Season 2026, Six Acts, Two Real Resets
Valorant stopped using Episodes in January 2025. What you have now is a year-long Season divided into six Acts of roughly two months each. Right now that's Season 2026 Act 5, running from 19 August to mid-October.
The reset schedule changed with it, and this is the part most boosting sites still get wrong.
Two hard resets a year. One at season start in January, one at midseason around July. You drop roughly one to three full ranks and play five placement matches to re-establish your position.
Every other act rollover is a soft recalibration. Smaller drop, usually one or two tiers, and a single placement match.
Radiant is the exception either way — Radiant players drop to Immortal 1 with a heavy RR penalty at every reset, hard or soft.
Why This Changes When You Should Buy
Three timing windows actually matter, and knowing them saves you money.
Straight after a hard reset. MMR carries forward with a downward adjustment, so the ladder is full of people sitting below where they belong and the matches are softer than they'll be in a month. It's the cheapest, fastest climbing of the entire year. If you're going to buy once, buy here.
The last two weeks of an act. Act rewards and the rank badge you carry forward are decided by where you finish. Order volume roughly doubles in this window, queues for boosters get longer, and prices reflect it. Buy earlier if you can.
Mid-act, no deadline. The dullest window and usually the best value. Nothing is expiring, booster availability is good, and you're not paying for urgency.
Act 5 closes in mid-October. If you want a rank locked in before the Act 6 rollover, the sensible time to order is now rather than in the first week of October.
What Decides a Climb's Speed
Your rank band. Iron to Gold moves fast, partly because of the 3-6 RR performance bonus for strong individual games. That bonus fades at Platinum and above, where only the win counts.
Your MMR. Covered above, and it's the biggest single variable.
Your region. Queue times and pool quality differ meaningfully between NA, EU, AP, KR, BR and LATAM. KR and AP in particular have distinct pacing.
The map pool. Seven maps in competitive right now — Ascent, Breeze, Haven, Lotus, Split, Summit and Sunset. Summit and Sunset arrived in Patch 13.00 in June; Fracture and Pearl dropped out. Riot swaps on the act calendar, not on balance patches, so expect movement at the Act 6 rollover. A booster comfortable on the current seven climbs faster than one relearning two new maps.
Your agent restrictions. Locking your booster to a narrow pool is entirely reasonable and it does slow things slightly. Say so upfront and it gets factored into the estimate rather than becoming a surprise later.
What Your Rank Actually Means
Distribution, roughly, as of this season: Gold is the single largest band at around 22% of players. Diamond and above is about 10%. Ascendant is roughly the top 5%. Immortal is around the top 1%. Radiant is about 0.05%.
That's worth internalising before choosing a target. "Just get me to Immortal" is asking for the top one per cent of a playerbase in the tens of millions. It's absolutely doable and people buy it every week — but it's a different order to Silver-to-Gold, and the price gap isn't arbitrary.
Party Restrictions, If You're Buying to Play With Friends
A very common reason for ordering, and worth checking the rules before you pick a target.
Iron and Bronze can queue up to Silver. Silver with Gold. Gold with Platinum. From Platinum upward the window narrows to about one rank tier in either direction.
Immortal and Radiant can only queue solo, as a duo, or as a full five-stack — three-player parties aren't permitted at that level, and four-stacks were removed from ranked entirely.
Five-stacks bypass rank restrictions but take an RR hit: roughly 25% reduced gains when the party sits outside normal ranges, and up to 75% if a Radiant is in it.
So if the goal is queuing with a Diamond friend, you need Platinum at minimum. Tell us the friend's rank in the order notes and we'll target the tier that actually solves it rather than the one you guessed.