'Valorant's' New Competitive Mode Enters Alpha Testing Phase

Ranked mode will no longer be "Valorant's" most competitive playlist after Riot announced that a new mode is coming, and it aims to bring the sweatiness of scrims to a public, matchmade audience.

The new mode, dubbed "Premier," was announced in one of the developer's latest news entries, and it is due to enter its initial testing phase soon. Though Riot didn't give an exact date, players in Brazil will be able to test Premier sometime during the first week of November.

Premier is designed to be the ultimate goal for players who want to go beyond Radiant rank, according to designer Jon Walker who works with "Valorant's" competitive team. He said they wanted to "connect the game and the esport through a highly-competitive mode."

As such, the team created Premier to offer the broader playerbase the same experience that VCT pros and teams regularly go through in the form of hyper-competitive matches against equally-skilled competitors.

Walker reiterates that the game mode will only be entering an Alpha phase. This means that everything in the first version of Premier is still highly experimental. As of the announcement, the mode is only 60% complete, and a sizable portion of its features is still being developed.

In Premier, players get to organize a team and play against others in a series of pre-scheduled matches. Once a roster is built, it will be sent to a division where it will go against other teams of similar skills in a persistent season composed of tournaments and weekly matches.

Each season will culminate in a final tournament where the qualified teams fight over the title of Division Champion.

The upcoming alpha will focus on testing the following:

• In-game team creation
• Tournament system with map pick-and-ban system
• Matchmaking
• Server load
• General bug fixes and more

This isn't the first time Riot attempted to create a scrims-style game mode. "League of Legends" features the "Clash" mode, which is very similar to Premier. There, players assemble their teams to fight in tournaments for glory and unique cosmetic rewards. Though unconfirmed, players can expect a similar reward system to come to "Valorant" once Premier goes live.