Valorant

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Genre	Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
Gamming Style	MOBA/MMORPG
Platform	Microsoft Windows
Release Date	June 2, 2020
Developer	Riot Games
Publisher	Riot Games
Website	https://playvalorant.com/

Valorant is an online multiplayer game designed by Riot Games that is available on the Windows platform, and it is the company’s only first-person shooter (FPS). After being in closed beta for a couple of months, Its official release was on June 2, 2020. The main motivation for its development was to make tactical shooters more accessible to new players while resolving some of the core issues games of the same genre had before.

Gameplay

There are five different game modes:

Similar to other tactical shooters like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Call of Duty: Black Ops, Valorant presents a multiplayer shooter game with different maps and assortment of weapons to buy each round. In a standard game mode, there are ten players, five on each team, and each team gets a chance to be the attacking and defending team for an even amount of rounds. For each round, the attacking team’s main objective is to plant a spike, and if the spike is not defused in a given amount of time by the defending team, the attacking team wins that round. On the other hand, the defending team’s goal is to prevent the spike from blowing up if it is planted, and they win the round if they are successful. During the round, if all five players of a team are dead before the spike is planted, the other team wins the round. The first team to win 13 rounds wins the game.

The key difference that Valorant brings is the introduction of agents. Each agent has their own abilities to use during the game, and similar to guns, these are purchasable at the start of each round. This brings a new aspect to a traditional FPS video game in that abilities can harm, heal, and disrupt players and their movements, which create space for numerous strategies to be formed outside of pure gun fights.

Other Modes

The Summoner

A player in League of Legends is also referred to as a summoner. At the end of each game, Summoner will also receive experience points and influence points. The experience points levels up the Summoner's account as a whole, and the influence points can be used to purchase runes and new champions. The Summoner becomes more powerful as he/she collects more champions and runes.

Player Rating

League of Legends recently developed a feedback system for players to rate other players after each games. This rating system is called the Honors Initiative and it consists of 4 different ratings which are "Friendly", "Helpful", "Teamwork", and "Honorable." These ratings are used as a way for players to gauge the playing habits of other players. If a player has been friendly or helpful to another player, the player can have the option to add a point to the other player's rating. Although the ratings do not affect how the game plays and have no incentive if one has a lot of them, they signifies the player's reputation. Riot Games developed this rating system as a way to reward players for good behavior. After the system has implemented, there has been significant improvement in the quality of the games. Below are the results of after one week of implementing the system.

Negative Attitude reports: -29% in normals games and -11% in ranked games

Offensive Language reports: -35% in normals games and -20% in ranked games

Verbal Abuse reports: -41% in normals games -17% in ranked games

The improved game play due to the Honor Initiative is notable. The system promotes good gaming etiquette through a rating system that doesn't interfere with the actual game play. Players naturally want to collect these honor points to be reputable. Riot Games also implemented bots that routinely checks for players that trade honor points(Giving points to other player for no other reason than to receive points back) , making it difficult for players to accumulate honor points through unconventional methods.

Ethical Issues

Delayed Punishment

One of the biggest problems of the Tribunal is that it is a delayed punishment system. Players who are reported due to poor gaming etiquette are not punished immediately. Players can continue to play games and behave poorly after being reported for a while. A case might not be reviewed until there are multiple reports and incidents. When a player is put on the Tribunal, almost certainly there is a pattern of poor gameplay in not just one, but multiple games. Players can avoid being put on the tribunal by playing some games well and other games poorly, making it difficult to pinpoint unethical gaming behavior. This means that players can abuse the system and play around the system by trolling here and there, which ultimately lowers the quality of the game if many players decide to do this.

"Smurfing"

League of Legends is a free to play game. Anyone with an email account can apply for an account and play. Players who are banned from one account can just create another one to play. Officially Riot Games does not have any rules or regulations against such behavior. Theoretically, players can create as many accounts as they please, play on one until it gets banned and move on to another one. "Smurfing" also becomes a concern since players at a higher skill level may create a new account and play players at lower player ratings, who are less skilled players by design. This could be seen as a form of gaining an unfair advantage, which by some gamers could be seen as a form of cheating, despite the aforementioned fact that there are not any rules against making a smurf. This affects the experience of new players who are trying to learn how to play the game because these "smurfs" have higher skill levels than the new account(s) they are hiding behind, meaning that they can easily turn the tide of a game;sometimes single-handedly winning otherwise losing games. The "smurfs" have the benefits of beating lower skilled players while their victims can win games they should lose or lose games they should win, potentially affecting player rankings. However, despite being able to go smoothly from one account to another, the player does not get to keep any of the items or champions they have bought and must essentially start from scratch, meaning that every smurf account is a legitimately leveled account. Also, the moderators of League of Legends have stated multiple times that they generally have a good idea on which accounts are smurfs and if the player's attitude does not change, the smurf will have a high chance of getting banned as well.

