The highly anticipated patch 2.02 of Riot Games’ competitive shooter Valorant is nearly here, and it seems like the developers have already informed fans about the upcoming competitive changes in a blog post released on February 2nd.
While Valorant has come under fire from the community for its unbalanced matchmaking and long queue times recently, the developers have addressed the issue while assuring fans that they’re likely to be fixed in the next update.
Here are the competitive changes arriving with Valorant patch 2.02:
- Firstly, the Valorant devs have went ahead and fixed queue times for high MMR players by making a few tweaks to the system.
“After making some tweaks, we’ve been able to reduce that time to about 10–15 minutes, while maintaining match quality/fairness for these players,” the devs said.
- The MMR to Rank convergence has been increased. Convergence is the multiplier that gives you more, or less, Rank Rating (RR) if your MMR is not equal to your rank. The devs have adjusted the ranking system such that players will see Rank Rating gains, and consequently faster rank-ups, if their ranks are lower than their MMR.
“Overall, you should feel less ‘hardstuck’ if you’re getting matched into higher skilled games then your actual rank,” the blog post stated. “Those of you with exceptionally good individual performance in games where your team wins decisively will see close to 50 RR per win.”
- Players in Diamond 3 will only have access to solo/duo queue.
“We want to make sure that you can’t 5-stack all the way to the leaderboard, as well as reduce the amount of Immortal/Radiant 5-stacks you may encounter. This change, along with the convergence changes, reduces the total number of games that 5-stacks can play together before being forced to Solo/Duo.”
- From Iron to Diamond, players will be rewarded an increased number of Rank Rating points for exceptional performance in a competitive game.
