Valorant was one of my first of many long-term games I would play and thoroughly enjoy. That joy would eventually run out unfortunately.
When I first played it was during the beta and the hype around it was huge and I couldn’t wait to start playing. It was also around the time of the pandemic so I was excited to finally have some new games to play with my best friend. We both got a key from Twitch and downloaded it. Obviously, since the game was a closed beta, it looked unfinished. But that wasn’t my concern at the time.
It was new and fresh and we were ready to just enjoy the game to full effect. We enjoyed it for the most part and had a good time, but little did we know that this game would later turn into something we barely enjoyed.
For the first few seasons and episodes, we were excited for every new content drop and every new release of skins or spray and genuinely enjoyed the content Riot was releasing. I eventually took a long break from the game for about 5 to 7 months, and when I came back it didn’t really have the same feel as it did months ago.
I got back into it anyways for months and strived to be better and hit a higher rank. I ended up achieving the second-highest rank tier in a Valorant Competitive System, Immortal, and left the game ever since. The competitive experience was horrible. People could just make new accounts whenever they wanted to even with the same email. I would know because I was able to do it fairly easily. This made smurfs a common occurrence, resulting in people that left games either to throw games or just out of anger, go unpunished as they could just hop onto another account to play the same game with no changes made.
Of course, there was a system in place to prevent competitive smurfs in the game. A level requirement had to be met but it didn’t take long to reach. It’s a horrible system and they should, dare I say, follow in Blizzard’s tracks and use a phone number or only have one account per email. I am not saying ban alternate accounts that already exist using one email but maybe have them switch to a separate email account and have a verifiable phone number to play competitively.
This may be the worst out of the 3 games I am reviewing and I just wish Riot Games did something about the terrible community linked to the game. In conclusion, Valorant was short lived for me and I eventually moved on to other games and it didn’t have any staying power for me. It was addicting but in the wrong way and an overall bad experience, but who says they can’t enjoy junk food from time to time? The game works fine, the gameplay is solid, but the community as I have said is awful. All I wish is for Riot to do something.
By Sean Corona, Aliso Niguel High School, Class of 2023
