Riot Games has decided to retain the supposed temporary ranked queues for Korea, Brazil, and Latin America(LATAM) regions until the end of Valorant closed beta phase.
Things are looking up for Valorant as its summer release nears. The ranked queues appear to be running smoothly as it adds three more regions in its servers.
As the closed beta phase continues to run, after the subsequent competitive third-party tourneys, Riot Games has announced on May 1 that they’ll turn on the Ranked queues for North America, followed by the European region.
The next day, May 2, Riot announced that they’ll be widening the scope of the closed beta phase, adding in new regions—Korea, Brazil, and LATAM, on May 5.
Annyeonghaseyo, Korea! Vamos, Latinoamérica! Bora, Brasil! Today @RiotSuperCakes welcomes new regions to the VALORANT Closed Beta and gives an update on our progress so far. pic.twitter.com/RKr6FN5gmC
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) May 1, 2020
Closed beta running smoothly
Riot Games has strategically handled the introduction of Valorant to the gaming community. Instead of releasing the game right there and then, they slowly publicized the gameplay concept.
They let the public absorb its unique gaming diversity by collaborating with Twitch and known-streamers in launching its closed beta. Gradually, they’ve allowed third-party organizations to launch invitation tourneys which added a massive hype to the game.
In fact, this before-release publicity has lured in prominent names in the eSports industry. What makes the process great is the fact that Riot chose to divide its traffic into phases, allowing only a few regions in at a time, while they try to manage their servers.
Overall, it seems like the closed beta is running smoothly so far, as Riot decided to open temporary Ranked queues for the three added regions on May 15.
The League of Legends makers initially said the competitive queue will only be available until May 19, as they test out their server stability. Fortunately, Riot saw “healthy ranked queues over the weekend.”
May 15: a weekend of ranked is coming for LATAM, KR, and BR.
KR @ 9AM KST
LATAM @ 9AM CST
BR @ 11AM BRT
Queues will end on May 19 at the same time they start as we evaluate server stability. Be sure to play 20 unranked games before!
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) May 14, 2020
Therefore, they’ve decided to leave the ranked queues on for the mention regions for the rest of the closed beta phase. Although, it comes with the condition that the server stability should remain healthy.
Issues looming solo vs. stack gaming
Meanwhile, despite everything running smoothly on the side of the Riot Games devs, a few players have aired out their grievances about Valorant‘s ranked queues.
As the game embodies a 5v5 gameplay, there’s been issues about solo gamers who get randomly teamed up with other solos, going up against a “fully coordinated group“—who is probably actively communicating via Discord.
Famous streamers have voiced out the disadvantage of solo gaming in Valorant, as more likely they’ll be going up against a stack.
Nevertheless, Riot has emphasized:
We’ve also taken steps to ensure that you’re on a level playing field regardless of your queue size. Our competitive matchmaking takes into account your pre-made party size, and automatically optimizes your match to favor similar premade sizes on the opposing team.
In other competitive video games such as the Call of Duty franchise, players are queued in Battle Royale mode based on their party size. So if players are going in as duos, all other players in the same servers are going in as a duo.
There’s also an option to “fill in the squad” if players decide to team up with random players. This might be something for Riot to ponder on, should they look for a way to finally answer this issue.
Featured Image courtesy of Valorant/Twitter