Competitive games are the quintessential Valorant gameplay experience, pitting two teams of roughly equal skill levels against each other in a bid to claim more elo, or ‘RR’ as it’s known in Valorant (Ranked Rating), and a higher rank as their reward. There are eight different ranks in Valorant, each with its own three sub-tiers, with the exception of the very highest, Radiant. Here we’re explaining Valorant’s rank distribution to give you an idea of where you are in the grand scheme of the game’s total player count.
Valorant Rank Distribution Explained
As you can see in the above image, the most populous rank in Valorant –the rank with the most players– is Silver 1, followed closely by Bronze 2. These stats are by way of Esports Tales, which utilizes a program based on Riot Games’ officially released API to track stats and in-game data.
Generally speaking, the majority of players are clustered between Bronze 1 and Gold 1, with an ever-descending number of players in every rank beyond Gold 1.
If you’re Silver 1, you’re playing with roughly 11% of the game’s total player base and can consider yourself an averagely-skilled player — at least, according to your RR. Always remember that because Valorant is a team game and you are only awarded RR for winning games, your rank is entirely dependent on your team’s performance. Therefore, it is only a rough estimation of skill; it’s totally conceivable that a player might go on a rather unlucky run and drop well below the skill levels of the players they really should be against, and the same can be said of players luckily winning due to being “carried” and fast-tracking beyond where they should be.
Of course, if you play enough ranked games, you should eventually find yourself more or less in an appropriate rank for your skill level.
The graph you see above paints a fairly balanced picture of Valorant’s rank distribution, but this hasn’t always been the case. Riot Games completely revamped the system last year after it discovered a disproportionate number of players in Silver 1, and there have been numerous tweaks and balance adjustments to ensure that the spread of players is as even as is illustrated above.
As for how many Valorant players there are and where you and your rank stand in the grand scheme of things, Riot Games last year announced that there were 14 million active Valorant accounts playing the game. Of course, not all of those would necessarily be playing ranked. The only measure we have for certain is that there are roughly 40,000 Immortal + players on the leaderboard at the conclusion of each Valorant Episode, 500 of which are Radiant.
Still, what we can tell you is that if you are, say, Platinum 1, then you are roughly in the top 20% of the game’s competitive queue. Immortal players, by comparison, are roughly in the top 2%.
How Valorant Rank Resets Work
At the conclusion of each Act, Valorant’s leaderboard (the top 20-40,000 players) resets, whereas everyone below that stays exactly where they were previously. Only a single game is required to reveal your new rank (which, again, continues on from the previous). New Valorant Episodes are a different story; this is a full reset that completely wipes the leaderboard and requires all players to complete five placement games for a new rank.
Here’s the official overview from Riot:
- Every episode, the highest you can place is Diamond 1, and we will squish all ranks downward. You can expect to drop (usually) 1-4 ranks from where you were last episode. Higher ranks get dropped harder due to leaderboard ranking, boosting concerns, skill atrophy, etc.
- Every Act we only reset the leaderboard, dropping all players to 10% of their current RR (if on the leaderboard). Everyone else is only required to play one placement and will earn their previous rank back from the prior Act.
Hopefully, this article gives you a solid overview of Valorant rank distribution. We’ll be sure to keep this updated if Riot Games makes any substantial changes to how its Competitive system works. Until then, for more Valorant coverage, search Twinfinite.
