Valorant patch 1.13 might be bringing a lot of changes to Competitive Mode

Valorant’s competitive mode needs a substantial amount of work when it comes to balancing gameplay experience.

In a previous discussion, we went over how the ranked system itself has been forcing players to grind matches and is demotivating them to the point where they are creating smurf accounts.

Moreover, the current LP gain/loss that is in play and low elo smurfing problems have created a plethora of issues for those who like to take their competitive matches seriously.

Needless to say, the Valorant community is not exactly happy with how things stand with the shooter’s ranked mode, and many have taken to social media platforms like Reddit to vent out some of their frustrations with the game.

In a recent post on the platform, a Valorant player who goes by the handle of fiascolan_ai sheds some light on some of the issues that Riot’s shooter has been having with its competitive match mode.

The Redditor feels that a great deal of the smurfing issues in the game has come from the existing problems with ranked mode, and Riot needs to fix it as soon as possible.

Fiascolan_ai said:

“Forcing players to be within 3 ranks led to more smurf accounts. I used to regularly play with my group of friends and we were within 6 ranks so we just played on our main accounts. Now we all have alt (smurf) accounts because we're almost never within 3 ranks.”

To fix some of the issues with matchmaking, Riot had recently made changes to the competitive mode, where a player will only be allowed to queue up for ranked matches with friends who are within a 3-rank difference.

It would seem that this has caused more problems than it solved. And the changes escalated Valorant’s smurfing pandemic to a whole other level.

Valorant patch 1.13 might be fixing a lot of issues in competitive play

Valorant doesn’t exactly punish griefers as much as it should (Image via Riot Games)

In the same Reddit post by Fiascolan_ai, another Valorant player gave a viable solution to the ranked problem that is currently ruining the competitive integrity of the game.

The Redditor stated:

“They (Riot Games) need to change the rank queue requirement from 10 games to 10 wins, this will de-emphasize throwing matches to keep rank low and have people starting out closer to their true skill because smurfs want to play ranked ASAP. I feel bad for my iron wife, almost every game has smurfs dropping 40 bombs.”

Valorant doesn’t exactly punish griefers as much as it should. This leads to many players just throwing matches intentionally or picking Raze and team-killing everyone on the squad just to throw matches and not rank up.

Smurfs use this method a lot in their alternate accounts and make sure that they do not accidentally rank up.

Surprisingly enough Riot’s very own game producer ‘npcSara’ replied to this comment and confirmed that the balance team is working to bring a fix to this issue and that “[they’ll] be doing this in the next patch.”

Valorant’s patch 1.13 might just be bringing a lot of balance changes to the game in terms of both matchmaking and ranked LP system. Moreover, it might just be the last patch before Episode 2 kicks off in January 2021.