Riot Games made some major changes when it comes to queuing up with friends in Valorant recently and now they are improving the system.
Riot Games tried several ways to combat boosting in Valorant as well as bad matchups due to player skill discrepancy. This would usually be forced by teams that had members with wildly different skill levels which resulted in 5-stack restrictions in ranked. Eventually, the devs removed the restriction with a few caveats but this created new problems as the queue times became pretty long for these groups.
According to a post that seemingly came out of the blue on Valorant's official Twitter account, Riot altered the match balance for 5-stacks in order to cut down on waiting in the queue. They expressed they liked the balance thus far but this seems like an experiment to see if allowing more people into the same pool would have adverse effects.
Anyway, the team apparently pulled a sneaky patch that changed matchmaking across all regions in order to drastically reduce the queue time for 5-stacks. Riot's expectation is for the queue time to get halves but it remains to be seen how it will behave in practice. More importantly, the players will need to see if their matches will suddenly start feeling imbalanced due to teams that could end up more coordinated than random groups.
