Ask VALORANT #1

This is Ask VALORANT. We collect your questions and select a few to get answered every other week.

Q

Why can't I earn VALORANT Points in the Battlepass instead of Radianite points?

A

“I sense two separate questions here—why you can’t earn VP and why we give out Radianite Points in the battle pass— I’ll break them out.

So first, why can’t you earn VP in the battle pass? Our goal is that when you buy a battle pass, you buy it for the total value of it rather than buying it as a way of getting enough currency to buy the next one. We want the battle pass to be the highest value product we offer as well as a compelling experience, but by adding VP as an incentive we hurt our ability to fund our long-term vision for the battle pass. We'll be doing more studying on the current battle pass to make sure that you feel like it offers great value and will continue to make sure that the content within it justifies the price.

Now the second question: long-term, what are Radianite points for? Our plan is to have Radianite Points become the evolving currency of VALORANT. So as we develop new features, we hope you'll be able to use it to buy more Gun Buddies, upgrade Player Cards and Sprays in addition to what is currently just weapon skins. We'll make sure to offer ways to spend your Radianite Points on content that is unlocked within the battle pass. It’ll take us some time to get there but that's our long-term vision for the product.”

—Joe Lee, Revenue Lead

Q

Some unrated games have felt really unbalanced, is it because unrated has looser matchmaking?

A

"Our goal with Unrated Mode is to allow players a way to play the core VALORANT game mode with any of their friends. Given this, it means there is going to be a wider range of skills in games, and that can lead to matches feeling less fair. We still have strategies to make sure we keep stomps low and matches competitive, but Unrated will generally have a slightly higher range of skills. We have taken some steps at the cost of a moderate increase to queue times in order to reduce the average disparity in matches. We hope this leads to matches feeling more balanced.

Comparing Competitive and Unrated, we actually have a pretty similar matchmaking configuration, with the biggest difference being that in Unrated, there’s no limitation on who you can party up with skill-wise. As it turns out, lots of folks have friends of varying degrees of skill they'd like to play with!

Right now, the majority of our Unrated matches are still within the skill disparity constraints that Ranked games would allow. For the high skill disparity matches, the skill gaps come directly from the premade, while the matchmaker adds zero or very limited skill disparity to the match. We are working on launching our Competitive mode in patch 1.02, which hopefully will help players in both queues, and Competitive will continue to have hard limits on skill disparity.

As a final note, we do track matchmaking ‘quality’ in many ways, including match balance (the final round score) and skill disparity (the difference in skill between the best and worst player in a match), and so far haven’t found huge balance issues, but we’ll continue to monitor this data at scale."

—Ian Fielding, Senior Producer, and Yilin He, Senior Data Scientist

Q

Will there ever be new guns introduced to VALORANT? Ever is a kinda long time, maybe, are there short-term plans to introduce new guns?

A

“This quote from the article on the VALORANT arsenal sums it up nicely: ‘No weapon should feel like it only exists to troll, or have no imagined use scenario. Likewise, guns that felt redundant were also removed.’

There are no immediate short term plans to add new guns. We've had the current 17 guns in the game for some time now (internally) and feel that the balance is in a good spot as of today. And as noted in the article, we removed some guns along the way in early development if we felt they were redundant or didn't serve a clear purpose.

We'll learn a lot more about the gun balance through the many players playing our game, so I'm sure we'll discover potential gaps in the arsenal we could fill in the coming months.Adding a new gun isn't totally out of the question, but it's also not something we're planning for the short term.”

—Preeti Khanolkar, Producer, and Sean Marino, Art Lead

Q

Is there going to be an option to surrender in VALORANT?

A

“Yes! An option for early surrender will be introduced with patch 1.02. Please see our 1.02 patch notes for more info around how the system will work.”

—Ian Fielding, Senior Producer