Riot Games celebrates VALORANT's birthday

The free-to-play tactical shooter VALORANT is exactly two years old today. In their twitter account, the developers asked their players to blow out the candles on this occasion. On their first birthday, Riot Games employees were more open to the fans of their shooter. This year they limited themselves to a post on Twitter.

Let's talk about VALORANT, see how things are in the competitive arena of the team shooter, and also how far he has come in these two years.

After an unprecedented closed beta and a successful international launch, VALORANT, then codenamed Project A, quickly won the love of fans around the world and became one of the most popular games in its genre on PC. Over 500,000,000 tag team matches were played in VALORANT in its first year. Riot Games, despite the extremely positive results, began to work hard to introduce the shooter to an even wider audience.

During the existence of the game, VALORANT has been full of various events, events and major tournaments. Many esports organizations have become interested in the game and have formed their rosters in this discipline. The tournament component in Valorant is very extensive, there is a division of tournaments into categories and classes, the division of which directly depends on the organizers and the prize fund.

Tournament classification table

$100.000 and more

Tournaments only with the elite teams of the world. S-Tier tournament finals are international LAN events. They require an extensive qualification system to ensure that only the best teams can enter.

A Tier

$50,000 or more

Highly competitive tournaments, but with a less rigorous qualification system than the S-Tier, such as through open qualifiers. A-Tier tournaments may, but are not required to, include LAN Finals, but require significant regional influence in the regions. Examples of A-Tier tournaments are the RAGE Japan Tournament or Pop Flash.

B-Tier

from $5.000 to $50.000

Tournaments with a main event and/or unusually high prize pools. Tournaments with relatively small prize pools and lesser overall value may be categorized as B if the majority of participants are expected to be at the top level of their region. Level B tournaments should have at least some regional influence. Domestic tournaments can also be B-level, but only if the country in question has several well-known active players close to the top level of the game. Examples are Valorant Contenders Cup, Gamers Club Ultimate #2 or Clan Masters 2020.

C Tier

$10,000 or less

Tournaments with small prize pools, as well as those that are not part of the weekly or monthly events.

Less than a year after VALORANT's debut, Riot Games launched the VALORANT Champions Tour to support the game's growing esports community. The VALORANT Champions Tour (VCT) is a year-long international event with three stages: Challengers, Masters and Champions. Stage 2 of the VCT Masters, the second big event of the Valorant Champions Tour 2021 and the first international VALORANT tournament, culminated in Reykjavik, Iceland. According to preliminary data, the final match between SENTINELS and FNATIC attracted more than 1,000,000 simultaneous viewers at the screens, and the average audience per minute was more than 800,000 people.

The most significant tournaments for the entire existence of this esports discipline

• VCT 2021: Stage 2 Masters - Reykjavík Date May 24 - 30, 2021. The prize pool is $600,000. Location Reykjavik. The winner is the Sentinels.
• VCT 2021: Stage 3 Masters - Berlin The date of the event is September 10 - 19, 2021. The prize pool is $700,000. Venue Berlin. The winner is Gambit Esports.
• VALORANT Champions 2021 Date 01 - 12 December 2021. The prize pool is $1,000,000. Venue Berlin. Winner - Acend.
• VCT 2022: Stage 1 Masters - Reykjavík Date 10 - 24 April 2022. The prize pool is $675,000. Location Reykjavik. The winner is OpTic Gaming.
  

As for active players in VALORANT, Riot is stable in this regard. Online users are stable around 1,400,000 active users and there are no strong jumps up or down, apart from the hype after the release of the game.

At the moment, the developers are actively monitoring their game, releasing new agents, as well as new maps. At the release of the game, the number of game characters was 12, in the closed beta it was even 10. Game cards were calculated in the amount of 4 pieces. With the latest updates, the game has 19 agents. Currently there are seven maps, each of these maps provides a lot of opportunities for inventive maneuvers, tense moments and team strategies.

List of currently available maps

• Range
• Split
• Bind
• Ascent
• ice box
• Breeze
• Fracture

Returning to the topic of esports in this discipline, pay attention to VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters Copenhagen, which will be held in the capital of Denmark. It will run from July 10th and end on July 22nd of this year. 12 strongest teams from all over the world will compete in it.

If Riot Games continues to develop their game at such an active pace, the success for VALORANT will drag on for a very, very long time.