Riot Games first revealed VALORANT in League of Legends’ ten year anniversary last year. Ever since then players have been really hyped about the potential of this game as an Esports title.
Unfortunately, the very first VALORANT Twitch Rival tournament was not that great as the viewer number was really low compared to when the game was in the closed beta state. Additionally, there were also allegations of potential view botting to artificially inflate the viewer numbers.
Later Riot decided to launch their Ignition series where many tier-1 Organizations all around the world would host VALORANT invitational tournaments to kickstart the Esports scene. While the Ignition series was actually a great success for Riot Games, fans of this title were already asking Riot what lies ahead in the future.
Riot announces First Strike
In the recent dev diaries, Anna Donlon who is the producer on VALORANT along with Whalen Rozelle who is the Senior Director of Global Esports at Riot Games officially announced “First Strike” to be the next step in VALORANT’s Esports journey.
In short, First Strike will be a series of tournaments where pro and amateur teams all around the world will be able to compete against each other. And this time around these tournaments will have more support directly from Riot Games.
From December 2020, players all around the world will have a chance to compete against the best VALORANT teams to show their dominance and be the VALORANT winner in that particular region.
Observer and round reset features are finally coming
One of the reasons why VALORANT’s first few tournaments were such a mess was mainly because of the omission of some much-needed tools like the observer and round reset. Many fans rightly pointed out that these basic features were a necessity for VALORANT’s Esports scene to take off.
Riot Games finally listened and they are finally planning to introduce these features before the “First Strike” tournaments take place during this winter.
