After some months of hotly sought drops and some hours earned, Valorant has gotten off to a good start. This one has given way to a full release, which surely means it is time to start playing in ranked, right?
With the shooter as the skill focused as it was inevitable that a ranked mode was coning, the form of it would take was not clear. As people have gotten used to the gunplay, the abilities, and the strategy, Valorant has added a competitive mode to its game. You are now able to log in and climb the ladder to get to as high a rank as possible. Here is the explanation of the Valorant ranking system.
The ranks that you are able to gain in Valorant ranked are tiered, with three tiers in every rank. However, the top one has only a tier. Here are the ranks of Valorant:
- Iron I
- Iron II
- Iron III
- Bronze I
- Bronze II
- Bronze III
- Silver I
- Silver II
- Silver III
- Gold I
- Gold II
- Gold III
- Platinum I
- Platinum II
- Platinum III
- Diamond I
- Diamond II
- Diamond III
- Immortal I
- Immortal II
- Immortal III
- Valorant
You need to work your way through all levels of Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Immortal. You are then able to reach the final rank called Valorant. All tiers all have associated badges so you are able to quickly identify player level and skill. They get fancier the higher you place.
As you progress through the tiers mentioned above your individual skill will be used less by the algorithm, leaving you with wins and losses as your only metric of rank. Please keep in mind that your rank will determine who you will be matched against, and you are able to only party up with players within six tiers of your own place.
Do not forget that if you do not play Valorant for 14 days, your rank will be hidden until you plan a ranked match again. It will not affect your tiers or any progression in the ranked ladder, it just will not be visible to the other players.
As for now, there are no rewards based on rank, other than the badge that is visible on your profile and can be deployed for bragging rights. In fact, ranked mode plays the exact same as the normal unranked mode. This one includes all the ame maps with the same bomb sites. Aside from that, it also allows you to use any of the unlocked agents as well as any weapon from the normal pool. Fortunately, there are no restrictions that differentiate ranked and unranked, so all the usual plays will still be viable and exploitable in the ranked mode. The agent pool is currently too tiny to make the banning phase enabled, but if Valornat takes on any of the lessons learned by League of Legends, it could be coming once the pool of characters has bulked out a bit.
