Though the feature isn’t in Valorant yet, Riot has confirmed that they plan to force players to authenticate their identity in order to queue ranked, virtually eliminating smurfing.
Smurfing is a massive issue in competitive games, especially in the free-to-play landscape. Even in titles where smurfing is a reportable offense, players can just go and make a new account if they get banned.
So, in order to combat people making multiple accounts and hitting the ranked ladder to try and snipe their favorite (or least favorite) streamer is a tall order. But Valorant is at least trying to find a solution.
In order to queue for ranked, you’ll have to provide a form of authentication that’s unique to your account that aims to prevent players from creating alternate accounts.
Valorant is about to make smurfing a lot harder
In a game like Valorant that’s so reliant on gun skill and can be so heavily influenced by one player who’s significantly better than everyone else in the lobby, smurfing can be a huge issue.
It’s not uncommon for a new player to queue ranked, run into a smurf that steamrolls the entire lobby, and either go right back to normals until they muster the courage to hop back into ranked or just drop Valorant entirely.
So, Riot’s taking some drastic measures in order to combat this and make games a bit more fair. In order to even queue for ranked, your account has to be authenticated. It hasn’t yet been clarified by Riot what this will be, but they plan to make it either an SMS requirement or an app that requires unique identification for people to play ranked.
At the start, it’ll only be for users who have suspicious activity on their account, i.e. if you’re logging in from a completely different IP than you normally play on. This is to prevent account sharing that lets people bypass the grind to a high enough level to queue ranked.
Riot already has systems like this outside of Western countries, with places like China and South Korea requiring the functional equivalent of their social security number to make an account. If you’ve ever wondered by bootcampers going to South Korea for LoL have a hard time getting accounts, this is why.
There’s a very low chance that Riot goes that far and requires something like a personal ID to play ranked, but this is a step in the direction of trying to fight rampant smurfs.
And, while there will likely be some pushback from the Valorant community considering the sheer number of people who play it and the amount of them that may have to go through this extra step of verification to stay on the ranked grind, it could have some huge long-term benefits.
Valorant has a whole slew of quality of life changes coming to commemorate the game’s fifth anniversary, including harsher and more clear punishments for bad behavior and a move to Unreal 5.
