How to Install VALORANT and Join a Server

Most games ask you to install them. VALORANT asks you to restart your computer, and then, for a fair number of people, asks them to go into their machine's firmware settings and turn two things on before it will run at all.

That is Vanguard, Riot's anti-cheat, and it is the first and largest obstacle between a new player and a match. It is worth understanding before you download anything, because the error messages it produces are not friendly and the fix is not in the game.

VALORANT is free, it is a five-against-five tactical shooter, and — this is the part that matters on a site like this one — it has no community-run servers of any kind. What collects on the game's hub are communities: scrim groups, ladders and the organised custom lobbies that fill the gap where a server browser would be in any other shooter.

Vanguard, and getting past it

Vanguard runs at a much deeper level of your operating system than most software, and it loads when your computer starts rather than when the game does. That design is why it catches cheats other systems miss, and it is also why it is the most argued-about piece of software in competitive shooting.

Two practical consequences.

It wants a reboot. After installation, Vanguard needs your machine restarted before the game will launch. This is not optional and skipping it produces an error rather than a game.

On Windows 11 it requires TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. Both are firmware features, both are commonly switched off on machines that were built or assembled a few years ago, and neither is turned on from inside Windows. You enable them in your machine's own firmware settings, and how you reach those settings differs between manufacturers — your motherboard or laptop documentation is the correct source rather than a stranger's video.

If you are not comfortable changing firmware settings, that is a completely reasonable place to stop. It is a real requirement rather than something a guide can talk you around.

Vanguard also conflicts with some other software that operates at the same level, particularly certain monitoring and overclocking tools. If the game refuses to start and you have something like that installed, that is the first thing to try closing.

Installing it

The game is free and comes through the Riot Client rather than through Steam. You need a Riot account, which is separate from any account you already have.

Make that account properly. Use a real email address you control, and turn on multi-factor authentication before you have anything worth stealing — competitive accounts with rank and cosmetics attached are a target, and recovering one is far harder than protecting it.

The download is substantial. Start it before you plan to play rather than during the evening you intended to spend playing.

What the game actually is

Five players against five. One side has a bomb — called the spike — and is trying to plant it at one of the sites on the map. The other side is trying to stop them, or to defuse it if they fail. Rounds are short, deaths are permanent until the round ends, and the first team to thirteen wins.

Underneath that sits an economy. Credits come from kills and from winning, and from losing repeatedly, and you spend them at the start of each round on weapons, shields and abilities. Buying a rifle every round is not possible, so teams coordinate: everybody saves together and everybody buys together, and the player who buys a rifle alone on a save round has thrown it away for nothing.

The abilities are what separate this from its ancestors. Every player picks an agent, and every agent has a small set of tools bought each round alongside the guns — smokes, flashes, area denial, information gathering. They do not do the killing. They decide where the killing happens.

The four roles

Duelists take space. They are the ones expected to enter a site first and win the fight when they get there, and they are what most new players gravitate towards.

Initiators create the opening. Their tools reveal defenders or disorient them so that somebody else can walk in safely, and playing one well means acting a second before your team needs it rather than a second after.

Controllers block sightlines. Smokes are the most important resource in the game and the least appreciated one — a controller who places them where the team asked is worth more than a duelist with a better scoreboard.

Sentinels hold ground and watch the flank nobody else is watching. This is the role that stops a team being attacked from behind while it is busy.

A team of five duelists loses. This is not a subtle effect, and it is the most common reason a group of friends bounces off the game.

Maps and what to learn first

The map pool rotates. Some are retired for a while and brought back later, and any list written today will be wrong within a year, so treat map guides with a date on them accordingly.

The ones that have been around longest — the original set the game launched with, plus a handful that stuck — are where most people learn the fundamentals. What transfers between all of them is the same short list: where the common angles are; which smokes block which approaches; how long a rotation from one site to the other takes; what the callouts are.

That last one matters more than new players expect. A team that cannot name the part of the map it is looking at cannot help each other, and learning one map's callouts properly is worth more than a passing familiarity with all of them.

