[2020] How the VALORANT Arsenal was built

We've definitely been trying to address this - at their core the spectre and phantom are fairly different, but the addition of the silencer made it confusing for sure, especially on the ground. Additionally, we actually scale the guns up when they're dropped so that they're more noticeable, and at the time, the Spectre had a higher scale than the Phantom, making them appear similar in size.
In the latest patch, we've actually tried to address this in 2 ways.

1. The Spectre no longer recieves a larger scale when thrown onto the ground making it appear smaller relative to the Phantom
2. We collapsed the stock on the Spectre when on the ground, shortening the overall profile of the gun significantly - this actually makes more thematic sense considering when you pick it up and equip, you pull the stock open :P

Hopefully this combo of changes can help with the confusion of the two guns. Let us know if it does!

Comments here are right :)
At one point we had more guns than are currently available in the game, and part of our balancing efforts were to get rid of redundant weapons. The Guardian has always sat in this strange space of "is it a rifle or a sniper," because technically it can function as both - its actually the only gun with a higher ADS zoom, maybe something like 1.5 compared to all other guns with like 1.25, i forget the exact numbers.

The Otto was an automatic sniper rifle ("omg noob weapon!") that we found just didn't really have a place in the game - the high price point and damage output felt like it was trying to take the best of the Operator and Guardian and combine it into one, which just didn't make sense considering we already had those.

yep! its got the old weapon silhouette without the silencer, we're updating it ;)

yep. .50 - the scale bit of i think came out in .49 but still was largely unnoticed, so we made the stock change sometime in the last week or so and should be live today.

Like was mentioned in the article we tried some sort of attachments system - one of the potential problems with doing visual attachments is the comparison to other games. A foregrip for example in another shooter indicates better recoil control - we want to make sure we dont give any false expectations that having a weapon with an attachment gives you a distinct gameplay advantage, and we wouldnt want the visuals of a weapon to influence your choice to use that weapon or not.

We've talked about it way early on but there's no plans to take a look at that yet. We havent found any particular instances where we were needing to make a gun that we didnt already have, and we wouldnt want the tradeoff to be arbitrary.