The Valorant Team

Hey everyone! I'm Lydia Zanotti, a 3D environment artist on VALORANT. With the release of Icebox, I thought it was the right time to bring you in from the cold and discuss how we bring our maps to life, from the inside out.

The VALORANT maps team is fairly small, and consists of level designers, 3D, concept, lighting, and QA. It's a real collaborative feat getting a map from greybox (the earliest playable version of a map) to a version that's ready for you, the player.

When it comes to maps, level design normally grabs most ...

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As mentioned in the recent Ask VALORANT, the problematic release of Patch 1.11 is forcing us to reevaluate what it takes to raise the quality bar for patch days going forward. So, while we’re not skipping Patch 1.12, we’re giving it a light touch.

Updates to the Observer and the social panel are the stars this time around, along with some bug fixes. The in-match display of Act Rank Badges will continue to be suspended while we figure out what’s contributing to the performance hitches.

As a head’s up, it’s very likely we’ll skip the next patch and get back in the swing of things on or around Dec. ...

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At the start of VALORANT Act III, our Bahrain datacenters lit up and we welcomed the Middle East to the VALORANT community. In a short time, they’ve already provided us with some of our favorite community creations.

We’ve collected a handful for you here to get started. See any others from this community, send them our way!

Q

Patch stability has been really bad these days. What’s going on?

A

Oof, yeah this one stings. Our day zero patch stability has honestly been far below our own expectations recently. There are many different reasons for this, from internal process improvements we have to make, to some philosophical changes we should consider, investment in tooling and infrastructure. Honestly, we could even include maybe slowing down a bit.

We’ve been rigorously keeping to the two week patch cadence since even before we started our Closed Beta. Even with the logistical challenges of working from home, the team has been—and continues being—incredibly passionate to get content and features out as quickly as possible, including moving up our maps release schedule. But it’s time to take a breath and take stock of what we need to do internally to make sure that our efforts are sustainable and hitting the quality...

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You can play Skye, our newest Agent, right now. But if you want to get ahead of the competition we’ve got a collection of intros and tips created by a handful of the best and brightest from the VALORANT community all over.

These should help you get a handle on how to play Skye and begin to master her abilities. Let’s get started.

NORTH AMERICA

EthanBenard

Sasslyn

Hendrixlive

UK

HITSCAN

NORWAY

Average Jonas

BRAZIL

Marquezinho

Souzones Valorant

SPAIN

HITBOXKING

...

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[UPDATE: Patch 1.11 is currently on hold for all regions until further notice. VALORANT will roll back to Patch 1.10 until we can redeploy later in the week with a solution, and at a less disruptive time for the VALORANT First Strike Qualifiers . If you started the Skye character contract, you won't be able to progress until we patch again. Thanks for sticking with us.]

Skye enters VALORANT and will be available to play in all queues.

(Recently, one of you asked, “how can she be ‘Skye’ if she’s on the ground?” Well, just repeat to yourself, “it’s just a game, I should really just relax.”)

All of our Sentinels and Initiators are getting role and abilities-specific tuning, ...

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This week’s Ask VALORANT covers weekly challenges, filthy smurfs, and...wait, did you say “test server”?

Q

Thoughts on adding more weekly challenges?

A

The goal of weekly challenges was to provide a bulk source of XP progress and tie some playful texture to the progression experience. To be frank, we're not happy with the current state, as some of them can be a grind. It's also been difficult to strike the right balance between interesting missions and not promoting unhealthy play patterns (eg. playing only to harvest orbs and use your ult).

Our short term outlook is to reduce the completion requirement for many weeklies in Act III and remove the worst offenders completely. So hopefully these changes, along with the extended length of Act III, many more of you will progress further and faster into the Battlepass.

Long term, we want to revisit how to keep game-to...

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The Battlepass is a path of various rewards for the time you spend tapping heads and planting Spikes in VALORANT. It’s a feature all players engage with, so we (the Premium Content team) want to make sure the pass is broadly appealing. That doesn’t mean every player will love everything; however, every player should love at least something.

We draw inspiration from lots of sources—the Maps, meta gameplay memes, fun references to items from the previous Battlepass, etc.—and go into each creative brainstorm with an open mind.

Although this dev diary will focus on creative considerations behind the Battlepass, improvements for our cosmetics are always top of mind. The recent pick-any-variant change, ...

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VALORANT First Strike: North America Qualifiers Kick Off Oct. 26

Riot Games Partners with Nerd Street Gamers and Engine Media to Broaden Competition & Offer $100K Total Prize Pool

A few weeks ago we announced the first official Riot Games-produced VALORANT tournament, First Strike. Now, here’s how we’ll go from two NA qualifiers to the top 8 teams battling for their share of the $100K prize pool, and the title as first First Strike champion.

