Valorant: Patch 1.03 competitive changes will significantly impact Ranked Matches

For those unaware, Riot Games had released their latest bi-weekly Valorant patch on Tuesday. And though it doesn’t exactly bring a lot of changes to Valorant, it does bring some slight improvements to competitive games, which is sure to affect ranked matches in the long run.

So what are some of the changes made?

Valorant ranked matches to retain unanimous surrender voting

In patch 1.03, the devs have stuck to keeping the surrender vote in the Competitive Mode unanimous but reduced the surrender vote cap for the Unrated Mode.

The Valorant devs reasoned:

“We know it can be at times challenging to get a surrender vote to pass given it has historically required an unanimous vote. For Unrated Mode, which is meant to be lower stakes than Competitive (no rank on the line), we have made adjustments so if the vast majority of the team wants to surrender (80%) they can now opt out of that match and find a fairer fight sooner."

In addition, they have reduced the required number of rounds from 8 to 5, but each team will only be allowed one surrender vote option per half.

"For Competitive Mode we plan to keep the vote requirement as unanimous, because surrendering has an impact on your rank (all unplayed rounds count as loss credit), we want to make sure the team is in full agreement before a decision is made that will negatively impact a player’s rank. We’ve also slightly reduced the minimum rounds needed to be played so that if players have a particularly bad start, they can opt out of that match earlier.”

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A new overtime format

Valorant's Patch 1.03 also brings a new win-by-two overtime format to ranked matches which will effectively eliminate the single sudden-death round which has been present in the game so far.

The previous format would give an unfair advantage to certain teams as it didn’t allow some teams to play both sides of the map. This meant that the team who had the favourable side would often win the game.

Riot said:

“After every two rounds of overtime, an automated vote will trigger to determine if the match should continue or end in a draw. The threshold for continuing the match will become stricter as more rounds have been played.”

According to Valorant's official patch notes:

• Each round will have a full reset, setting all players at 5000 credits and 4 points short of their ultimate.
• After every two rounds of overtime, an automated vote will trigger to determine if the match should continue or end in a draw
• The threshold for continuing the match will become stricter as more rounds have been played:
• First vote: 6 players needed to end the match in a draw
• Second vote: 3 players needed to end the match in a draw
• Third vote and on: 1 player needed to end the match in a draw
• If the vote fails, the match will end in a draw.
• Players might gain rank off a draw but will never lose rank

CS: GO doesn’t have this voting system when any of their games go into overtime. It, instead, has a tendency to extend games indefinitely, making it a rather long-drawn affair. Riot wants to curb this as much as possible in Valorant by lowering the voting threshold as the overtime rounds progress.