Valorant patch 2.02 may be one of the most sought-after updates to Valorant following the release of Episode 2. The update features changes to rifle movement accuracy, something that the community has been nudging the developers about for weeks. The patch also adds a few competitive updates, such as given bonus rank rating after having a fantastic performance in a match.

Rifle Spray N’ Pray Begone

The Bulldog, Guardian, Phantom, and Vandal, have all received a major nerf to their running, walking, as well as crouch-moving accuracy. All rifles are now much less accurate while moving. Naturally, the most important change is in the running accuracy. Though firing while walking and crouch-moving is now also much less accurate than before the changes.

Running Error across rifles increased 3.75 >>> 5.0

Walking Error across rifles increased .8 >>> 1.1

Crouch-moving Error across rifles increased .3 >>> .8

Updates to Competitive

Apart from the major change to Valorant’s rifles, update 2.02 also features some tweaks to competitive. Players will now gain more ranked rating if the system believes that they need to get to their designated rank faster, this is named rank rating convergence.

This will help everyone get to a rank/Leaderboard Rank that best illustrates their skill more quickly. We wanted to be a little conservative launching the new ranked system, but believe in some cases you were having to play too many games to reach your intended rank. By doubling the effectiveness of convergence, players on the extreme ends might see 40+ Ranked Rating gains, pushing them to their proper rank faster.

Update 2.02 also gives us higher rewards when we have one of those rare games with 30+ frags. Now, when you have an insane game that is above what you usually score, you get rewarded with more rank rating.

Players Iron through Diamond who perform exceptionally well in a match (weighed against their own average performance) will gain bonus Rank Rating

We want to reward players that “pop-off” in a match, performing above expectations.

Lastly, Diamond 3 ranked players are now only able to solo queue and duo-queue. This is supposed to get them ready for Immortal, where that is the norm.

Changed Diamond 3 to a premade size capped at 2 players. We needed “proving grounds” before getting into Immortal, and this should prepare players for the leaderboard and create a 5-stack buffer before Immortal.

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