VALORANT News: na

After a successful EU roll out of the hotfix, Ranked is now live in EU & NA!

The VALORANT hotfix patch brought stability to servers, addressing a number of service issues and bugs. This allowed Riot Games developers to feel confident in rolling out ranked in NA first, then EU in the early morning hours of May 1st.

Looking for Ranked mode? Click the “Play” button at the top of the screen. Then click the “Competitive” tab that appears below.

Remember, to play Ranked matches you must meet the following requirements:

• Complete 20 Unrated matches to unlock Competitive mode
• Queue with up to 5-player parties, but must be within 2 ranks

The eight levels of rank, each divided into three tiers are: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Immortal, and the highest rank — VALORANT.

For a complete run through of Competitive mode, check out our review of the initial reveal, here.

The wait is officially over! Ranked mode rolled out today for NA players at approximately 3:30pm PDT!

If all goes well, Ranked will go live for EU after the hotfix after 9:30am CEST on Friday, May 1.

If there are problems, Riot may disable ranked at any time.

It’s an exciting time for all Closed Beta VALORANT players!

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

VALORANT Game Director, Joe Ziegler cautioned:

Get ready! WARNING: It's gonna be a test to make sure it all works, if anything goes wrong we may have to bring it down. https://t.co/gfvJFRF7Dp

— Ziegler (@RiotZiegler) April 30, 2020

VALORANT Executive Producer, Anna Donlon added:

We try to avoid any major changes on Fridays. Getting ranked on in NA lets us test before we turn it on for EU 5/1. Usually time zones and non-peak windows drive the order of things for us. If it didn't happen today, it would've been Monday & I'd have many grumpy tweets to read.

— Anna Donlon (@RiotSuperCakes) April 30, 2020

EU and NA servers went down today for the rollout of Patch 0.49, including: the launch of Ranked in “Rated” mode, a number of bug fixes, & QoL updates.

EU matchmaking & servers went down at 3:30AM CEST on April 29th, and came back up around 9AM CEST. 

NA matchmaking & servers went down at 4:30AM PDT and will come back up at 10AM PDT.

A ton of changes and fixes are featured in patch 0.49 including: 

• The addition of Rated mode
• Bug fixes for several Agent’s abilities like Phoenix’s Run it Back, Cypher’s Cyber Cage, & Viper’s Viper’s Pit, 
• Fixes to the Spike getting stuck in the map
• Observer mode polishing   
• HUD, UI, Menu, and Game Client updates
• Quality of Life updates:
• Audio occlusion system updates to help differentiate audio distancing queues
• Penalties for leavers of matchmade games or dodging agent selects, with increasing queue time penalties for frequent offenses.

Check out the full patch notes from Riot, here.