The part that makes this site relevant

There is no server browser. There is no IP address. There is no community-hosted VALORANT server anywhere, and there will not be one, because the game does not permit it.

Everything is matchmade on Riot's own infrastructure. What you can do is create a custom game — a private lobby where you choose the map, place people on either side, add spectators — and that single feature is the foundation everything the community has built stands on.

Custom lobbies are how scrims happen. They are how five-stacks practise against another five-stack instead of against whatever ranked queue produces. They are how tournaments run their matches, how content creators run events, how the ten-player pick-up games that fill the gap between ranked and organised play get made.

The organising happens outside the game. A scrim hub is a Discord community with a system for putting ten people into a lobby — sign-ups, captains, some way of tracking who is reliable and who leaves at half time. We wrote about how those hubs have filled the gap ranked queue left, and that piece is the practical guide to finding one and getting into it.

The listings on this site are those communities rather than machines. That distinction is unusual for a game directory and it is the honest way to describe VALORANT: the thing you are looking for is a group of people, not a box in a data centre. Our notes on how Discord reshaped gaming communities explain why that ended up being the shape of it.

Warming up somewhere that is not a ranked game

The game gives you a practice range, and using it is not optional if you intend to take the ladder seriously.

Ten minutes of the range before you queue changes how the first three rounds of a match go, and the first three rounds decide the economy for the next six. Spraying at moving targets is the part most people skip and the part that transfers.

Deathmatch exists for the same purpose, with the advantage that the targets shoot back and the disadvantage that it teaches habits — running into open ground, taking fights you would never take with a spike on the map — that are actively wrong in the real mode. Use it to warm up your aim, not to learn how to play.

The custom lobby is the other practice tool, and the better one. A private game with the practice options enabled lets you walk a map slowly, stand in every angle, and find out where a smoke actually lands rather than where you assumed it would. Half an hour of that on one map is worth more than a week of guessing in ranked.

Ranked, and when to start it

The ladder runs from Iron at the bottom through to Radiant at the top, with most players sitting nearer the middle than they would like to admit.

Play unrated for a while first. Ranked in this game rewards map knowledge and communication far more than reflexes, and a player who arrives with excellent aim and no idea what a rotation is will lose games and be told about it.

The single most valuable habit to build early is calling out what you see, briefly and accurately, and then shutting up. Long descriptions of how you died are worse than silence.

Problems people actually hit

The game will not launch after installation. Restart the machine. Vanguard needs it.

An error about secure boot or TPM. Firmware settings, as above. Not fixable from inside Windows.

Vanguard flags software you use. Close whatever operates at driver level — monitoring tools, overlay software, some peripheral utilities — and try again.

Your frame rate is far below what your hardware suggests. The game is unusually light on requirements, so if it is running badly the cause is generally a setting or a background program rather than the game.

You cannot find people to play with. This is the real problem and matchmaking does not solve it. Find a community with a queue system rather than hoping a solo queue produces friends.

If you want a shooter with actual servers

The obvious neighbour is Counter-Strike 2, which VALORANT is measured against constantly and which differs in the way that matters most here: it has community servers, thousands of them, running whatever their owners want. Retakes, deathmatch, surf, one-tap practice, entire game modes that Valve did not make. Our beginner's install guide covers getting in.

That difference is worth thinking about rather than glossing over. VALORANT's closed model gives it a consistent competitive experience and a serious anti-cheat. It also means that when you are tired of ranked, there is nowhere else in the game to go — no server running a mode somebody invented, no community box with forty regulars on it every evening. The comparison between retake and deathmatch servers describes a category of thing VALORANT simply does not have.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the previous generation of the same idea, and the original Counter-Strike still has more community servers running than most games released this year.

None of that makes VALORANT worse. It makes it a different arrangement, and knowing which arrangement you prefer is worth more than any amount of advice about which agent to buy first.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. VALORANT servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.