aeneia

I...should know the answer to this lol. Let me go look!

I think it's important to note, too, that I'm just ONE person on a whole team that deals with this stuff. This is just one part of the perspective that gets brought to the table. These were a few easy-to-communicate ones that came to mind. (I've found that our players want to understand some of the thoughts that go into our decisions, even if we can't explain the whole thing.)

I would love to hear what parts of these points didn't land with you, if you don't mind sharing them. It's just more info for me ;)

I'll need to review that to make sure it's accurate, but either way, I can tell you this: When we make tuning adjustments to the Battle Passes, we take lots of things into consideration. Here are a few:

• HOW MANY PLAYERS ARE BUYING THE PAID PASS? If that's lower than we want, then it means players probably don't think it's "worth" it, and that's a problem. It could be that the rewards aren't desirable, the pass requires too many games, lots of things.

• HOW MANY PLAYERS ARE 100%ING THE PASS? For every BP game I can think of, Battle Passes are created with a specific distribution in mind. The final tiers of the Battle Pass are supposed to represent something meaningful. "A top percentage of players earned this." It loses its value if it's too easy to get. So, we want completing the Battle Pass to be a commitment, but not impossible. It's why we grant so many rewards to players along the way: so those who couldn't finish it can still walk away with som...

I'm gonna need you to elaborate on that lol.

I don't know if it's PERFECT...but we're trying! I appreciate your mentality on this :) Thanks fam!

We love you too fam ♥

Oh dude, yeah. This is a problem I'm trying to address right now. Thanks for asking! On the top left corner, you'll see two little wheels. The one on the right is the Battle Pass. Click it. On the bottom right of that screen, you'll see a prompt to buy "PREMIUM" for 1000 VP. That's the premium battle pass. Right now it just looks like you're buying the next checkpoint in the Battle Pass and that's DEFINITELY not what it is lol. Like I said...I'm trying to work with the team to fix that like right now lol.

Do you mean of the VP? Like buying VP bundles? Across all the different content we offer, it would be extremely difficult for us to make sure that there's always a VP bundle that captures exactly the amount players need. And I don't just mean as a game: purchasing in-game currency is done in collaboration with a central Riot team that handles it for League, Legends of Runeterra, and VALORANT. When we've chatted with players about this, we've learned that it's frustrating for a first purchase, but the frustration usually goes away pretty quickly, because it's very, VERY rare that players only buy cosmetics once in their entire lifecycle. It almost always gets put towards a later purchase. Please know, though, that this is something on our radar. We're keeping tabs on how players feel about this, and if we have good reason to prioritize this issue over other issues, we'll do that :) I hope this makes sense!

Hey fam! Just a reminder that you do get free cosmetics :) Through the character contracts and free battle pass, you get gun skins, calling cards, gun buddies, sprays, titles, etc. Don't forget to equip those when you get them lol!

We're trying our best to deserve your support fam :)

Hey there OP.
I'm aeneia. I'm the researcher who worked on the pricing strategy for VALORANT (of course working closely with other folks, like our Rev Strat Guru SWAGGERNAU7).
I wanted to say thank you for this. A LOT of work went into determining our pricing strategy. And not just a few devs in conference rooms: we ran labs, surveys...made massive adjustments and tweaks...then more surveys, then more tweaks...all to create what you see in the store today.
Being honest, when I first joined the team and heard about our intentions for pricing, I wasn't convinced. I played League of Legends for 8 years and spent $20 that entire time for skins. I'm not a whale, not even close. But once I talked to our players...once I understood how all of our systems work together (Battle Passes, Character Contracts, Bundles, and more things we haven't announced yet!)...it made sense to me. And I've actually come to a place that I feel good about what we've put out there.
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I can understand, though. It's really hard to see something that you want, only to discover it's not as accessible as you want. I appreciate your mentality on it :)

It totally makes sense that you'd make that assumption. It's why we (at Riot) HAVE to do research. We're all gamers, and I can't tell you how many times we thought the players would want something (because we wanted it ourselves), then got totally put in our place when the players actually had a chance to speak for themselves. Thanks for engaging with me on this, and I'm so glad to hear you're enjoying the game! :)

That's fair! More people would buy them. But I would have to disagree with you that those skins are worth $2-3 -- at least compared to other games in the genre. Just my two cents though :)

And those are both 100% valid opinions to have! It just comes down to how you, personally, value the product. A metaphor I've used is comparing it to chocolates. You can go to the grocery store and buy a month's worth of chocolate for like $8. That's an option. You can also go to a chocolatier and buy a really nice piece of chocolate for like $8. That's also an option. For some people, they're like, "WTF. I'm not dropping that much money on a piece of food that I'll enjoy for like 6 seconds." Other people are like, "I don't even want chocolate unless it's super high quality truffles, and that's something I'm willing to pay for." We're leaning more towards the latter. Personally, I'll drop money on high quality chocolate...but I'll never drop more than $10 on a tshirt or something like that. It's all about perspective and what you value, and that's different for everyone. All that said...we always want the gameplay to be 100% free, and we always want players to get at least SOME c...

I'm not sure exactly what the system is right now...however, I can tell you FOR SURE that the goal is to have not only voice chat recorded for review, but to have AI that can recognize the worst of the worst (like racial slurs) to facilitate reporting systems. We're aware of the loopholes in other games. We're working really, really hard to seal those up in ours :)

You're welcome :) And thank you so much for playing our game!

Definitely not new to the internet :P. And I have indeed seen it work! But hey, if that language doesn't feel right for you, don't use it. I'm just not an advocate for defending against verbal abuse...with more verbal abuse lol.

Thank you so much :)

Unfortunately I can't say :(. But I hope you asking means you loved it!