. As it turns out, Riot has noticed an unusually high percentage of players are clustered around Silver, and it’s something it wants to change moving forward.
Riot explained that changes made to Valorant for Episode 3 have made matches much fairer, but they did so at the expense of dropping the MMR of all players — the elo system that determines player rank. Jon Walker, competition producer at Riot said:
@Now that we have gathered enough data, we can comfortably say our lower ranks have too many people in them, and our higher ranks not enough. This is what we call Ranked Distribution: the population of players in each rank. Since your rank is tied to your MMR, this led to the whole playerbase situated in a rank lower than intended (by a small amount).“
The article features two handy graphs that highlight just how cluttered the lower elo ranks are, and another below showcases Riot’s intended target distribution moving forward:
Riot does note that due to the ever-shifting skills of players the target rank distribution won’t ever be spot on, but it is at least encouraging for those who have been hard stuck in lower ranks to know that things should get easier in Act 2.
In related Valorant news you can read up on the latest patch notes here.
