Act III Competitive Changes

Game Director Joe Ziegler recruits the help of David Cole to map out the Competitive updates in Act III.
Game Updates
Jeff Landa

VALORANT’s Act III Competitive matchmaking begins Oct. 14 and the video above is the best place to hear our plans for the new ranked experience—straight from Game Director Joe Ziegler and Systems Design Lead David Cole. You even get a peek at Episode 2!

The long and short of it? We’re going to take a step back and simplify our goals with ranked, which you’ll see over the course of Act III, into next year in Episode 2, and beyond. Act III is about moving quickly—we want to bring back more competitive integrity to the queue, and get you focused on what matters: winning.

Here’s a summary of all our planned changes:

TIGHTER RANK QUEUE

To help with a more even matchmaking experience, we’re limiting the Rank tiers you can queue with from 6 tiers to 3 tiers. Experiences with your friends outside of your Rank circle are still important to us and we’re working to carve out more places for this.

PREFERRED SERVER

You’ll now be able to select your preferred server. We can’t fully guarantee you’ll always get the server you want, due to Matchmaking reasons. But this feature will notably increase the chance to get your preferred game server and either stabilize or help improve your ping.

IMMORTAL-PLUS RANKS ARE 100% W/L

For those of you who are near the peak or at the top in Immortal-plus ranks, whether or not you climb or fall will be decided entirely by a win or loss and the decisiveness of the final score.

ACT RANK BADGE

Finally, Act III is another chance to collect wins at a higher rank and polish that Act Rank Badge into something you’d place in your trophy case.

EPISODE 2 AND BEYOND

Depending on the results of our Immortal-plus ranked experiment, we’re looking to apply the pure w/l measurement across all ranks.

Also, a public, region-based leaderboard is on it’s way! More projects are in the works, but you’ll have to wait until we’re closer to Episode 2.


Like all changes, we’ll listen and read to see what you love or hate. Hopefully these updates will help improve Competitive play in the long run. Thanks, and keep us honest with your feedback.