Valorant, as mentioned in a previous article, is a 5v5 tactical shooter most similar to a blend of Counter-Strike and Overwatch gameplay. Valorant is balanced around precise gunplay and strategic decisions such as characters and map picks.
Valorant is ever growing, every few weeks a new patch is released with varying degrees of changes, these changes can range from minor bug fixes to adding new characters or maps.
Starting in early January, a Valorant Championship Tour, or VCT, starts. This tour involves four regional tournaments and three international tournaments all culminating in a final championship event in early fall.
Currently, 48 teams compete in VCT with 40 of them being franchised from the start. The other eight teams earned their spot to compete in the league through Challengers.
Challengers is a league that runs parallel to VCT with a spot for franchising on the line, each major region runs their own individual leagues with no international tournament at the end.
Alongside both Challengers and VCT is Game Changers, a league for marginalized genders, focusing on giving opportunities to those that may be discriminated against based on their gender. GC runs on an open qualifier system with the only requirement being that all players on a team must be of a marginalized gender.
Any GC team that qualifies for Champions will automatically be qualified for their local Challengers league, giving a direct pipeline from GC to VCT. This was one of the many changes announced by Riot Games during 2024 for the upcoming season.
The 2025 season also included an overhaul to the VCT schedule. The 2025 VCT season offers a denser schedule that places more importance on stage 2 compared to the 2024 season.
This season will also be longer, shortening the off season and in turn the amount of time spent not playing Valorant. The last major changes for the 2025 season were made to the Challengers system. Alongside changes to the points system, Challengers has received an upheaval to its old systems.
Challengers in the 2025 season will have a changed schedule and different point system based on the feedback received during the 2024 season. More importantly, two new types of teams will be competing alongside the old teams in Challengers, Academy and Game Changers teams.
Academy teams is a system in which already franchised teams will create another team to foster new players in a competitive environment, the drawback of this system is that these teams, no matter how well they do, cannot qualify for ascension.
Despite the 2025 season not having started, a few predictions can be made. For example, the denser VCT schedule will lead to a more volatile state of Valorant that will cause domination to be even harder to achieve. Another prediction is that a wave of formerly Game Changer’s players will come to the main VCT circuit after Florescent, the best Game Changer’s player ever, made the first leap during this off season.
The last major prediction is that the Academy team system will flop in Americas because despite the individual team’s success, the players will not be able to advance to VCT because of the highly competitive nature of America’s. However, Academy teams in APAC, EMEA, and China will flourish because of it will show off young talents that underperforming teams can pick up. Although none of these predictions could come true, the only way to find out is to watch.
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