Valorant players question why low elo players “don’t care about winning”

Stephanie Zucarelli
Valorant Agent Iso

The Valorant community has swiftly identified a problem that might be affecting the entire matchmaking system of rank matches. Here’s what they said about it.

Valorant requires players to set clear strategies with their teammates, which is arguably the most difficult thing to do in a competitive FPS. While Riot Games is still working on a system to help with balanced matchmaking, fans noticed a trend when getting paired with low elo players.

The debate started thanks to a post made in Valorant’s subreddit, where a diligent user called ‘Antonidas-25’ listed a graph of surrender rates by rank. “Do you surrender early, or do you never F5? Silver teams are (on average) twice as likely to surrender as teams in Acendant or Immortal,” they explained.

According to the submission, Bronze, Silver, and Gold players were more likely to surrender during matches, which Valorant fans point out seemed to be counterintuitive when trying to rank up.

Episode 7 Act 3 poster for Valorant featuring various agents
Valorant low elo players have the highest surrender rate while playing in ranked matches.

“The lower rank, the more casual you are, and don’t care about winning as much as having fun. And if they’re getting stomped, they’re just gonna move on. Their focus is just having fun with the skill level they have, not always improving and challenging themselves,” commented Redditor ‘PriorFinancial4092.’

However, not all Valorant fans agreed that lower elo players were getting into ranked “just for fun,” since they pointed out that it was easier to get into other game modes with lower expectations. Players theorized that the main problem was that it’s easier to surrender when losing a match, and that it seemed more practical to directly move on to another “more winnable” match.

“In high elo, you don’t really care. You just queued to play the game, so even if you’re getting stomped, you’ll play it out,” said Reddit user ‘MrDyl4n.’

The Valorant community also pointed out that a prevalent problem in lower ranks was connection or technical issues, which could also affect their skills in-game.

Redditor ‘PiSteps,’ also proposed an interesting take on the problem, and pointed out that “lower rank people are coping too much” and that it generally leads to a lack of confidence to finish an entire match.

“There are lower-rank friends that I tried coaching, and they always come up with an excuse for something they’ve done wrong, instead of acknowledging that a more experienced player found the reason why they are not winning games. They want to rank up badly, but they can’t fix themselves, so then you are just stuck in that place,” explained the user.

Riot Games haven’t formally addressed the issue of surrender rates in ranked matches. However, this generalized problem affects the entire matchmaking landscape, something that Valorant has been struggling with for a while.

And that’s why Valorant player question why low elo players have a higher surrender rate than other ranks. If you want to know more about Riot Games’ FPS, you can check all weekly challenges in Episode 8 Act 1 or why players slam Radianite as “worst monetization model.

About The Author

Stephanie is a Games Writer at CharlieIntel. After graduating as a journalist, she started working as a tech writer for Infobae, Channel 9, and Rolling Stone. She's currently focused on covering Diablo 4, Baldur's Gate 3 and Fortnite, but can't resist anything related to The Sims 4 and Stardew Valley. You can contact her at [email protected].