Riot responds to pro player backlash over VCT 2024 schedule

❘ Published: 2023-08-24T04:15:41

Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games

The best Valorant teams have the least amount of rest before the next phase of competition in VCT.

In a Riot Games Media Day Q&A, Head of Valorant Esports Leo Faria spoke about some of the criticisms of the 2024 VCT schedule.

Riot Games announced the upcoming schedule for the 2024 VCT season on August 23 and was immediately met with criticism from a number of professional Valorant players. Some pros blasted the calendar for its extended offseason for teams that fail to make Valorant Champions, which is the majority of the VCT international league squads, and the marathon schedule during the season which features few breaks.

Some players said they felt like their criticisms of the 2023 schedule, which featured many of the same issues cited for the 2024 calendar, were not heard from Riot’s camp.

In a Media Day Q&A ahead of the final days of Valorant Champions, executives from Riot Games took questions from the press and were asked directly about the criticisms of the schedule.

Riot responds to player backlash to VCT 2024 calendar

Leo Faria, the Head of Valorant Esports, explained that he understands that the season is “quite packed” from January to August and said the offseason is long to compensate.

Leo Faria, Anna Donlon, and John Needham during Valorant Champions 2023 Media Day.

“The big challenge at the end of the day is we’re always going to have the best teams playing more and giving us feedback that the calendar is too packed. I have no time to rest and the teams that don’t qualify for global events saying the calendar is… not enough, I don’t have the opportunity to play my season ends too early, and we cannot plan the season with the lowest common denominator in mind,” Faria said.

The executive said that one of the goals for the schedule is to give the best teams the most chances to play against each other as possible. However, he did say that there is no right answer to scheduling out the season to appease all ends of the VCT spectrum.

“It’s always going to be a challenge and the reality is there’s no perfect answer. And again, as I said about Challengers and Tier 2, we’re going to continue listening to pros, listening to teams, listening to fans, and iterating every year and yeah, we’re happy with how things are right now, but we could absolutely change,” he said.