The competition will begin on October 26 with our first open, 128-team tournament, produced by partner Nerd Street Gamers. The tournament will whittle down the pool to 16 teams, who will compete in our first qualifier. From there, the top four teams will advance straight to the main event, and the next four teams will advance into the second open tournament for another chance to fight for their spot in First Strike.

For any teams who don’t make the first cut, you’re in luck -- we...

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Competitive Integrity for VALORANT Esports

Today, we are releasing the first versions of competitive policies that will serve as the cornerstones of VALORANT esports. Over the past few months, the feedback you shared has been invaluable in helping us identify the necessary structures to ensure the current, and future, competitive integrity of our sport. Thank you to the many players, teams, fans, and tournament operators whose contributions helped shape the policies we are releasing today.

Why This is Important

The vast majority of rule violations can be prevented by writing clear rules and being responsive to teams and players who are seeking clarification. As VALORANT esports continues to grow, my goal is to institute the greatest possible clarity and transparency for the participants of the competitive ecosystem.

To further supplement our competitive policies and ensure fair play, we’ve built a strong partnership with the VALORANT anti-c...

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First Strike is the first major VALORANT esports tournament organized by Riot Games and will showcase the best talent and the unique playstyle of each region. The tournament will crown the first VALORANT champions via multiple regional finals taking place from December 3-6. Each final will feature the top eight teams teams from the region, who will earn their spots via a series of merit based qualifiers.

FIRST STRIKE: EUROPE

Information on the Europe’s First Strike Qualifiers can be found here. The Open Qualifiers are split into four separa...

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Earlier this month, Reddit user John_Bot_ asked if it was too early to get spooky in VALORANT.

This Community Spotlight is to show you that VALORANT’s been spooky. No really, a lot of you are convinced that VALORANT is a horror game.

(warning: scares mean some nsfw language in the videos below)

Let’s ease into it with John Bot’s awesome Omen pumpkin. Tell your neighbors we said hi.

Now ...

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You already know about our latest map, Icebox. You’ve even stuck your head in the freezer to run scrims. Hopefully, you’ll be happy to learn we’ve weighed Unrated queue to favor getting Icebox (at least for the first part of this patch).

Competitive folks, you’ll have to hold on for at least two weeks before you can earn rank on Icebox. But right off the bat,...

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This is Ask VALORANT. We pull questions from the soup of the community to answer. Today you asked about in-game pauses, sharing crosshair settings, and practice while queueing. 

Q

You should allow an in-game pause per team, because sometimes we have to pee or poop.

A

We've done some rough experimentation with team pauses in-game and pre-round. Pausing mid-round can introduce a number of gameplay concerns that may compromise the competitive integrity of a match. And since we view the competitive integrity of each match as a fundamental part of VALORANT, we've opted to not support mid-round pauses.

We know that sometimes you will need to “pee or poop,” as you so elegantly put it. To make sure everyone has a chance to handle their business, we'll be exploring different ways of possibly incorporating a pre-round pause. This would allow you to pause the match without ...

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You’re right, the VALORANT map rotation could use a refresh. That’s why Act III opens cold, with a new map set in the arctic wilderness: Icebox.

Moving Icebox up from Episode 2 does come with a trade-off: we’ll be delaying the release of our newest Agent for two weeks (one patch cycle) after the start of Act III. Simply put, our last few patches haven’t been the most stable, and we know more of you want Icebox. Delaying the release of a new Agent allows us to better handle any issues that might emerge when launching alongside Patch 1.10.

Not gonna lie, the Act III patch is a bit scary considering the high amount of content coming and potential instability. We want to be faster when it comes to resolving any issues or exploits. This delay gives our team some breathing room to make sure current Agents play nice with the new map (invisible Spy Cams, invincibility, teleporting in the wrong neighborhood, etc.) before introducing anot...

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VALORANT’s Act III Competitive matchmaking begins Oct. 13 and the video above is the best place to hear our plans for the new ranked experience—straight from Game Director Joe Ziegler and Systems Design Lead David Cole. You even get a peek at Episode 2!

The long and short of it? We’re going to take a step back and simplify our goals with ranked, which you’ll see over the course of Act III, into next year in Episode 2, and beyond. Act III is about moving quickly—we want to bring back more competitive integrity to the queue, and get you focused on what matters: winning.

Here’s a summary of all our planned changes:

TIGHTER RANK QUEUE

To help with a more even matchmaking experience, we’re limiting the Rank tiers you can queue with from 6 tiers to 3 tiers. Experiences with your friends outside of your Rank circle are still important to us and we’re working to carve out more places for this.

PREFERRED SERVER ...

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