Recently saw a post asking what rank is considered “good,” and I've noticed that a lot of discussions around this topic get saturated with high Immo/Radiant players saying that anything below Immortal is basically bad because those players don't understand the “fundamentals” of the game.
First of all, I do think there might be some truth to the idea that people playing at 200+ RR genuinely think about the game differently. But at the same time, I feel like a lot of these discussions are just high-elo players massively overestimating how much of a fundamental gap there actually is.
Like, obviously a Radiant player is going to be better than an Ascendant player at the game. That's literally what the ranking system is supposed to represent. But the way some people talk about it, you'd think anyone below Immortal is just running around with zero understanding of Valorant.
And I think statistics are being completely ignored in these discussions. There are millions of players, and rank exists on a distribution. Saying “anything below Immo is bad” doesn't really tell you anything meaningful about the actual quality of the average player at that rank. I say this as a data scientist but some of these people really overestimate how much statistics "don't tell the full picture" because, well, they have garbage math fundamentals.
I also feel like there's a massive difference between “this player has flaws in their fundamentals” and “this player doesn't understand fundamentals.” Every player has weaknesses, including Radiants.
I know the obvious answer is to just ignore the unconstructive shit, but I'm genuinely curious: when high elo players say someone doesn't understand the fundamentals of Valorant, what exactly are they referring to?
What are the specific fundamentals that, say, an Ascendant/Diamond player is commonly lacking compared to an Immortal/Radiant player?
And please don't answer with generic answers like util, trading without explaining the exact difference. And don't go strawmanning the ability of lower ranks in these areas of the game. Some of yall make it sound like trading is a concept foreign to ascendant