With more than 2,000 upvotes and two awards, a Reddit post gained traction in the VALORANT community to give more credit to utility assists.
Unlike VALORANT’s competitor Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the game uses utility that is specific to each character such as slows, healing, flashes and stuns. This equipment is critical to having success during the round and can often determine whether a gunfight will end in a loss or a win. Despite this impact on VALORANT, utility assists rarely reflect positively on the player’s overall score at the end of a match.
For players who play Agents that rely heavily on utility like Breach, Cypher or Fade these assists can sometimes make up most of their KD. Especially with Agents who have to hold down sites or use their utility to enter into a site for their teammates.
VALORANT rewards players who perform well during a match, especially during Ranked, so that a placing on the leaderboard determines how much Rank Rating they will gain or lose. Leaderboard placement is determined by several features and also comes down to ACS, which gives utility assists little impact. As pointed out by Redditors, ACS does not directly tie to a player’s RR or MMR but still has an overall effect on a player’s performance.
The solution to this would be to have Riot reward players who are consistently using utility since players rely heavily on utility to win matches. This would also help separate VALORANT from other FPS titles that put more emphasis on gunplay alone.
Riot may not ultimately shake things up, but fans will likely keep pushing for such a change.
