New path to pro — VALORANT Premier announced

Riot has revealed the next step of its vision for the future of competitive VALORANT — Premier, a new competitive mode, which aims to “provide the most competition-hungry players with a rewarding challenge beyond ranked”. 

Higher than Radiant, the new feature is supposed to be a connection between VALORANT and its esports scene, allowing players to experience VALORANT in a similar way as VCT professionals.

What is Premier?

Premier is an upcoming in-game feature in VALORANT that will allow players to create or join a team and compete in pre-scheduled matches. The newly created rosters will be placed in divisions, where they will fight their way through the season composed of a mix of weekly matches and tournaments. Each season will last a couple of weeks and will feature a big season-concluding tournament for each division.

Premier goes to Alpha next week 

According to Jon Walker, designer on the VALORANT Competitive team, the Alpha version of VALORANT’s new competitive mode will be launched next week and will be tested by a small group of players in Brazil.

They’ll take the first steps in testing some of the mode’s key features such as team creation, server load, tournament play (including a map pick-and-ban system), Premier Score (and qualifying for the end-of-season tournament), matchmaking, and queue health throughout the Alpha, bugs, and more.

Walker also pointed out in Riot’s official announcement that Premier is in its current state at approximately 60% of its progression and functionality, and that whole features will be missing in Alpha. However, Riot will use the feedback received from Alpha to ensure the quality of the competitive system and to ensure that the final version gets rolled out as soon as possible.

While the release of the VALORANT Premier for the wider player base is yet unknown, it’s likely that the feature will be released ahead of the start of the 2023 VCT season in February.