Note: You are reading an article from 2020.
The current competitive state of VALORANT heavily favors Operator players.
Ever since VALORANT was launched officially on June 2nd, it was pretty obvious that the operator was pretty overpowered. More so than the developers originally expected, as right now, pro teams are literally abusing the operator.
According to 100T Hiko, professional VALORANT teams are double or triple AWPing(using the operator) on the defense side. Since there are not enough utilities like flash and smokes in the game right now, the operator is just too overpowered, especially at defense sites.
VALORANT needs more utilities
In CS:GO, a team can carry at least 10 flashes and 5 smokes. As a result, the AWP is pretty much balanced for the most part. However, VALORANT’s low movement speed, paired with the lack of smokes/flashes, makes it really hard to retake some of the sites as an attacker.
VALORANT needs more characters with smoke or stun abilities. On that note, the VALORANT community is currently divided on whether or not they think that the operator needs a nerf. Although the way pro teams are abusing the operator at the moment in the recent tournaments, Riot might step in and nerf the operator down to earth.
With the recent few updates, Riot is focusing more and more on character balancing. Agents like Viper and Jett are getting huge buffs, while popular agent like Sage is getting nerfs.
While it is too early to say what the competitive meta will look like a year from now, the way Riot is doubling down on some of these changes it won’t take that long for Riot to come to a conclusion on what kind of meta they want their game to have.
