Riot devs respond to Valorant ‘pay-to-win’ Operator skin glitch

Riot Games has responded to the major flaw with the newly released Prism Operator skin, where players could see around the scope while aiming down sight.

Valorant’s closed beta is moving into its third week, and it has been relatively plain sailing (as far as beta testing goes) for the Riot devs, as more players continue to test their tactical shooter.

While there have been a number of concerns surrounding Agent balancing and a couple of server hiccups along the way, Riot looks primed and ready to release a well-rounded shooter in Summer 2020.

Despite this, Riot has received its first flood of community backlash following the release of their ‘Prism’ skin collection on April 20.

And it is this batch of cosmetics which are responsible for a major flaw in Riot’s plan to uphold the competitive integrity that was promised as part of their mission statement back in October 2019.

• Read more: Valorant dev reveals second CSGO-style anti-cheat coming post-launch

Essentially, one player discovered that if you aim down sight with the Prism skin equipped on your Operator, you can see around the scope, which plenty of people dubbed ‘pay-to-win’ — a concept which Riot are avidly against.

But amid the immediate uncertainty, Riot developers were quick to address the issue on the Valorant subreddit, where they responded with two hours of the post going live.

One Riot developer under the alias ‘Fancypmcgee’ suggested that a patch was imminent, implying that the issue slipped through the cracks. “This is a bug which will be fixed in an upcoming patch, sorry about that! Competitive integrity is really important, and we test to make sure that we aren’t selling power with our cosmetic content.”

• Read more: Riot explain their strategy for balancing Valorant Agents & weapons

Nicholas ‘Nickwu’ Wu Smith, a developer who’s been at the forefront of Valorant’s development, subsequently went into more detail surrounding the cosmetic issue, explaining that the “issue only happens when material quality is set to low.”

So for those thinking that they could adjust their material quality to give them the edge in the server, Riot are already onto it and have a fix incoming, although an exact date for that fix is currently unknown.

Riot’s pledge to maintain competitive integrity is shown through their readiness to listen to community feedback and sort any issues in the most efficient way possible before the official release. After all, what are betas for?