Riot dev responds to Valorant Q&A backlash after community uproar

Riot Games developer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason has responded to the Valorant community’s backlash as a recent dev Q&A revealed that long-awaited features won’t be arriving in the near future.

Since Valorant’s launch in early 2020, players have requested various features to be added to the popular first-person shooter. However, Riot has remained a bit tight-lipped when it comes to the progress of implementing the highly-anticipated updates.

Among those features requested by players include the likes of a replay mode, a pick and ban system for the map pool, as well as a gifting system to give skins to your friends.

However, in an Ask Valorant blog post on May 19, the devs have shut down any hopes of seeing these features added, causing the community to hit out at the developers.

With the community in uproar over the lack of development on highly requested features, Valorant’s Director of Product Management Arnar Hrafn Gylfason posted a tweet longer discussing the Q&A responses.

“It’s been rough to read the responses to our Ask Valorant post the last 24 hours. Not because we feel attacked but because we feel bad we haven’t been engaging with y’all like we used to,” said the developer.

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“We understand your frustration and we know we haven’t been communicating as much about what we’ve been working on. While we’ve been on track with shipping maps and agents recently, we haven’t been giving you reasons to get excited for the future, just excuses for what we’re not doing.”

“We’re going to take a stab at providing some better answers on where the game is at and some plans for the future that we hope will answer a lot of your questions. It’ll take a couple of days to pull together so hopefully, you can bear with us until next week.”

While the Ask Valorant Q&A was a disappointment for many players, it’s nice to see the developers acknowledge the community’s concerns.

Hopefully, we’ll see some big updates with the launch of Episode 5 in late June, and fingers crossed it’ll include some of these long-awaited features.