Developers at Riot Games revealed more details regarding the upcoming competitive mode for Valorant.
In a blog post on the Valorant site on Friday, a member of Riot's competitive team announced the popular game's first go at a competitive mode will be released soon after its patch 0.49 goes out, and the first regions to get the competitive format will be Europe and North America.
A ranking system similar to those used in Riot games will be utilized, with eight levels: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Immortal and Valorant, the game's highest rank. All but Valorant will have three tiers within each rank.
Players will have to first complete 20 unrated matches to unlock the competitive mode, and games will allow up to five players. All players in the same game must be within two ranks of one another.
The competitive mode will first be launched in a closed beta, and at times during the beta developers will close the competitive matchmaking feature "as we work to refine the mode and incorporate your feedback."
The blog post also stated that some of the features in the competitive mode will be designed to ensure fairness in game play and mitigate maneuvers such as smurfing -- a practice in which highly skilled players create bogus profiles to play lesser competition.
There is no announced date for the patch 0.49 release.
Valorant continues to draw interest at an incredible rate, exceeding 100 million hours of hours watched on Twitch for the second week in a row.
Viewers watched 106.5 million hours of Valorant from April 13-19, according to The Esports Observer, more than triple the next-most-watched stream on Twitch. The week before, Valorant totaled a whopping 128.12 million hours of viewership.
Valorant has more than 260 million hours of viewership since launching in the first week of April. The title has also broken single-day Twitch viewership records and concurrent viewership records.
Viewership has been boosted by beta access given to those who log heavy hours.
Ludwig "Anomaly" Lagerstedt has become an increasingly popular streamer with the emergence of Valorant, leading all Twitch channels with 13.85 million hours watched last week, per the Observer.