Valorant is the most popular tactical-FPS game for nearly a year. But sometimes, the character abilities are at the forefront more than the tactical side. These abilities are also too powerful, so if you have good timing, you can win a game or round, or even a battle, after some abilities without even showing off your aiming skills. Of course, having different skills makes some agents more valuable. In reality, many players are acing it by playing only one agent. Consequently, Valorant players want Riot to bring in an agent ban system. The game’s designer explained that this system would come when they have around 30 agents.
Valorant, which launched almost a year ago, had ten different agents at the time. It seemed pretty modest, but it was ideal to have ten agents when it’s launch. Moreover, it would be wrong to expect a new game to contain many different characters. But looking back at the game now, we see fifteen agents after Astra‘s launch. The pool has expanded considerably, but Valorant developers have not yet brought in the anticipated agent ban system.
“Maybe Close To 30”
Nicholas Wu Smith, one of Valorant’s designers, addressed this issue in his stream today. One viewer asked, “At what Agent do you think bans will be viable?” After thinking about it for a while, Smith replied:
Maybe close to 30. It also really depends on if we get as much good competition out of banning stuff versus other games. Other games ban, but is it actually better?
Nicholas Wu Smith
Statistically speaking, Valorant will probably be releasing the 30th agent in four years. Of course, it may be shorter, but the game introduced five new agents in its first year. It’s like we’re going to wait at least a few years, if not four years.
Also, Smith doesn’t seem to be interested in this idea because he explained why the agent ban system wouldn’t be good with an example. In his example, he featured former CS:GO player Tyson “TenZ” Ngo. Ngo, who made a name for himself in Valorant and even led the Sentinels to the championship, is also a Jett fan.
Is it better to see TenZ on Jett more often, or is it better that we never see that because it always gets banned against that team?
Nicholas Wu Smith
Although the agent ban system is the number one request of the players, Valorant is not ready for it. Imagine that the system is active and teams are banning three agents each. It would leave nine agents to pick. When we take League of Legends as an example, there are currently 140 characters in the game. Therefore, banning ten characters is not cutting a swathe and does not narrow the pool of players. But it seems like Valorant players should expand their pool of characters already to invest in the future.
