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Valorant: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Bharat Kotwani
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Valorant: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Set in the near future, Valorant is a 5v5 First person and tactical shooter title developed by Riot games. Since its launch, Valorant has been adjudged as a fusion of Valve’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Blizzard’s Overwatch where emerging victorious by the only means of gunning won’t do any good as you would be poised to use your abilities in a bid to gain the upper hand on your opposition. A part of the community post its release in Closed Beta has claimed it to be CS:GO but with abilities where one can trick his/her enemies by using the latter.

Game Modes

As of now, Valorant provides four types of game modes.

  • Unrated
  • Competitive
  • Custom Match (Scrims, Map Layouts)
  • Practice Arena

At the launch, Unrated was the lone game mode where players could compete in a 5v5 environment with the Competitive mode being inculcated later in the 0.49 patch. These all four game modes have been made available under the “Play” option. After the latter patch was inculcated in the game, it was made necessary to play 20 unrated games before the game would allow you to start your journey in the competitive pool.

Characters

The characters in this title go by the term “Agents” and at the start of every match, players get a choice to select them. Upon selecting an Agent, you are deployed with 4 abilities out of them one would be your signature ability which would reset every 35 seconds along with the last one being your ultimate which can be either recharged by either getting kills, planting/defusing the spike or by collecting Orbs across the Map. Once you have chosen a Character, you won’t be getting a chance to swap it for another for the rest of the match. As of now, Valorant fields 10 Agents.

In the ongoing closed beta, the game does provide with five unlocked Agents, for everyone who starts the game. These free Agents are Phoenix, Sage, Sova, Brimstone, and Jett. The rest five Agents are locked and can be unlocked upon progression. Once in the closed beta, you do stand a chance to unlock more two agents by playing a couple of unrated games.

You can track your advancement via the “Latest Tab” which would be showcased on the home screen where you would be able to unlock two agents each at Level 5 and Level 10. The rest three agents can be unlocked by either starting their respective contracts or can be acquired by purchasing them from the in-game store. You can find the contracts for the Agents under the collection menu.

Here are the 10 agents available in the closed beta.

Jett

Sova

Sage

Omen

Phoenix

Brimstone

Raze

Breach

Viper

Cypher

Gameplay

Once you have been found a match for the Unrated/Competitive mode, after selecting your desired agent, your team will start either on the defensive side or the attack side. Just like CS:GO, your mission will be to plant the Spike when on the offensive side and defuse the same on your defense. Both of these game modes will feature a “fastest to 13” objective for picking up the map victory where the two sides would go all in to secure the 13th round as earlier as possible.

But before charging up on the Unrated and Competitive modes, you might want to visit the shooting range in order to get yourself a hang of the weapons and their recoil patterns where you can too tweak your aim sensitivity settings. The practice arena does help you to enter an aiming session for refining your reflexes and as mentioned above, the recoil patterns of the weapons available in the store. At some moments in the game, it gets vital to keep your aim somewhere around the head because of the maps and their layouts.

Abilities

Abilities do play a pivotal role here in Valorant as gunning down enemies won’t help you and your team to get in the driver’s seat for the entire match. By using your set of abilities, you can either catch an enemy off guard by revealing their location or by blocking their vision in a bid to buy some more time post plant or slowing down the offensive wave while playing on the defensive side.

Buy Menu

Trust me, the buy menu is pretty much interesting here in Valorant with a plethora of commands been made available in a bid to acquire weapons. Running low on economy with others flowing in cash? You’re just one step away from requesting a weapon by left clicking on it’s icon as it would ping your team about your request.

Your teammates could buy you weapons except your abilities and the armor. Yes, we haven’t discussed about the types of Armor. Valorant does provide you with two types of Armor packs.

Light Shields

  • Cost: 400 credits.
  • Damage Reduction: 66%
  • Health: Breaks after absorbing 25 damage.

Heavy Shields

  • Cost: 1,000
  • Damage Reduction: 66%
  • Health: Breaks after 50 damage

The buy menu also gives you a chance to re-sell your weapon which you might have bought mistakenly at a 100% refund value. At the start of every match, players are given 800 credits where they can either to upgrade themselves to a light shield armor along with an upgraded pistol.

Communication

This might be the most important factor in every FPS as your teammate’s life would totally depend on your actions. Once you call out about watching their backs might make them concentrate on their duels and ability usages. Just like while using the latter, you may want to make them know about your actions as they can equally prove fatal to your team just like for your opposition.

