If you’ve had some complaints about VALORANT‘s ranked system, you aren’t alone. NRG Esports’ Brandon “Aceu” Winn raised more complaints around the system in a recent stream due to the “inflated” ranks that some players can get from five-stacking.
In his previous game, he played with two players who ended up with 17 collective kills and 30 collective deaths through a 23-round match. It was a rough loss for the talented former Apex Legends pro, who top-fragged with 35 kills and only had 16 deaths.
Aceu’s issue, though, is a problem that’s been brought up by multiple other pros before. The ability to five-stack into VALORANT ranked games with other solo queue players provides so many problems for competitors looking to climb by themselves.
Five-stack players, for example, can climb together much more easily since they’re familiar with each other and have more synergy than the average solo group. This makes actual solo players struggle to win since they aren’t as coordinated with their fellow solo teammates.
Of course, this also prompts the problem that Aceu ran into today. Players who usually play in groups of five will now struggle when they’re queued in by themselves, which puts the rest of their team at a disadvantage. These inflated ranks and various issues can be solved, however, by simply implementing two queues—one for solo-duos and another for group play.
This system was implemented in another Riot Games’ title, League of Legends, after the same problems cropped up in their ranked system. This allowed full teams to queue up more frequently against full teams, while solo and duo players played with and against only solos and duos.
Although Riot devs are on their week-long break right now, they’ll likely have to think of a way to rectify these issues soon.
