VALORANT is getting a map pool update soon, but it doesn’t address one of the community’s most popular requests: Rotate out Ascent. As annoying as the devs choosing to ignore the player base sounds, Riot Games says it had actually considered the plea—but “decided against it” for the time being.
Under a Reddit post calling out Riot for not taking out Ascent this time, altrombe, product manager at VALORANT, confirmed the map will go out at some point—just not now. “It’s not a permanent fixture in our rotation structure,” they said.
The upcoming map rotation refresh will see the removal of Breeze and Split, with the gap replaced by Haven and the new map, slated to be revealed during VCT Masters Shanghai. While Breeze was heavily criticized for some time now, warranting its removal from the pool, players didn’t expect Split to take a hit. After all, it certainly doesn’t encourage a stale meta, unlike Ascent.
Internal decisions like map pool updates can confuse VALORANT without a proper explanation from the des. Altrombe acknowledged the team could do a better job at explaining the reason behind their decisions. “I think we can talk a bit more about map rotations and how we approach decisions like that then. There’s a lot of context behind these calls internally that I think we can do a better job of talking about with y’all,” they said.
Talking about the permanent removal of maps, altrombe said the devs would rather “rework it and get it to a point” where they can put the map back in the pool.
Many players have advocated for the removal of the map pool rotation system. They want all 13 maps included in all VALORANT modes—but it’s unlikely to happen, considering how the devs are focused on making it a beginner-friendly game.
In another comment, altrombe said the team is working on releasing a “quick video” on the map pool today, May 22—so we can definitely get some answers there.
