Riot Games has spoken: Valorant ranks and competitive matchmaking will be made available soon. Riot Games is hoping to put a core framework in place, which they will then evolve and refine with the help of the community.
Just hours ago we reported on a leak regarding Valorants ranks and competitive mode. Now, Riot Games’ Ian “Brighteyz” Fielding officially addressed the community to share news on Valorant’s upcoming competitive mode, which he says “will be available soon after patch 0.49, starting with EU and NA.”
Brighteyz states that Valorant’s competitive system and ranks are still in the early stages and will evolve over time. However, Riot feels like the core competitive-framework is ready to be experienced by the community, with which they want to share and evolve even further. This, Brighteyz warns, might lead to the competitive mode being disabled from time to time over the course of the beta, as refinements based on feedback are being made.
“Our system aims to solve some of the common pain points we've seen players experience with competitive modes and ranked systems. We're taking your personal skill into account so we can recognize when you're crushing it, combat smurfing, reduce players with ‘boosted’ ranks, and ensure that for most of your matches, you and your teammates are placed into a fair fight.”
Competitive Valorant: The cliff notes
- Complete 20 Unrated matches to unlock Competitive mode
- 8 ranks, 3 tiers each, except the top rank, VALORANT
- Queue with up to 5-player parties, must be within 2 ranks
- Rank isn’t displayed if competitive matches aren’t played within 14 days, but your rank doesn’t decay behind the scenes.
- Closed beta rank does not carry over to launch
True skill-based matchmaking
At first, personal performance will mostly determine your skill evaluation but, over time, as your skill is honed in on by the system, wins will matter most. Not only that though, the margin and decisiveness of your wins and losses will also factor into your evaluation. Riot hopes that this will motivate players to not drop out of matches and push for comebacks.
Queueing up for competitive matchmaking with a full squad of 5 will also be possible - as long as everybody is within 2 ranks (6 tiers) from each other. This is to avoid imbalanced teams and carrying. Riot is also confident that their skill-evaluation system will detect smurfs and move them through the ranks quickly to ensure an ever-fair, ever-competitive matchmaking.
Sounds to us like Riot Games has a solid framework in place. So far they’ve been very active in communicating with the players and this makes us optimistic that we’ll see a solid ranking system in place for Valorant.
We’ll take Brighteyz word for it and expect the ranked mode to be put in place soon after patch 0.49 for which there is no release date yet.
As soon as we know more, you’ll read it about here. Until then, keep it at EarlyGame for all things Valorant.