ValScan Rating: Scoring your Impact
ValScan's new rating system, VSR, is a round-based scoring system loosely inspired by professional ranking systems like VLR rating and HLTV rating. Here's the TL;DR: it rewards behaviors like trading and gaining advantages through kills, it punishes behaviors like overextending and leaving your team in a disadvantage, and it weights kills according to round economy (sorry, no more eco chasing).
With these principles, ValScan rating is a robust system that can identify the difference between impactful and harmful behaviors in a VALORANT match. Unfortunately, hidden impact behaviors such as IGL'ing or being an amazing fill player understandably cannot be ranked and are not part of ValScan rating.
The Formula
ValScan’s rating algorithm begins by giving a score to every duel in a round. Initial scores are determined by the relative advantage one team has over another. The key word here is “relative”. ValScan’s rating algorithm awards points based on number differentials, such as +2 (5v3, 4v2, etc.) or -1 (4v5, 3v4, etc). The most impactful kills occur at +0, or when teams are evenly matched (such as a 5v5, 4v4, 3v3, etc.). The least impactful kills occur at the edges, such as +4 or -4. Finally, kills aren’t all that matters. If you die, your score will be penalized much like you are rewarded for kills. If you die in a 5v5, you will be penalized much more heavily than if you died in a 1v5. The key to having a positive impact is to generate more advantages for your team than you generate disadvantages.
The next step is weighting. Firstly, a kill that is immediately traded is less impactful and therefore has a lower inherent score. Deaths are treated the same way, meaning players are encouraged to play with their teammates in order to reduce their penalty for dying. Round context is also taken into consideration: for example, if your team is on a low buy, your deaths will have less weight while your kills have more weight due to the additional advantage of picking up better guns. Dying first on an anti-eco is penalized more than a first death on an equal buy, while getting kills is reduced heavily in weight.
Finally, you gain bonuses based off of your actions in a round. Damaging and non-damaging assists are factored into VSR as well as non-kill damage. Clutching a round gives you a large, flat bonus and getting multikills gives you a small bonus for every additional kill.
And that's it! VSR is a simple yet effective measure of player skill. A player who rarely plays around their team will usually die in untradable spots, lowering their rating. Baiters and overheaters are similarly punished. On the other hand, players that help their team win the round by securing pivotal kills, trading their teammates out, and clutching up tend to have a higher score.
Why ValScan Rating?
ValScan rating seeks to mend the imperfections of other popular rating systems. ACS, for example, heavily favors duelists by scoring kills solely on the number of enemies alive. Controllers and initiators, who are encouraged to stay alive due to their regenerative utility, will always have an inherently low score compared to duelists even if their actual impact in a round is higher. Additionally, this opens up obvious loopholes: in the ACS system, getting a kill in a 5v2 is scored the same as getting a kill in a 2v2, and getting a kill in a 1v5 is scored the same as winning the opening duel. By scoring kills more fairly with relative advantage, impactful players have more opportunities to shine. Systems like ACS and ADR also don't penalize deaths at all, which encourages behaviors like running it down, 'getting your one', and dying. Generally, ACS and ADR favor quantity of kills, while VSR emphasizes quality of play.