General Overview
In Riot Games’ popular free-to-play first-person shooter or FPS game Valorant, players are given a fairly familiar competitive or ranked game mode that can be compared to other competitive games alike such as CSGO, and League of Legends (another IP of Riot Games). The Valorant ranking system is designed to place players in tiers and sub-ranks where they are matched upon skill, to try to balance the game mode and offer a fairly equal competitive play experience. The ranks in Valorant can then be climbed, or fallen through, by players depending on their performance in their respective rank.
Fans of competitive games have praised such a ranking system, and as such it is featured in every eSport title to date in some form or another. However, the Valorant ranking system of course differs slightly from others.
The Tiers Explained
Much like the aforementioned games, the Valorant ranking system features multiple tiers or ranks that players can obtain, obviously a higher rank is rewarded to players who are more skilled. The Valorant ranks include 8 different tiers, which fans of competitive games will be familiar with the first 6 Valorant ranks in order – Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. The last two tiers included in the Valorant rankings are the Immortal tier and finally the highest rank in Valorant, previously name ‘Valorant’, the Radiant tier.
Furthermore, up until the Diamond tier of the ranks in Valorant, each tier includes three sub-ranks, such as Bronze I-III, and then the final two tiers only having one sub-rank each.
Much like in other games, a player’s Valorant rank is a sign of their skill – players with a lower rank tend to be considered not as good players as those who are in much harder to reach ranks; the higher ranks tend to be filled with professional eSport players and streamers.
Distribution of Ranks
Courtesy of Riot Games’ public release of a Valorant API, information and data regarding the Valorant rank distribution is easily obtainable. According to said data, in July 2021, the Valorant rank that featured the most players was Silver I and featured as much as 15.3% of players. Furthermore, more than 60% of the total players enlisted in Valorant rankings were in the Silver tier or below. This means that in Riot Games’ popular competitive FPS, the last five tiers out of the total eight were reserved to only roughly 40% of the game’s player base.
This Valorant rank distribution data suggests the real difficulty of reaching such high ranks in the game, as well as showing just how important ones Valorant rank is in the social sphere of the game.
Climbing or Dropping Valorant Ranks
In the Valorant ranking system, much like the League of Legends League Point system, players have a Rank Rating (RR), which is a number that fluctuates after each competitive match – earning RR points based on a combination of wins and overall performance.
To advance to the next Valorant rank, a player must gain 100 RR points, similar to League of Legends, and also similar to Riot Games’ previous and still mega-popular IP, a win generally rewards you with 10-50 RR. And then obviously, if you manage to find yourself falling below your 0-100 Rank Rating for your specific tier, you can expect a Valorant rank demotion.
Overall, the Valorant ranking system explained is very similar to other big competitive games alike, especially with Riot Games’ additional competitive game IP League of Legends. Of course, however, the Valorant ranks in order are slightly different, as they feature two ranks that are not in other games. However nonetheless, fans of the popular competitive eSport title genre will be familiar with what competitive Valorant play has to offer, and it should allow for an easy transition from other competitive games.