Cheating

There are various and creative methods of cheating that players have discovered in League of Legends. Some include boosting, writing scripts, and map zooming . Regardless of the type of cheating, many seek to gain an unfair advantage over other players and worsens their experience. Some tactics do so by decreasing the time required to complete tasks, while others allow players to complete moves they couldn't do naturally.

Boosting

Boosting is the act of someone other than the original account’s owner playing on his or her account. The point of getting boosted is for the player’s account to reach a higher rank. In the League of Legends ranking system, there are 7 different tiers. In each tier, there are five divisions with the exception of the two highest tiers. These tiers are as follows: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, masters, and challenger. The percent of players in each tier are 19.70%, 48.28%, 22.35%, 7.87%, 1.73%, 0.04%, and 0.02% respectively. As such challenger tier is the most sought after and most respected by the players.

When a person wants their account to be boosted, they will usually contact a boosting website and make a payment depending on what rank they want to achieve and what rank they are currently at. When players want to be boosted to diamond, masters, or challenger, the payment a lot higher compared to boosting to gold or silver.

Boosting results in similar ethical issues as smurfing. Since the booster playing on the low rank account is very high rank themselves, they will put their team at a severe advantage over the enemy team and almost always guarantees victory in all games that they play. As a result, if players are lucky and happen to be on the same team as the booster, they will essentially get a free win even if they would have lost otherwise. On the other hand, if players are unlucky and happen to be on the opposite team as the booster, they are essentially guaranteed a loss due to the skill gap and knowledge gap. This creates an unfair situation for enemy players and will negatively impact their experience while playing League of Legends.

Scripts

People have found ways to write in game scripts that automatically complete a series of actions that they couldn't complete as well without scripts . Using scripts makes a person almost unstoppable against players who aren't cheating, but it can be very easy to detect players who are using them. If a high level player comes up against a low level counterpart who seems too good for their skill level, scripts are usually to blame.

Map Zooming

In League of Legends, part of the strategy when facing other players includes deciding what to do based on the sections of the map that are visible. Normal players can't see the entire map they are battling on, but the map zoom hack allows players to do just that. This gives map zoom users a huge upper hand over players because they can strategize based on information regular players don't have. The issue with this cheat is that it can be extremely hard if not possible to detect by other players and the game itself.

Esports in the Realm of Actual Sports

E-sports has been picking up steam as a potential legit sport in the world nowadays. This is a drastic change from the outlook of games being something that is seen only as a leisure activity. Games such as League of Legends, Starcraft II, Overwatch, etc. have all shown just how popular this can be. This has garnered the attention of the IOC(International Olympic Committee) recently. So far the Asian Games has decided to make E-sports an official event in the 2022 Hangzhou games. The idea of E-sports as an Olympic sport has garnered an opinion from IOC president Thomas Bach when he said “We want to promote non-discrimination, non-violence, and peace among people. This doesn’t match with video games, which are about violence, explosions and killing. And there we have to draw a clear line,

Game Addiction

As with other games, League of Legends may lead to severe game addiction in users. Individual games usually last at least 20 to 30 minutes and in many cases go over an hour, so it takes a good chunk of a player's time to play a couple of rounds. As it is looked down upon to leave in the middle of a game, in many cases players opt to finish games rather than take care of responsibilities in their real life. Because League of Legends is a real-time strategy game, players are not allowed to pause while playing in games, meaning that many players must continue playing out a game until a team surrenders or loses the game in order to stop playing. If a player chooses to stop early, the player can be penalized, since leaving in the middle of the game is almost a guarantee that a team will lose the game. League of Legends is such a popular game and logs so many minutes for millions of players around the world that many players neglect other responsibilities and prioritize the video game first. League of Legends also has a strong fan base which means that many people are not only players, but also like to watch streams of popular and professional players, as well as watch professional matches and tournaments. These tournaments usually last for weeks and when aired, take up a majority of the day since each professional game averages about an hour including commercial time, picks and bans, and actual gameplay. Since most tournaments run a best-of-5 style, some tournaments might take more than 36 hours to fully complete. Thus, this combination of playing the video game and watching the video game can take over a player's time and cause addiction levels to grow as players get more and more consumed by the video game.

League of Legends also offers a solid sense of progression throughout the game as players get better and better, earn more resources, and are able to purchase more and more champions, skins, runes, and other items. This raises addiction levels because players become more invested in their profile, wanting to acquire as many champions and other elements as possible in order to have more fun while playing the game. Through riot points, players can purchase new skins, champions, and ward skins without grinding influence points which can take a long time to gather. As of March of 2016, there was a new addition to in-game purchases released to the public called Hextech Crafting. Each time you win any matchmade game, there’s a chance you’ll earn a key and winning with friends increases the chance of a key drop. You can use these keys to open chests which can be earned when you or someone in your premade party earns any S rank. . Although these in-game purchases do not provide any advantage to users in game, it encourages its players which are mainly teenagers to spend money. Most of these young adults are still dependents of their parents, so it can cause issues within families if their kids use their credit card.

League of Legends creates a potentially toxic sense of addiction that many players experience as they get sucked into playing the video game.

References

Valorant - video game Valorant

Kevin Chen