Valorant game director Joe Ziegler has announced that ranked play will finally be coming to the game sometime next week if all goes to plan.
Ziegler made the announcement via Twitter, saying that ranked will return sometime next week, providing that no major issues are found with the system between now and launch. The next few days will be spent testing the system internally before gearing up for a launch next week.
Ranked play was available in the closed beta, but was removed for launch in order to give everyone a level playing field. Riot felt that it would be a less than ideal experience to have experienced players from the beta playing alongside newcomers in a ranked mode when they were still learning the game. As a result they have held back the ranked mode, and have now determined that enough time has passed for most people to get up to speed with Valorant so ranked play will be returning.
With ranked play coming back, queue times for matches may increase somewhat, as the matchmaking pool will be split in two, but the quality of the matches should be better. Since launch many people have complained about being in matches with players far above or below their skill level, but once ranked returns that issue should be less of a problem.
