Valorant Placement Match Boosting

The Structure Most Sites Still Get Wrong

Valorant retired the Episode system in January 2025. What runs now is a year-long Season divided into six Acts, each about two months long. Right now that's Season 2026 Act 5, which started 19 August and runs to mid-October.

The reset schedule changed with it, and getting this right is the difference between a purchase worth making and one that isn't.

Hard Resets — Twice a Year

One at season start in January, one at midseason around July.

• You drop roughly one to three full ranks

• You play five placement matches

• Placement outcomes are capped, with a practical ceiling around Ascendant 3 regardless of where you finished

• This is the reset that decides months of your ladder

Soft Resets — Every Other Act Rollover

Every act transition between the hard resets.

• Smaller drop, usually one or two tiers

• A single placement match, not five

• Far less consequential, and far less worth buying

Radiant Is the Exception Either Way

Radiant players drop to Immortal 1 with a heavy RR penalty at every reset, hard or soft. If you hold a Radiant seat, the reset conversation is different and the maintenance question matters more than the placement question.

What This Means for Your Order

If you've landed on this page in the days after a hard reset, this is one of the highest-value purchases on the site. Five games, a floor set for months, and the ladder is simultaneously at its softest — everyone else is also placed below where they belong, so the lobbies are genuinely easier than they'll be in a month.

If you've landed here after a soft act rollover, be sceptical of what anyone tries to sell you. One placement game is not a package. It's one game. Buying a handful of wins or simply playing it yourself is usually the better answer, and we'd rather tell you that than take an order you'll resent.

The calculator asks which reset you're in. If you pick wrong, live chat will correct it before you pay.

Timing: Book Before the Reset, Not After

Placement demand spikes hard in the first 48 hours after a hard reset. Everyone wants their five games played on day one, booster queues stretch, and the express option stops being optional.

The fix is simple: book ahead. If you know a hard reset is coming in January or around July, place the order in the quiet week before it. You get a booster reserved, standard pricing, and your placements played in the softest part of the window instead of the busiest.

Act 5 closes in mid-October, and that rollover is a soft reset — one placement game. The next hard reset is the January season start.

The Detail Worth Verifying Yourself

We'd rather flag this than pretend to more certainty than we have.

Riot adjusts placement mechanics between seasons, and the exact numbers — how many placement games, how far the drop goes, where the placement ceiling sits — occasionally shift with a patch. The figures above reflect the current structure as widely documented, and our boosters play these resets every cycle.

But if you're making a decision that hinges on an exact number, check the live patch notes or ask us in live chat and we'll confirm what we're seeing on accounts this week. That's a better answer than a number on a landing page that was true two seasons ago.

Region, Platform and Level Requirements

Account level 20 is required before competitive unlocks at all. If you're below it, levelling comes first and we can handle that.

Regions: NA, EU, AP, KR, BR and LATAM, with boosters actually in those regions rather than routing in from elsewhere.

Console is a separate ladder. PS5 and Xbox track independently from PC on the same Riot account, with no ranked crossplay between them — so console placements are a separate order, played by a booster on controller.

Current map pool is seven: Ascent, Breeze, Haven, Lotus, Split, Summit and Sunset. Summit and Sunset came in with Patch 13.00 in June; Fracture and Pearl rotated out. Riot swaps on the act calendar rather than on balance patches.