Ranked Mode

Players would get their ranked mode unlocked after playing 20 unrated matches in a bid to gain experience. They might not start it right after the 20 matches threshold but it’s recommended to get well versed with all the map layouts and with agents as well.

With this collective data, you can easily bank on the same if you’re new to this game and looking to get started. We will be updating our Valorant Blog with more content for beginners and professionals as well which you guys won’t hesitate to miss for sure. Do stay tuned!

More useful Valorant guides:

Kjaerbye takes indefinite break from CSGO

Sonu Banerjee
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Kjaerbye takes indefinite break from CSGO

Health should be the prime priority in life. Sometimes, it’s worth it to put it ahead of your hobbies, passion or even your career. Markus “Kjaerbye” Kjærbye seems to have set an example in proving the point as he announces going on an indefinite break from competitive CS due to his physical problems.

The Danish CSGO pro who had shifted from Astralis to North in early 2018 has announced through a recent tweet that he wants to “listen to his body”.

Over the past couple of months, Kjaerbye claimed to have been experiencing abdominal pain, breathing problems and even chest cramps. He mentioned that he was having difficulty playing the game he loves “on the highest level.”

“I have come to a point, where I need to listen to my body,” Kjaerbye said, “and give it time to recover fully. I don’t know when I’ll be back on the server but, I do know that I need a break.”

He concluded his tweet by thanking his family, fans and the North team for understanding and supporting him in these troubling times.

DreamHack wished him a speedy recovery which was attached with a clip of kjaerbye showcasing a 3K with a Galil on Nuke.

His announcement cleared things up about him missing North’s previous matches in ESL: Road to Rio. What’s commendable is despite that, North successfully made it to the play-offs.

Dota 2: Newbee Banned from ImbaTV Events for Match-Fixing

Pranav Nalawade
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Dota 2: Newbee Banned from ImbaTV Events for Match-Fixing

Newbee’s Dota 2 team is now banned for a lifetime at all ImbaTV Media and Mars TV tournaments.

A permanent ban was received by Xu “Moogy” Han, Yin “Aq” Rui, Wen “Wizard” Lipeng, Young “waixi” Xiao as well as The International 2012 champion Zeng “Faith” Hunda. Apart from the players, head of Dota 2 division at Newbee, Feng feng Yitsin also receives a ban.

EHOME’s coach Zhang Xiao8 Ning suspected the Newbee and Avengerls matchup in February earlier this year at the StarLadder ImbaTV Dota 2 Minor Season 3, Avengerls won the first game and dropped the second game in an absurd way despite having a massive gold lead.

Xiao8: If this match is not fixed, I will eat shit on stream
by u/yjygwzs in DotA2

The matter was further Investigated leading CDA and IMBA to conclude a lifetime ban for the players and organisation.

The evidence has been shared with Valve and Perfectworld in an official report filed by CDA on May 15th, 2020 stated on Weibo.

From CDA:

However, Newbee has denied all the allegations and has prosecuted an appeal claiming it wasn’t a throw but an issue caused by lack of communication by the org and the TOs.

The final conclusion will be out prior to May 20th but for the time being, organisation and the players will stay banned.

Valve employee on Source 2 “rumors can be bogus”

Sonu Banerjee
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Valve employee on Source 2 “rumors can be bogus”

Recently, a lot of hype has been circulating surrounding the Source 2 release on CSGO. Speculations about the incoming engine upgrade has been prevalent for a while, but what added fuel to the fire recently was the rumour that suggested the release of Source 2 on May 18th. Amid the atmosphere of excitement, VNN Tyler went further and said in one of his streams that the Source 2 release might be sooner than expected. You can read a full list of leaks about Source 2 rounded up here.

CSGO Source 2 predictions
by in GlobalOffensive

Another speculation on Reddit which predicts the map remakes after the engine upgrade drew the attention of Ido Magal – an employee of Valve corporations and the project lead of CSGO.

Reddit user u/YourGenericName was messing around with the files of Half-Life: Alyx when he found out a model for a stack of cardboard boxes which were filed under ‘cs_militia’. According to him, The file was named as ‘boxes_garage_lower.mdl’ and was missing its texture. What was more shocking was when he decided to look at the models for the older versions of cs_militia on CSGO and CS: Source. Both the games had the boxes’ models under the exact same file name, ‘boxes_garage_lower.mdl’. He further mentioned that the file structures of militia on CS:S and CSGO were almost identical other than some models and texture changes.

