Ranked Valorant

This doesn’t mean that planting the spike isn’t important though. You are more vulnerable when planting for those 4 seconds, but planting the spike gets you an ultimate orb, which can potentially get you more kills or victories. As you’ll see later, winning rounds is the defining factor in ELO progression, and not playing the objective in a game like Valorant tends to lose you rounds which otherwise could have been won. 

Defuses

Based on these graphs, it’s safe to assume that whether or not you’re being efficient with your money doesn’t directly affect your change in rank. This doesn’t mean you should go waste your credits however. An important aspect of the game is maintaining a good economy that can support yourself and your team. Won rounds are backed with funds, but with this data you can relax about accidentally buying that extra gun.

Assists

A hot topic in the community has been a lack of love for support characters. The players that get stuck smoking, healing, or finding information for teammates often are the ones who get the least elo. This becomes obvious when looking at the correlation between assist and change in rank.

It’s tricky because you don’t want to create a system that allows players to boost their mmr simply by getting a bunch of assists, but it’s ridiculous how it barely seems to directly affect your rank if at all. Teamplay and assists are important to winning rounds, but looking at the situation from an individual's ELO, you’re better off playing frag characters that get kills.

First Bloods

Being the first person to get a kill each round however appears to have very little importance to riot.

Although an opening pick can win you the round, it doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to your mmr. This promotes a common theme of baiting in the competitive scene. Because if the extra risk taken to snag the first kill is not rewarded with any extra compensation, then most players are likely to let their teammates walk out first, often getting the trade and the overall elo benefit. I’m not saying that the players who get a lot of kill shouldn’t be rewarded, I just think the current system needs some refinement in how that elo is dealt out.

Individual Score

A number most people don’t even realize exists until they stare at the career tab while waiting in queue is the individual score earned each game.

This seems to have no direct effect on your elo because it does not take into account rounds played. A 13-0 win will often award a lower score than a 13-13 draw.

Deaths

You would think Riot would punish the players who died frequently. There’s a difference between those who are entering for their team and those who simply run in alone. No one likes the dude who jet dashes over a wall without their team only to get one kill and is instantly traded. But looking at the recorded data, it becomes obvious this isn’t important to ELO.

Ideally you would see an inverse relationship here. This is somewhat true but it doesn’t seem to be a constant. I had games with two up arrows where I nearly died 20 times. I understand that someone needs to enter the site first, and oftentimes they are the ones who die. But what ends up happening is people play selfishly, making dumb descions that will get them one kill with very little benefit to the team without a hit to their ELO. 

Kills

When looking at the data for kills, it looks like a shrunken version of the ELO graph. There are some exceptions, but most of the time it is pretty clear that kills stand to be one of the most important factors when ranking up. And that is certainly not a bad thing, because players should be rewarded for this. But when the players who play support roles, assisting those who get the high kill games, don’t receive similar elo progression then I think that’s a problem.

Average Kills/Round

The average kills per round pretty much just matches what I’ve already said for the general kill analysis.

Average Damager/Round

The average damage per round is interesting though, because with players learning brimstone molly lineups and shock dart arrows, you think this assisting damage and zone clearance would award more ELO. 

But looking at the graph you can see it doesn’t really matter (in terms of direct ELO correlation) if you’re doing damage for your team or not. This system is good for punishing players who can’t finish their kills, but it also rewards those who bait out their fellow teammates by finishing weakened enemies for their personal gain.

Combat Score

Your combat score is defined by your damage and kills. You can see the basic relationship between these two graphs. There’s nothing really specific to focus on gameplay wise when it comes to this besides getting as many kills as possible.

Score Gap

And finally, the most important factor when ranking up is the Score Gap.