suspended for 180 days for “rank manipulation” — need help or visibility

hi everyone,

i’m posting here because i genuinely don’t know what to do at this point. i’ve seen others get help or visibility directly from rioters through reddit, and i’m really hoping someone here might be able to help or point me in the right direction because support hasn’t been helpful so far.

i was recently hit with a 180-day suspension from valorant for “manipulating rank,” but i’ve never boosted, cheated, 5-stacked with lower ranks, or account shared. i’ve always played on my own account from my own device. i’m someone who takes the game seriously, it's my first FPS/PC game, i've played since 2021, i’ve played in collegiate tournaments and even have a riot buddy through my community involvement.

my stats show that i’ve improved consistently over time. there’s nothing unnatural or suspicious about my progress, just a little inconsistency sometimes. the only recent penalty i’ve ever had was a 4-day comp restriction for disconnects, which happened because of game crashes after the UE5 update, not anything related to gameplay behavior or competitive issues. i ended up figuring out how to resolve the crashes on my own since support was also unhelpful for that.

i’ve submitted multiple support tickets, but the responses haven’t addressed the actual issue. in one of them, support misunderstood what i said: i mentioned that one of my duo’s gmail and the accounts connected to that gmail were recently hacked (aug 04), and they assumed that my own account was compromised, which isn’t true. my account has never been shared, hacked, or accessed by anyone else.

i only ever queue with the same people that i know, never random individuals. i haven’t queued with that duo in over a week simply because i've been busy, and he’s already submitted his own ticket. i’m starting to feel like i might’ve been falsely flagged because of association and now i’m serving a ban that doesn’t reflect how i play or who i am as a player.

i really want to have faith in the online support process but i've read through the posts and i've seen how so many of these same issues go unanswered for months, some of the posts are lucky enough to get seen by the right people and get resolved. i wanted to post here in case someone else at riot sees this or if anyone in the community could pass this along to the right person.

this game means a lot to me. i play it to compete, to improve, and to be part of a community, not to cheat or exploit the system. it’s really upsetting to feel like all of that is being undone by something i didn’t do and i feel like all i've gotten were copy/paste responses. please help!!

and i've noticed a common occurrence in this group so to anyone who wants to leave unhelpful or rage-bait comments, i won’t be engaging and i don't mean that to come off negatively, i just don't want to waste my energy towards it. this post is for people who want to/can help or share insight.

thanks so much