It has been great to see Riot Games, the developers of Valorant, continue to keep up regular communication with the community. They are releasing a regular “Ask Valorant” update series. The 3rd edition of this recently came out, and they answered some of the most popular questions. This happens each week, so we should continue to receive regular, high quality feedback and Valorant updates.
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A Valorant gifting system like League of Legends
The question that featured was about Valorant also getting the gifting system that is available on League of Legends. Those that have played LoL will know the full ins and outs of this.
Senior Producer Steven Eldredge provided us with an answer. He mentioned that it is something they are “interested in exploring soon”. He points out that they are aware that the community and player base would make great use of this system, so we can expect to see more on this front moving forward.
Possibility of a Valorant map select / playlist
The new Valorant update was something that many from the competitive community have been crying out for. This is the ability to select particular maps that you want to play with the playlist continually filtering for this. A filter like this one would allow players to focus on improving on specific maps they enjoy or feel they need to work on.
Another Senior Producer, Ian Fielding, provided us with an in-depth response:
“From a Competitive perspective, we really want to ensure we’re able to not only put players in fair matches but do so in a reasonable queue time. Splitting up matchmaking into separate map pools would reduce the overall players in our matchmaking pool, which not only slows down matchmaking, but makes it more difficult for us to produce fair matches. Given that, we currently don’t have plans to enable map specific selection for Matchmaking.”
How many Radiant-tier players are there in the world
Whilst we didn’t receive quite a clear answer on this question, Ian Fielding was again able to offer some details to help us along. He stated that Radiant has been designed to “represent the most elite players, with anywhere from 20 to 150 players having earned the rank per region”.
What they want from the Valorant Observing Client in esports
This was the only joint answer, and it came from Whalen Rozelle, the Senior Director of Global Esports, and Kasra Jafroodi, the Global Business Esports Strategy. It was quite a long answer, but here’s the key information to take away.
They showed an understanding on how bare-bones the observer currently is, and it’s something they are working on building together in the near future. Their long term goal of the observer is to “enable storytelling and to capture the action and style of the game played at the highest level”.
It seems they have a clear understanding of how vital a good, clean observer system can aid the viewer experience for the game as an esport. I personally look forward to seeing what they can develop and bring to the table.
