Metrics
Trade Kills and Traded Deaths in Valorant
The 3-second window, the two stats it produces, and why the average trade rate is far lower than most players assume.
In Valorant, a trade is a refrag: an enemy kills one of you, and a teammate kills that enemy immediately after. The death was not free - it was exchanged. Riptide draws the line at 3 seconds and reads trading from both sides of the exchange: deaths of yours that got avenged, and kills of yours that did the avenging.
| Stat | Counts when | Corpus average |
|---|---|---|
| Traded death % | You died and your killer was killed by your team within 3s | ~17% of deaths |
| Trade kill % | Your kill avenged a teammate's death within 3s | ~16% of kills |
| Fast trade % | A trade kill landed within 2s of the teammate's death | A refrag-speed signal, no fixed baseline |
The two trade rates and the fast-trade refinement, under the fixed 3-second window.
TRADE_WINDOW_MS = 3000 FAST_TRADE_MS = 2000From isDeathTraded() and tradeKillGap(): the killer must die to the victim's team within 3000 ms; a refrag inside 2000 ms also counts as fast.
The mechanics are exact. The window starts the moment you die. Anyone on your team can take the refrag - it does not have to be the player you were paired with. And a single kill can only be a trade kill if the enemy it removed had killed one of your teammates inside the window; the engine credits it against the nearest such death.
Why ~17% is average, not 50
Trading feels like a coin flip - either your team punished the kill or it did not - so most players guess that around half of all deaths get traded. The corpus says otherwise: among established competitive players (at least 30 competitive games), the average traded-death rate is ~17%, with a spread of only about 2 points. Trade-kill rate sits at ~16% of kills. Trading is the exception, not the norm.
The reason is structural. Most deaths are not tradeable at all: a lurker picked off alone, a save hunted down after the round is decided, a retreat caught in the open, a duel taken with no teammate inside refrag range. Three seconds is a short window, and a team has to already be positioned to use it.
The 50% intuition breaks ratings
Grade a player against an imagined 50% trade rate and everyone in the lobby looks roughly two standard deviations bad. Riptide's baselines are fit to measured corpus rates under the same 3-second window the engine uses, so the trade bars center on real play, not intuition.
How trading feeds KAST
The T in KAST is exactly this rule: a round where you died but were traded still counts as a contributing round, because your death bought an exchange instead of a free pick. The same 3-second window powers both stats - improve your trade discipline and your KAST rises with it.
The Impact trade axis
Trading is one of the six axes of Riptide's Impact rating, and the second-largest after firepower. It blends both sides of the exchange:
trade = 0.55 z(traded death %) + 0.45 z(trade kill %) weight in Impact: 0.19Getting traded weighs slightly more than trading for a teammate: dying in a position your team can punish is a positioning skill in its own right.
Both rates are standardized against the corpus baselines above, so an 18% traded-death rate reads as genuinely good (about half a standard deviation up), not as "failed to reach 50". For reference, the six Impact axis weights are firepower 0.36, trade 0.19, clutch 0.15, and precision, entry, and consistency at 0.10 each.
How to raise your trade rates
- Take fights in pairs. A trade needs a teammate close enough to shoot your killer within 3 seconds. If nobody can see the angle you are peeking, your death there is untradeable by definition.
- Refrag immediately, not eventually. Hesitation is what turns a trade into a lost round. The fast-trade stat (within 2s) exists because the best refrags happen while the killer is still repositioning.
- Stop dry-peeking alone. Solo aggression on off-angles produces exactly the untradeable deaths that drag this rate down.
- Die forward, not backward. A death while entering with your team behind you is usually traded; a death while retreating around a corner almost never is.
Keep reading
Trading is team play measured; the lone-wolf mirror image is the clutch. For every definition in one place, see the stats glossary.