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Riot Games Launches Episode Four – Act One Into Valorant

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Riot Games has released the latest update for Valorant today, as Episode Four – Act One has been added with several updates. Along with the latest character addition of Neon, seen below, you're getting a ton o mechanics changes, a new battle pass, the Protocol 781-A skin line, and much more. We have a snippet of some of the new additions below with the changes compedative modes, and you can read the full patch notes here.

Riot Games Launches Episode Four - Act One Into Valorant
Credit: Riot Games

As the map and Agent pool has increased, it's become increasingly difficult for new players to effectively learn and play Valorant. However, we haven't made any changes to when players are able to access our most competitive experience. We believe everyone should take time to learn the ins and outs of core gameplay, and have ample exposure to all the maps and Agents Valorant will throw at you before competing in our ranked experience. To force this learning period, we've decided to add an Account Level requirement to play in Competitive.

  • Starting with Patch 4.0, accounts that have yet to play in Ranked are required to reach account level 20 level before they are able to enter the Competitive queue
    • For those that have not yet reached account level 20, but have already played in Competitive queue, you will still be able to play in ranked.

Reduced 5-stack Rank Rating penalty

After getting our initial data on 5-stacks in ranked, we've realized we may have been too harsh on the penalty you receive to your RR gains/losses while in a 5-stack. Match fairness for 5-stacks is equal to non-five stacks, meaning it's difficult for you to bring in a higher ranking player and potentially boost a low rank player. Because of this data, we are reducing the penalties for lower ranks.

  • Diamond 2 and below players will see their RR penalty reduced by 25% compared to the current balance. This means the new minimum penalty is 25% reduced gains/losses compared to the previous 50%
  • We only made this change for ranks not breaking into, or on, the leaderboard to help maintain leaderboard integrity.

Increased Map Randomization

  • Increased our map weights, which should lead to an increase in map variety and reduction in map duplicates from match to match.

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Gavin SheehanAbout Gavin Sheehan

Gavin is the current Games Editor for Bleeding Cool. He has been a lifelong geek who can chat with you about comics, television, video games, and even pro wrestling. He can also teach you how to play Star Trek chess, be your Mercy on Overwatch, recommend random cool music, and goes rogue in D&D. He also enjoys hundreds of other geeky things that can't be covered in a single paragraph. Follow @TheGavinSheehan on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vero, for random pictures and musings.
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