Competitive VALORANT players are getting tired of a lack of updates to the ranked system. Turns out, there’s a reason for that.
VALORANT’s ranked matchmaking has a few teething issues after officially launching last month. The biggest complaint appears to be the matchmaking itself, which sometimes pits teams against each other where there’s an enormous skill gap. Ranks are also displayed at the beginning of a match, too, which sometimes encourages toxic behavior from higher-ranked players. This includes blaming lower-ranked players for losing matches or even just outright quitting games as soon as they see how bad their teammates’ rankings are.
Players are calling for fixes, and it appears as though nobody at Riot is listening. And as it turns out, they’re right.
Ryan “Morello” Scott, lead character designer for VALORANT, just hosted a stream today where he talked about the state of the game. One Twitch follower asked about updates to the ranked system and who folks should throw questions to online.
“Sadly, Mark, nobody right now,” Morello said. “I know that sucks.”
As it happens, the guy who was working on VALORANT’s ranked matchmaking is no longer at Riot. So yeah, there’s a reason why you don’t hear much about ranked matchmaking updates these days.
“I’m gonna be real with y’all: the person who worked on the ranked system from a design standpoint has left the company,” Morello explained. “Nobody owns the ranked system right now, this is a huge problem. We’re trying to figure out how to resolve that right now–the design team is talking about it.”
One assumes this means that Riot is desperately scrambling to either hire someone new or throw an existing developer at the problem by perhaps adding to their workload. Either way, until Riot actually fills the position, “we can’t do anything about it right now.”
VALORANT is still relatively fresh out of beta, so some teething issues are to be expected. And COVID-19 is likely going to make the usual hiring process a bit more complicated than usual. But if Riot has aspirations of displacing big names in competitive esports, they’re going to need to get this problem solved, and fast.
Source: Twitch
