devtrackers.gg
TLDR: Too much emphasis is put on daily / weekly missions to gain exp. About half of the exp needed to complete your Battlepass comes from missions.
People inherently feel like the Battlepass is too much a grind, yet people are still able to complete their passes somehow. Why is this the case? It's the big boost that missions give you. You wouldn't be able to complete your pass without them. And missions feel largely outside of your control. They just kind of happen automatically, or result in sub-par game strategy if you're focused on completing them.
Valorant forces players to keep coming back every day if they hope to complete their Battlepass. From a product standpoint this is pretty genius. It makes the game habitual for people. But the downside is that it offers no reward to players who prefer longer, less frequent sessions. And it punishes players for taking a day off.
Daily mission exp: 4,000 per day x 7 days a week x 10 weeks = 280,000
Weekly mission exp: The math is too complicated for me and I'm lazy. But each week last season was somewhere between 28,350 and 60,750 exp. Let's say conservatively you get 350,000 exp from weeklies. (I think it might actually be less this season, if someone has an exact number I can edit my post)
Edit: Weekly mission exp for the first 5 weeks of Act 2 is 141,750 in total. Not sure what the rest of the weeks will be yet. (Thanks /u/bobmore11 for the numbers here)
That means that 630,000 exp for the season comes from daily/weekly missions. You need 1,372,000 exp to hit level 50. So that's 45% of your total exp. Half your battlepass comes from bonuses.
The most extreme example of where this is a problem: Someone who can't play during the week because of school/work, but plays 6-8 hours per day on weekends. They will miss out on 5/7ths of their daily mission exp as a result, aka 200,000 exp. To compensate for that, they'd need to play an extra 200 spike rush games (~34 hours) over the season compared to someone who can play for a couple hours daily.
What would Valorant look like if you didn't complete your missions:
Deathmatch - 2,744 games needed to complete the Battlepass. That's 39 deathmatch games every day for 10 weeks. Even if you could manage to do 10 DM games per hour, that's still 4 hours every single day. For people who will primarily play DM now, the fact that it doesn't contribute to missions could be a real issue.
Spike Rush - 1,372 games needed to complete the Battlepass. That's 20 spike rush games every day for 10 weeks. Assuming 10 minute games, that's 3.33 hours every single day.
Unrated/Comp is a bit more variable depending on how much you win/lose, but probably comparable to Spike Rush.
If you want to complete your Battlepass effortlessly, you need to consistently play for 1-2 hours every day and never miss a daily. But this just isn't feasible for most people. Sometimes you're busy and can't log in for a day, or you want to take a break and play something else. Also it fails to reward long-session players. After you complete your missions for the day, the exp a match gives you feels like it's moving you toward completing your Battlepass. But really it's a drop in the ocean compared to what you get from weekly/daily missions and playing a little bit each day. There's no real incentive to keep playing once your daily missions are done.
In my opinion, this results in burnout for most players. I finished my Act 1 Battlepass a week early. But once I was done, I was sick of grinding Valorant and took the remaining week off from the game. Knowing that I'd have to commit to another 2 months straight of only playing Valorant for the next Act. I've heard similar stories from several friends. This isn't sustainable... I can commit to playing Valorant for 6-8 hours a week long-term, but I can't play every single day forever.
Proposed solutions:
Increase exp for all game modes - Make the Battlepass about actually playing the game, not completing arbitrary missions. That way your progress scales based on the amount of games you play, not whether you've got missions left for the day.
Allow renewing weekly missions (less optimal) - In some other games, you simply get new missions once you complete your existing ones. I think this could be another way to reward players who skip days but then play for 6 hours at a time when they do play. Missions could get progressively more difficult throughout the week, or limit it to 1 refresh of weekly missions per day to still have some sort of a cap.
Premium Battlepass XP Boost - From a business perspective, it makes sense that the Premium Battlepass should give a 10-15% global XP boost. Right now there is no incentive to buy the pass at the start of the season. More and more people are saying "I'll wait and see how far I get before I decide to buy."
External link →