Valorant is already looking like a premium first-person shooter that places a premium on skill and has an impeccable offer of high-stakes competition, all in a free-to-play format. While the actual popularity of the title is difficult to discuss at this moment, but one thing is absolutely sure: it looks to have the Counter-Strike format down pat, and they aren’t afraid to add new spice to it. Of course for many, the keyword is look; Twitch is filled, day after day, with thousands of users all attempting to get that uber-rare access into Valorant‘s closed beta. That is simply unlikely to change in the near future as Riot randomly selects Twitch users to bestow the almighty access.
While the tactic has resulted in some news-worthy moments over the past few days; Valorant has received almost two million concurrent viewers on Twitch, the developers smote professional CS: GO players last night in a one-sided stomp, Valorant-enabled Riot accounts are selling for over $100, streamers pretending to have drops enabled to get that precious foot-traffic, and of course, a hefty number of botting views on Twitch.
Riot has taken to Valorant‘s official website to post an update that shares a bit of the studio’s thoughts to make the entire experience more transparent.
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— elrubius (@Rubiu5) April 8, 2020
First, Riot has stated that they’re aware of viewbotting, along with Twitch; both studio’s have filters in place that appear to measure unique IPs of viewers, and that those are being filtered out of the drops. Secondly, they’re also aware that users are selling keys that they’ve gained through spoofing and viewbotting, and are working on banning those keys.
Pay close attention to this next aspect: Riot claims that if you’ve purchased a Riot account to gain access to Valorant, those accounts will be banned before launch.
With this in mind, they’ve also further clarified how players can become eligible for receiving a Valorant key, along with a weighting system. Twitch viewers must past a certain threshold of hours watched of Valorant from streamers with the ‘Drops Enabled’ tag below their title, and the number of hours is ‘roughly two’. They are tracking by total Valorant stream time across all channels, and passing that threshold entitles you to the closed-beta access raffle that happens every day, multiple times per day.
Watching beyond two hours gives you a higher weight when the raffle occurs, yet there are diminishing returns over time. You do not need to be watching a Valorant stream when the drops occur, or even logged into Twitch itself; you’ll be notified via email if your account has been selected.
The posting ends on a note of concern; Riot has noticed a large number of viewers that are marathoning every Twitch streamer playing Valorant with little to no breaks since the event has begun, racking up hours in the hope of getting a drop. The majority of the post actually appears to be focused on calming these viewers, as Riot mentions concerns more than once that they hold of viewers burning out on Valorant before the title is even officially available. Take a break, go shower and get some sleep; Valorant doesn’t appear to be going anywhere for a long time.
