Should the total number of rounds be lowered in Valorant’s Unrated matchmaking to make it a more casual experience?

Valorant players have been asking for a casual “in-and-out” sort of a game mode from Riot Games for quite some time now.

While Deathmatch and Spike Rush were introduced by the developers to help and fulfill that very desire, they failed to hit the mark, and the closest the community came to a casual mode was with Replication. However, Replication is a temporary game mode that is only available once every few months, alternating between Snowball Fight and Escalation.

In a recent Reddit post, a Valorant player raised the issue of the lack of an “in-and-out” game mode and suggested that Unrated should be made more casual friendly.

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Redditors believe Valorant’s Unrated should cater to casual gamers

Currently, Valorant’s Unrated games have the same set of rules as that of Competitive matchmaking, and due to the format, these games often take a very long time to finish.

The Redditor states,

“People just want to hop on and get in a quick game where they can complete their dailies and chill. Since SR doesn't have the ability to purchase weapons and abilities, you're limited to what you can complete in there. I'm a huge fan of replication as it's the closest we had to this, but that’s available once every two months due to the carousel of new game modes. Having to play a game that could last up to 50 minutes is pretty intimidating most days.”

One of the bigger issues that the Valorant community is facing is the lack of differentiating features between Unrated and Competitive games. Both often last a similar amount of time, because of which Unrated does not feel like a casual game mode .

Some even noted that there is also a certain level of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) in Unrated, which makes it rather difficult to have fun in the mode.

What’s interesting about this Reddit post is the amount of support that it got from the Valorant playerbase. It seems that a large portion of the community is all for limiting the total amount of rounds in Unrated games, and feels that the “supposed to be casual” game mode is often as stressful as its competitive counterpart.