FormaL explains why he’s grinding Valorant over Warzone after CDL retirement

On August 28, 2021, Matthew ‘FormaL’ Piper announced that he would be stepping down as a professional Call of Duty player, having played out his final season with OpTic Chicago in the CDL. Now, his attention has flipped to Valorant.

The news came as somewhat of a surprise to many fans, with FormaL still being relatively young and capable, as well as one of the most phenomenally successful players in CoD history.

He’s stayed under the OpTic banner and started streaming pretty regularly but, while other pros are grinding Warzone in the off-season, he’s actually putting the hours in on Riot Games FPS Valorant instead.

As FormaL explains, this decision boils down to two fairly significant factors for him.

With OpTic CEO Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez asking FormaL what he finds so enjoyable about Valorant on the OpTic podcast, he said it comes down to one thing: the rank.

“It’s the rank, that’s it,” he said. “The fact that you can feel final once you hit Immortal. That’s when you’re like ‘Okay, I’ve got pretty good.’”

He continued: “It’s just so fun. You feel so final when you go up a rank or something and you’re sh***ing on other Immortals. If there was no rank I wouldn’t be playing it, let’s put it that way.”

Timestamp 25:18

Ranked play is something Call of Duty fans have often pleaded for over the years, but this isn’t the sole reason FormaL has strayed towards Valorant instead of Warzone.

Why won’t FormaL stream Warzone?

The conversation quickly turned to CoD BR Warzone, and FormaL explained why it’s such a struggle. He said: “I played Warzone with Seth [Scump], Zinni and ZooMaa, and we were just getting stream sniped every f**king game. Even when we hide our screens we’re getting stream sniped constantly.”

Scump’s CDL off-season streams have been completely inundated by stream snipers, making things much harder for him — and we can’t imagine that’s much fun to deal with.

A functional streamer mode is something creators have been calling for from Warzone for months, but whether it comes is another question.

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