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Ask VALORANT #7
This is Ask VALORANT. Send us your questions, we find some answers. This time we dive into performance history, breakdown your combat score, and a new way to buy weapon skin variants.
Q
I understand it means I’m doing something right, but what exactly does it mean when I have stars in my performance history?
A
If you’ve ever received a gold or silver sticker in your life for doing well, then this system likely speaks to you. In the performance tab, a star indicates if you’ve played better than we anticipated. That is, if you were regularly beating someone in combat and/or closely competing with someone of a higher rank than you, expect to have that acknowledged via a star.
A silver star means you exceeded expectations and a gold star means you’ve really punched above your weight. Pat on the back not included.
—Ian Fielding, Senior Producer
Q
Is it true that there’s an extra importance on frags when it comes to getting a good combat score? If so, do you plan on increasing the recognition of assists and other forms of contributions to your team (spotting or slowing enemies, healing allies, etc)?
A
Your combat score is not just based on kills, although that is a big factor in the score. We also look at damage inflicted, meaning that assists where you help kill an enemy are taken into account, as well as utility that does damage.There are some other factors that help inform your combat score, such as first bloods and streaks. These are called out on the combat score tool tip. Longer term, we are looking into ways to incorporate non-damaging assists into your combat score as well.
Regarding competitive, while your combat score indicates how well you performed in core combat during the game, it’s not 1:1 with the performance calculations we use for your rank updates. Rank updates leverage some, not only, of these data points. Simply put, the focus of whether or not your rank updates is primarily focused on wins and the decisiveness of these wins.
—Ian Fielding, Senior Producer
Q
I'm really interested in getting a specific weapon skin variant but it feels bad to have to get a variant I’m not interested in so I can unlock the one I want. Will I ever be able to buy a variant directly?
A
Yes! Starting with Patch 1.10 players will be able to select any variant they want. Weapon skins will still need to be fully evolved to unlock variants, but after doing so, you’ll be able to pick whichever one is most appealing to you.
—Miles "Riot Usury" Metzger, Revenue Strategist
Q
Why don’t any of the melee skins have variants? I think this could look really good, especially on Sovereign and Spline. The melee skins cost more than regular skins but they don't have variants. Personally, I would love to have a green Spline dagger and don't see why we can't.
A
"We've read the frequent posts asking a version of this question and it's definitely something we'd like to have in VALORANT too. So for one of our upcoming skin lines, we're going to test out variants on melee weapons. Consider it a limited test to see whether this is something desired by enough players for our small team to commit to. We'll evaluate and determine what is needed from our end to pursue variants on future melees, if it's something that players really want."
—Sean Marino, Art Lead, and Preeti Khanolkar, Producer
Q
About that audio question last time...can you just tell us if HRTF is coming?
A
First—sorry if it seemed like my original response came across as "we know better!" or that we didn't hear you in wanting HRTF. I just wanted to explain our limitations and challenges we wanted to solve, rather than making it seem like they were more important than your requests. Second, I'll say that we agree that HRTF is a worthwhile endeavor, and plan to begin work on implementation. There are a few preemptive steps we need to take (e.g. engine version updates), but are hoping that we can start in October.
—Peter Zinda, Audio Director