Valorant ranked players have long been pestering Riot Games to do something about the serial AFKs. The FPS game‘s creator has put plenty of punishments in place, but dedicated players remain discontent. According to them, AFKs get away with unacceptable behaviour as penalties aren’t harsh enough, but it turns out Riot has been silently slowing down their rank-up progress.
In an ever-enlightening episode of Rank Fact Friday, senior competitive designer Jon ‘EvrMoar’ Walker has revealed that each time you move away from the keyboard, the system deducts Rank Rating (RR). This means, whether you win or lose, the game will gobble a chunk of your ELO to keep you from acquiring your next rank badge as quickly.
“When you go AFK, there is an RR penalty! We want to incentivize coming back to help your team win, but we want AFK to be punishing. This is on top of our social systems, which gives temporary competitive restrictions for chronic AFK players.” EvrMoar says.
How much Valorant RR do you lose for going AFK?
You can lose as much as 12 RR for going AFK in Valorant. The deduction begins at your third missed round at -6 RR. If you don’t return, the game will continue to deduct rating, capping it at -12 in the sixth round.
This is a severe penalty, especially for ranked demons who value every single point rating. In Valorant, you can bag 30 ELO and still miss out on desired rank due to a missing 2 RR. So, 12 is a big number, and the fact that you can lose it despite winning a game is brutal yet fair. According to EvrMoar, the AFK penalty has nothing to do with winning. If you miss rounds, you pay either way.
This means if you have won a game after being away for six rounds, Valorant will still charge you 12 RR. So, if you were slated to receive 25 winning ELO, the game will only allow 13. This is the same if you lose, but the damage will be much more severe as the AFK penalty would get combined with the generic deduction for losing.
If these numbers don’t convince a serious ranked player to stay in the game, we don’t know what will. The penalty is pretty harsh, so hopefully, players will seriously commit to their rank games now that this information is out in the open.
So, stay in the game and do your best till the end, as underperforming or leaving Valorant ranked games early can hurt your MMR. Make sure you don’t lose ELO over silly mistakes, as the Valorant Immortal leaderboard will become more exclusive soon.
