Early next month, on the 9th of July, Riot will be launching a new feature for Valorant; the Public Beta Environment. This new testing ground will be open to a limited number of accounts in North America and will allow players to test patches before they launch to the wider ecosystem.
The Valorant Public Beta Environment [PBE]
In a recent blog post announcing the upcoming launch of the Valorant Public Beta Environment, Riot stressed that the primary purpose of the PBE is bug-catching. “Simply put, our bi-weekly patch cadence could use some extra help to identify bugs and evaluate stability,” explains Riot; “before we lockdown what stays and goes into our patches. This includes Agent and weapon balance, game systems, competitive, and the other updates that are usually captured in our Patch Notes.”
Riot goes on to state that the purpose of the PBE is to give patches a final pass. This means that it won’t give players the opportunity to try out things that are early in development; all those early stages will still be handled internally by Riot. Instead, the focus will be on patches and updates due to launch within a few weeks at most.
According to Riot, the PBE will not be available at all times. Instead, prior to the release of a new patch, it will open for a single weekend. This will typically be two weekends before the day the patch goes live. On this select weekend, a limited number of North American Valorant accounts will be able to enter the PBE to test out the upcoming content. A dedicated Valorant PBE subreddit will also be available for players to report bugs. A megathread detailing the new patch content will be posted to this subreddit each time the PBE opens. The first of these weekends will begin on the 9th of July, in just over two weeks’ time.