Economy in VALORANT is very deliberately and specifically designed around the two main ‘rifles’ — the Vandal and the Phantom, both priced at 2900 credits. This is the same as in certain similar games, and the reason for this is because the rifles are designed so that, with perfect play…

Back just after beta, I wrote an economy guide for Valorant. (I mostly wrote about the first few months of competitive Valorant on here, but there’s one or two theory pieces prior to those early tournaments). It’s one of the few pieces on this Medium that’s still pretty consistently trafficked…

UPDATE, November 27th: EU First Strike used a similar model to NA/other regions, but not identical; as best we can tell, seeding applied for the teams from the first qualifier, and then each was randomly assigned one of the teams from the second qualifier. …

As you read this, the bracket for the finals of First Strike: Europe is in the process of being set. …

1) G2 still have a long way to go (but ardiis is still the best player in Europe). So. G2 won. There are going to be enough panegyrics to what G2 did at this tournament that honestly, it seems like the more valuable contribution to the discourse (trademark copyright) here is in general to actually pull everyone’s collective neck in a bit. Did they perform well here? Yes…

Context tl;dr: this is pretty much just a list of notable beta/post-beta tournaments. Absolutely skip this if you’re already familiar. I’m conscious here that a lot of people who are potentially going to read a piece like this actually haven’t seen all or maybe any of the tournaments that have been…

For the first time in a while (maybe ever), we’re getting a fairly big EU Valorant tournament midweek — the Wave Esports Invitational Cup. You may be familiar with the name, so to clarify: yes, there has already been a Wave Esports Invitational, last month. …

This weekend saw the first big batch of high-level, full-team, competitive games in the European Valorant scene, in the form of Epulze Valorant Prodigies Group C and D. This isn’t a recap of the full event or anything; the following links will get you there on that: https://twitter.com/joejedwards/status/1271442688274042881 was a…

With Twitch Rivals EU having come and gone, and as we look towards the first team tournaments of 1.0, let’s talk meta. …