Rating matchmaking in Valorant often drives players to white heat. Riot Games has repeatedly raised the topic of feeling “stuck in a rank,” but there are still a lot of questions about the MMR ranking system. Are there separate queues for smurfs? Does the agent’s choice affect the amount of Rank Rating (RR) gained or lost? And why do you get less RR after the same match than your friends at your party?
To put the dots on the “I”, Jonathan “EvrMoar” Walker, senior designer of the Valorant competitive mode, got in touch. In detailed posts on Reddit and Twitter, he explained in detail exactly how ranked MMR works, and described what Riot is doing to make matchmaking more accurate and fairer.
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What is the difference between MMR and Rank Rating?
Valorant uses two rating systems at once: the hidden Matchmaking Rating (MMR) and the visible Rank Rating (RR). And here it is important to understand one thing — the rank that you see in the client and your real MMR are not the same thing. With the beginning of each new episode, the rank is reset to zero, but the MMR remains in place. It is he who helps the game determine your approximate skill level when placed in a rank.
Riot’s main goal is to reduce your rank and MMR to the same value. If your rank is higher than the current MMR, the system will start to “pull” you down: less RR will be awarded for wins, and more will be deducted for losses. Conversely, if the MMR is higher than the rank, you will move up faster, getting more RR for wins and losing less for losses. This is how the game tries to get you to a rank that really matches your level.
What affects the MMR rank in Valorant
The MMR in Valorant consists of two components: Encounter MMR and Win/Loss MMR. Encounter MMR evaluates your personal interaction with rivals — duels, damage done, assists, and the proper use of abilities. This also takes into account the difference in ranks between you and your opponents: defeating a stronger player is more appreciated.
Win/Loss MMR is much simpler — it looks solely at the result of the match. Victory or defeat, without unnecessary details. Together, these two systems allow you to understand how you play against opponents of equal strength and how consistently you win.
At lower ranks, Encounter MMR has more weight — an individual game can really have a greater impact on your progress. But the higher you go, the more important the team result becomes. At a high level, the reactions and aim of most players are about the same, so it’s not the number of duels won that decides, but the victory in the matches.
At the same time, as EvrMoar emphasizes, the selected agent does not affect the MMR in any way. Playing as a duelist does not give rating bonuses only due to the potentially higher number of kills. Similarly, the Average Combat Score (ACS) at the end of a match does not directly affect either rank or MMR — it’s just an auxiliary statistic for analyzing the game.
How does Riot check if the rank matches the player’s actual level?
A logical question arises: how does the system understand that the MMR is set correctly? According to EvrMoar, matchmaking constantly strives for situations where players have about a 50% chance of winning. If statistics show that a player consistently loses more often than he wins, this is a signal of a possible error in the rating.
In such cases, the system performs a reverse analysis, finding out why the current MMR does not reflect reality. Then the rating is adjusted, and the matches are recalculated based on the new data. If the updated MMR starts predicting game outcomes more accurately, then the adjustment has worked.
EvrMoar also emphasizes separately that there are no hidden “loss queues”, “victory queues” or special smurf queues in Valorant. When it seems to a player that it is easier to climb on one account than on another, the reason most often lies in the details — a different team composition, a different style of play, or simply different gaming habits.
