Riot Games speaks on 5-stacks in ranked games

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In the Ask Valorant article release today, Riot finally spoke about 5-stack in ranked games. Up until now, only duos were allowed to queue together in higher elo ranked games. Many streamers, common people and professional players have experienced their concern regarding it.

People just fear for randoms joining their games, not communicating or coordinating with the team and eventually being the sole reason for their loss. Many players either casual or professional want to be able to play with their friends and 5-stack in Valorant as they are able to do in other FPS games like CSGO.


Spencer ''Hiko" Martin is a professional player for 100Thieves also has expressed his concern about the state of ranked play few weeks ago. When asked his problem with Valorant Ranked, he responded "Okay then, you can have fun. But if you’re not gonna try, you don’t play comp. You go play unrated, go play escalation, go play spike rush, go play deathmatch, go play anything but ranked." According to him, ranked should be a place where people wanna try their best to win.

A few months ago, when Shroud tweeted about 5-stacks, a Riot Dev responded " I'm working on a way for 5 stacks to play together competitively, we agree we want something(unfortunately it's taking time). We are also talking about short term solutions, while we work on the bigger system. Unfortunately no ETA's :)". This indicates the fact that Riot Games are actively trying to come up with a solution for this problem.

Now, coming to the Ask Valorant article, Riot Devs have finally opened up about this problem officially. They responded by saying that they are open to 5-stack queues but the only thing stopping them is the execution. They said they were thinking about splitting the queue. They probably might be talking about doing a queue where the player selects the role he wants to play and then matches up with players willing to play other roles. But this can increase the queue times and the number of players who'd like to play Duelists are way more than the number of players who want to play support roles like Sentinel, Controller etc.

I believe that at least a change regarding the ranked play is in the works and will be coming soon if Riot Games are openly talking about it now. The game is in a very delicate state now after the VCT Masters 2 as the community is waiting for Riot Games to see how it'll take the game further and make it something more than it is today.