Valorant Launches Its Competitive Ranked Mode

If you're a Valorant player who's been waiting to play the game's Competitive mode and see where you rank among your competition, your chance has come now that Riot Games has turned on the game's ranked mode. Though it's still in the closed beta stage, Valorant's new ranked environment will let players play against each other in settings with higher stakes where their scores are on the line in each game as they move up or down the ranks. You'll have to play a few Unrated games to get started, but once they're completed and you've learned how to play Valorant, you'll be free to enter the ranked mode.

Riot announced Thursday night that it'd turned on the ranked mode in Valorant after preparing for the mode's release earlier in the week with an update that laid the foundation for it. The previous update added the mode to the game, but Riot said it wouldn't turn on ranked until it was sure the game was at a point where things couldn't be easily exploited to affect the integrity of the ranked mode. Those problems have apparently been resolved now which means players are free to go into ranked and see where they stack up against others.

In the next 30 minutes we're going to turn ranked on in North America.

If all goes well there, we'll turn ranked on in Europe after the hotfix patch (so after 9:30AM CEST on May 1).

We also... reserve the right to turn off ranked at any time if things get weird.

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) April 30, 2020

That's assuming you've completed the requirements to join the ranked environment though, but if you've been playing Valorant for a while since it entered its closed beta, you've probably already taken care of those prerequisites. Players must partake in a minimum of 20 Unrated games – the normal ones you've been playing before ranked – before you're able to try out the Competitive mode. That's to make sure that players at least know the basics of Valorant and have hopefully developed some sorts of strategies with their favorite characters so that newcomers aren't hopping into Competitive right when they get access to the game because they think they're ready for the big time.

Once you complete those games, you'll have to start your ranked journey by playing five games in the Competitive mode. The game will then issue you your first rank so you can start your climb. There are several ranks in the game with the lowest being Iron and the highest called Valorant, but don't sweat your rank too much here since the ranked progress doesn't carry over to the full launch in the summer.