[2020] Popular opinion: Vandal in the new bundle should've been a Phantom

If anything this is a good proof for my other comment - when we decided to make these skins, Guardian was intended to be a “premiere” weapon alongside the Vandal and was a popular weapon in playtests so the skins team decided to make skins for it.

But now we’ve realized it’s not living up to that power level and have repurposed it at the 2500 price point as a somewhat more niche weapon. But it’s got two upgrading skins and the Phantom has none.

If we could magically conjure skins quickly... do y’all think we’d intentionally decide to sell two Guardian skins and no Phantom ones? Doesn’t seem like it’d make much sense to me given how popular those two weapons are comparatively nowadays. But, given the dev time we made the decisions we did and are catching up to current meta. Like I said before, this stuff just takes awhile to make!

I'm not a designer so I'm not the best equipped to answer questions like this, unfortunately. We were experimenting with a lot of ideas back then on weapon diversity, and for a period of time the Guardian was performing quite well on the maps and characters we had at the time. Things have changed since then!

I don't work on skin pricing, so I can't really speak to that! I worked with skins team briefly awhile back with some concept testing, but I've been fully allocated to core gameplay of Valorant for quite some time now - maps, agents, weapons, live balance. Outside of those spaces I can't speak to much and would rather defer to other Riot folks who are more knowledgeable there

He's right. At that time, we had also classified the Guardian in the sniper category, so it was in between the Operator and Marshal. Since then, we moved it back to the rifle category and you know the rest of the story.