The Reddit post also states that maps with a “large number of Half-Life 2 assets” are very likely to get remakes. These include Militia, Office, Mirage, Assault and Italy. The reason behind his assumption lies in the fact that Valve already had to remake all Half-Life 2 assets for Alyx, “so the only thing left is the small amount of map specific props.”

What happened next might be a saddening news for CSGO fans. When another Reddit user asked about the release date of Source 2, u/YourGenericName informed him about the leaks by VNN Tyler which suggested the release being in under a week. That’s when Ido Magal stepped in. The Valve employee mentioned how these sorts of rumours are “great” because they get to figure out the community’s demands. However, he also said, “Just remember that sometimes the rumours are totally bogus,” which can directly hint towards the release not being so soon after all.

Comment
by u/ido_valve from discussion CSGO Source 2 predictions
in GlobalOffensive

While Ido didn’t shed any light on the actual release date of Source 2 for CSGO, judging by his words the release might be delayed. The delay can likely be due to the Valve employees working from home amid the lockdown, but still chances are that the delay wouldn’t be that significant.

Valorant might be brewing the destruction of CSGO by taking over its pros

Pranav Nalawade
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Valorant might be brewing the destruction of CSGO by taking over its pros

You have definitely heard about a new superhot first-person shooter in town. No, I don’t mean Call of Duty Warzone although that’s also blowing up in recent leagues. Instead, I’m talking about Valorant. This is the first title developed by Riot Games, that isn’t set in the League of Legends universe which makes it interesting. After playing many hours of the game – it’s clear that Valorant is a super-competitive game catering, perhaps to a small slice of the overall gaming community. Right now, it’s only for PC.

Photo via Anomaly

Most of the pro-gamers have often compared Valorant with the most popular FPS “CSGO” due to the similar objective the games share. Most of the gamers think that Valorant is the new version of CSGO, a CSGO killer, or a mixup of Counter-Strike and Overwatch.

Many CSGO pros are left with no other choice but to switch games to stay relevant in the pro scene. Freakazoid, after playing CSGO for 10 years, the champ finally decided to quit the game, to pursue his career in Valorant. He’s not the only one. The pros who couldn’t succeed in Counter-Strike are also leaving the CSGO scene. This might spell trouble right now for Counter-Strike. But this is going to affect the North American region badly.

CSGO Pros Making The Move

You know, we got guys like Freakazoid, ScreaM, Mixwell, Brax, and maybe even Dennis. Other pro players and already retired Counter-Strike pros tons of them are making the switch. They were fun to watch and I cheered for many of them. The critical point being that Valorant offers a range of gameplay functionalities and mechanism which CSGO may lacked, it’s not that they had no other choice. The rising game like Valorant, why would you not switch for the opportunity.

As the hype around Valorant is so strong, people are being signed before the game is even out of the closed beta. I don’t blame a single pro. It’s a very sad thing that a lot of the pro players you probably cheered for in CS are no more in CS. But, you can still cheer for them in a different esport. It’s also super sad to see a guy who was begging not to have to make the switch and now he’s having to make the switch because of the money. And the contracts, they just aren’t there for CS right now. Even pros from other popular games like Fortnite, PUBG, Overwatch, RainbowSix Siege and Overwatch have started switching to Valorant.

Photo: ESL

The 27-year-old CSGO veteran Ryan “Freakazoid“ Abadir, has announced that he has decided to quit CS:GO to pursue a career in Valorant. He has played with teams such as Cloud9, Echo Fox, and Ghost Gaming. Valorant took the esports industry by a storm. Valorant has overwhelmed Fortnite in viewership on Twitch, eventually urging CSGO pros to change the game.

Although, Freakazoid received a lot of backlash from his fans for shifting to Valorant, because some of his fans are not exactly happy with it. Eventually, he took to Twitter and said what he had to. According to Freakazoid “Professional players frequently change their teams. How is it any different for gamers to change a game?”

Photo: DreamHack

25-year-old Belgian player Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom, who is known for his one-taps in the CS:GO community has switched to Valorant. ScreaM has played for teams like G2 Esports, Team Envy, etc. ScreaM also said that it’s very satisfying to kill the enemies in Valorant. After playing many hours of the game, it’s clear that Valorant is a super-competitive game catering to perhaps a small slice of the overall gaming community.

ScreaM led Valorant team, Team Prodigy won the Fnatic Proving Grounds: Valorant Open tournament. The team showcased talents like Mixwell, Dafran, KingMezii, and Shaiiko.

