Valorant dev explains why kills aren’t the most important for ranking up

A Valorant dev has explained how the game’s ranking up system means kills are far from being the only factor in determining player’s ranks.

As it’s an FPS, you’d expect kills to be the undisputed most important part of the game; after all, the more heads you click, the more games you win, right?

Well, not quite. While players ranked at Immortal 3 and above have their ranks based purely on whether they win or lose a game, at lower levels you can still improve your ELO rating whether you win or not. This is because your performance has an influence – and performance isn’t all about kills.

A Valorant dev has explained why your level of performance can mean so much more than how many kills you pick up.

Valorant dev explains why performance is not just kills

Valorant’s new Senior Competitive Designer EvrMoar explained how factors outside of kills impact players’ ranks.

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“Performance isn’t just kills, it looks at things like assists, flashes, smokes, utility, entry fragging, etc. so players that play a supportive role also see performance % increases for playing utility,” they explained to players.

“Being the top killer doesn’t always mean you were the highest performer on your team.”

In Valorant specifically, this makes sense. While on games like CS:GO, where every player starts the game with access to the same tools, putting more weight on kills in determining a player’s rank works, this doesn’t quite copy over to Valorant.

For example, it’s harder to compare the performance of a Jett player to the performance of a Cypher player is performance is based purely on kills.

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If both players are of equal ability, it’s likely the Jett will frag out more due to her kit allowing more way of outdueling enemies in raw damage. Meanwhile, the Cypher player is likely to get fewer kills as his kit is centered more on providing information and utility for his team.

This means at ranks below Immortal, where individual performance plays a bigger part in determining where players are ranked, a multi-factored performance calculator means agents with more utility than raw killing ability aren’t completely ignored.