Valorant team apologizes for lackluster updates: "We haven't been giving you reasons to get excited for the future"

The Valorant team at Riot acknowledged the sense of "frustration" in the community in an apologetic statement following up on an unpopular Q&A post. 

Production director Arnar Gylfason shared the statement on Twitter. "Well, oof, it's been rough to read the responses to our Ask Val post the last 24 hours," the statement, penned by the broader Valorant team, begins. "Not because we feel attacked but because we feel bad we haven't been engaging with y'all like we used to. We love our game. We love this community. We understand your frustration and we know we haven't been communicating as much what we've been working on. 

"While we've been on track 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," the statement continues. "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." 

The Q&A post in question went up on Thursday, and almost everything in it boils down to some variation of 'no immediate plans for that.' A pick or ban map system? "This is not something we're currently planning for regular Competitive queue play." The Gifting system once targeting a 2020 release?  "No timeline as of today." An in-game replay system? "The shortest answer today is that there is no plan for a player-facing version of a replay system, as of now." And on and on. 

It's an unfortunate collection of no-doubt difficult answers, but whatever the circumstances that led to these decisions and challenges, the post certainly didn't inspire confidence in the Valorant player base, as evidenced by the replies to the official tweet for the Q&A. Posts on the official subreddit were also quick to lament the bleak state of the game's roadmap and the disappointing outlook for many requested features. Here's hoping the forthcoming update from Riot puts a little more spring in Valorant's step.

Valorant's previous game director left the game late least year to head up a new project at Riot Games as the studio branches out into yet more genres.