Announcing VALORANT’s Premier Alpha Test

Hey everyone, I’m Jon Walker, a designer on the VALORANT Competitive team. You might remember that earlier this year we shared our big picture vision for the future of competitive VALORANT—which teased a new competitive mode. The way we put it then was: We want to present an even higher goal beyond Radiant that provides the most competition-hungry players with a rewarding challenge beyond ranked. 

When we were designing the VCT ecosystem for 2023, we wanted to build a connection between the game and the esport through a highly competitive mode that would allow millions of players to experience VALORANT in a similar way as our VCT pros and teams.

Next week, the competitive team is delivering the Alpha version of this feature into the hands of an initial group of players—called Premier. While we want to roll this out to a larger cohort in the future, a smaller group will allow us to test and iterate faster, ensuring that the final product gets into the hands of the rest of you sooner.

We really want to emphasize THIS IS AN ALPHA. Even though we’ve been working on this for some time now, we still have some parts that need work. In its current state, Premier is about 60% of all the planned features and functionally, but there are whole features that are absent in the current Alpha.

WHAT ARE WE TESTING?

The team has designed a new in-game feature called Premier that will allow you to build a team and compete across a season of pre-scheduled matches.

In Premier, you will be able to create or join a team of five friends, acquaintances, neighbors and battle for glory against teams of a similar skill level. After building a roster, your team will be placed in a division where you’ll play across a persistent season composed of a mix of weekly matches and tournaments.

Each season will last a few weeks, and if you play your sweatiest, your team may qualify into the end-of-season tournament to battle for the title of Division Champion.

PREMIER ALPHA

Next week, players in Brazil will hop into our first broader test of Premier. They’ll take the first steps in testing a few key features:

• Team creation (with team logos and colors)
• Server load
• Tournament play (including a map pick-and-ban system)
• Premier Score (and qualifying for the end-of-season tournament)
• Matchmaking and queue health throughout the Alpha
• General bugs
• …and much more!

IT’S EARLY AND WE NEED FEEDBACK!

This core initial group of testers will tell us what they love, what could be better, and what features they hope to see in the future. We will have our ears to the ground to make sure we can make the best team competitive system possible, and that we have time to implement the feedback we receive from the Alpha.

LET'S GO ON THIS JOURNEY TOGETHER

We really hate to make the rest of the world wait, but we do need some time to get this right. Stay tuned to official VALORANT channels for more news some time after the end of the Premier Alpha.

So, good luck out there! Thank you for all of your feedback on Competitive VALORANT so far, and we look forward to more feedback and figuring out how to turn Premier into something for all of us looking for that competitive team-based experience.