Valorant: The Competitive queue time for Radiant players is preposterously long and it’s turning them into ‘smurfs’

It's no wonder that Valorant pros are having a rather hard time saying anything good about the shooter's Competitive mode.

Matchmaking has been one of the most talked-about and outright negative aspects of the game, and Valorant professionals like Aceu had also openly commented about how bad the ranked system in the game feels at the moment.

And to make matters worse, the queue time for the top players is just preposterously wrong. In a tactical first-person shooter like Valorant, where ranked matchmaking should have been one of the most positive aspects of the game, pros are finding faults with it every other day.

It's now coming to a point where the Valorant players don't exactly see a reason behind playing ranked matches after they have attained Radiant.

If things continue the way they are, no matter how much Riot tries to overhaul the entire system, no player will like to queue up for ranked games.

Ranked queue time for Valorant's Radiant players turning them into smurfs

In a recent Reddit post by 'THAT_NOSTLGIA_GUY,' we see that in a live stream, Cloud9 star Tenz and his duo Jack have been stuck in queue for about 5 hours and 34 minutes.

And this problem with Tenz isn't precisely an isolated one, as every Radiant Valorant player has been facing this issue ever since the beginning of the game's closed beta.

This has been causing a lot of serious issues to crop up in Valorant, especially for the pros.

According to one of the comments in the Reddit post by 'daaaaaaaaniel,' the user says that "No one (pros) plays on their main account because queue times are too long. It's a big problem for Radiant players. Smurfs ruin the queue times. Think about it. Most Radiant players have a smurf, and Radiant-level players will eventually get their smurf accounts to Radiant if they play enough on it. Pro players like Hiko and Wardell have a bunch of smurfs in Radiant. This means there's few unique players at Radiant rank, so the actual pool of players you can queue into is much smaller than how many actual accounts are Radiant or close to Radiant. Riot has to do something, and/or the Radiant players have to collectively agree to not play on smurfs."

The comment by the Reddit user puts forth the 'chicken or the egg, who came first?' conundrum. It's not easy to say if the lack of unique accounts was the one that started the long queue times, or if it was the long queue times that forced pros to make smurf accounts.

However, what we can infer is that both of these issues are symbiotic, and one feeds the other. And Riot needs to do something about Valorant's competitive mode before players completely stop queuing up for ranked.