Valorant ranked remains one of the most divisive modes in Riot’s flagship FPS, with some arguing it functions perfectly, while others claim it is dominated by hackers and smurfs. Following a direct attack from one angry fan regarding the system’s design, Riot’s senior competitive designer, EvrMoar, has hit back at claims he is “completely and purposefully full of it.”
Valorant’s ranked queue either brings out the best in people, or the straight-up worst. Despite being one of the best FPS games, players often have to contend with grievers and toxicity, as well as smurfs.
The latter on that list have come under a lot of scrutiny from Riot, who implemented an all-new smurf detection system in Valorant patch 5.01. While it remains a North American exclusive for now, if successful the feature will likely be shipped worldwide.
Following a deep dive analysis into the Valorant’s ranked sphere by Twitch streamer Wendler, Riot has come under fire for not dealing with the smurf problem, with senior competitive designer EvrMoar apparently on the chopping block.
In response to Wendler’s findings, one sceptical fan writes “EvrMoar is completely and purposely full of it when it comes to the smurf accounts, which is his job – downplaying the game’s glaring issues.
“Anything that comes from Riot about smurfs should be taken with a million grains of salt because smurf accounts are a positive KPI from Riot’s perspective,” they continue. “Imagine the cliff sized drop in player accounts if they actually enforced some sort of authentication to where you couldn’t create infinite accounts at will.”
EvrMoar was quick to reply (buckle up, it’s a big one). “First, I really want to call out something that I think ‘humanizes’ the shadowy people (me and other Rioters) that these posts seem to call out; often viewing devs or employees as evil shadowy figures trying to manipulate their community. Most Rioters love games and play games all the time. Even if a Rioter doesn’t play games, they are passionate about what they are working on and want to work on awesome things that make people happy.
“Now, I do believe healthy scepticism is appropriate. I understand, Riot is a huge studio and has a lot of money and resources to enact whatever they see fit to make their games succeed… I’m not saying that ‘just because we are passionate devs we can do no wrong’ – that being said I have to point out that Riot makes good games because they enable passionate people to be creative and make them.
“Circling back to address your comment directly, it isn’t my ‘job’ to downplay glaring issues,” he states. “Riot actually does not ask us, or force us, to interact with the community in any way. I actually do not have anyone ‘watching’ my tweets or Reddit responses, and I do this on my free time.
“Reddit and social media is not reliable metric to measure game health, just as you pointed out later in the comment we would probably use KPIs, so then why do I need to hide any glaring issues?” he asks. “Also what issues am I hiding?
“I understand that all of this will never make up for what you believe to be true, or the groups that you agree with that say we are lying or for some reason ‘make decisions just for money,'” he states, concluding “it isn’t my job to worry about those things. I care about a fun ranked experience, not monetization.”
As Riot continues to grapple with smurfing in ranked, be sure to make use of the best Valorant crosshairs to give these rule breakers hell.