Riot reveal how Valorant’s Competitive mode will work & beta release

Riot developers have revealed when competitive play will finally be coming to the Valorant beta – but players will have to wait for a few more updates before they can get tilted on the ladder.

Valorant is currently approaching its third week of closed beta testing, and players have been itching for a competitive mode almost since release.

It’s no secret that a ranked feature will eventually be coming to Riot’s new FPS, but exactly when we would get the chance  has remained a mystery – until a new update on April 24.

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Riot’s Ian “Brighteyz” Fielding wrote in a blog post on April 24 that Competitive Play would be coming to Valorant with patch 0.49.

“VALORANT’s Competitive mode uses the same in-game rules and format as the Unrated mode, but with a focus on higher-stakes competition,” Brighteyz revealed. “VALORANT’s competitive system is still in its early stages, and we plan to evolve it over time, but we have a core experience we wanted to share with you all in closed beta so that we can build and evolve the mode together.”

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Unrated matches will still be available throughout the beta, while Competitive, when it launches, might go down “for short periods during the beta” Riot said, as they “work to refine the mode.”

Players will have to complete 20 Unrated matches to unlock Competitive play, and your beta rank will not carry over when the game releases fully, later in 2020, as explained by Brighteyz:

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In Valorant’s Competitive mode there are eight levels of rank, each split into three tiers: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Immortal, and the aptly named top ranking VALORANT.

Obviously, winning games is the main way for players to rank up, but if you perform exceptionally well at your level, your rank can go up faster. On the other side of things, though, if you perform very poorly, you’ll see your rank decrease just as fast.

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Personal performance plays a bigger part in determining your rank early on, but will decrease and become less important as you play more games, according to Riot.

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You’ll also be allowed to queue with friends, but everyone in your party has to be within 2 ranks (or six tiers) of one another for Comp to be available.

Ranked play won’t be available until beta update 0.49, so we have a bit to wait before getting all sweaty. For reference, the April 21 patch was labeled as 0.47, so we have at least one more to go in between.

So far Riot seems to be rolling out updates to Valorant at a rate of about once a week, so look for Competitive play to finally arrive around the first week of May, which leaves plenty of time to practice.