Valve shut the door, Riot opened another

Did you know that Brax was the first officially signed Valorant Pro? T1 had officially signed him before the game even released. Brax was also a former Counter-Strike pro. I say former here because he’s banned for five-years by Valve for being involved in match fixing alongside his team mates. Not that he’s proud of it, but definitely isn’t of the opinion to exit from the esports or competitive community just yet. Despite the ban, he is still active in the CSGO community. Further, he is not only the first-ever banned CSGO player to join Valorant. But he is also the first-ever signed Valorie pro.

Photo: TODD GUTIERREZ // BTS

Brax is the first-ever pro who officially signed for Valorant. International League of Legends powerhouse T1 signed Braxton “swag” Pierce as the first member of its new Valorant roster.

Brax announced his retirement from competitive CSGO earlier this week, citing his inability to compete at the esport’s highest levels due to an ongoing ban from the game’s developer, Valve. The ban stems from a 2016 match-fixing incident when swag was still technically a teenager. Others involved in the incident have repeatedly called for Valve to lift the indefinite ban on swag, but those requests have fallen on deaf ears.

CSGO is content-less, streaming the game is BORING

Well, that’s not what I suggest, but some of the world renowned pros of the game. According to one of the most successful Danes, CSGO gets boring with time. Dev1ce’s opinion is further echoed by Mixwell, which is also a well known face of the game. Trust me, these are the guys who grind this game for hours every day and speak their minds freely. It might just fall to dumb-ears, but that’s not just the point here.

Photo: ESL

Many CS pros like Nicolai ‘dev1ce’ Reedtz and Óscar ‘Mixwell’ Cañellas came forward and agreed to Summit’s tweet.

They validated Summit by implying CS:GO isn’t a good game for content creators as it is currently over-saturated by tournaments. CS:GO has been on a steady decline of viewership despite the increase in the number of hours streamed.

ALSO READ: Valorant’s Edge Over CSGO

Conclusion

I believe that a lot of players also feel the same way after playing this game for a decent amount of hours. I honestly treat Valorant as over-hype just like Apex Legends. Although a lot of pros have moved to Valorant, I feel nothing will change for CS:GO. CS:GO didn’t care at all and people will just replace the biggest players with no problems. And I think that when the hype element of Valorant will die, which eventually will happen at some point. CS:GO can either make a very smart move by releasing Source 2 engine.

Epic Game Store Status reflects “Degraded Performance” with enormous GTA 5 traffic

Arundhati Dutta
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Epic Game Store Status reflects “Degraded Performance” with enormous GTA 5 traffic

Epic Games Store Public Status shows “degraded performance” as its status right now after the application crashed multiple times. This is a result of their promotional activity to offer GTA 5 free to keep forever on Epic Games application.

After several rumors, first coming from GamePressure.com, it was widely discussed that Epic Games’ new free game could be a big title, as big as Rockstar Games’ GTA 5.

The load on their servers also affected their flagship title Fortnite as well, and users reported issues in logging into the app. Epic Games did grab the attention of the gaming community with this unprecedented title freebie. However, it seems as of now that Epic Games didn’t anticipate gamers’ anticipation and didn’t prepare their servers well.

It is also imperative to note that the offer isn’t limited for a short time. Infact, it runs throughout the week. Which means even if you can’t access the servers right now, you don’t need to panic, as the offer stays for a week long.

The servers still seem to be doomed, on my desktop, I can still see a 504 Timed Out Error. Find How to Download GTA 5 For Free Here.

Epic Games Store Goes Down With GTA 5 Freebie

Md. Naseer Fuad Khan
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Epic Games Store Goes Down With GTA 5 Freebie

Epic Games Store has just crashed, multiple users reported to us. The game new Freebie which reportedly broke the application was GTA 5, which was in the rumor since the past 24 hours.

Epic Games’ twitter handle accidentally revealed the game, which deleted the post just after it got traction.

We ourselves investigated the error in the application and indeed, just after the home screen a ‘500 Error’ flashes with a ‘Back to Home’ button. One of the users also reported that their default language in the application also changed in error and he had to restart the app just to get it back. Another user reported a “504 Timed Out” error which generally happens when resources are overloaded.

UPDATE: Epic Games Store just confirmed this.

Epic Games Store have certainly garnered thousands of new users today on account of offering GTA 5 as as the freebie. Just at the time of writing this article, the store still shows a ‘500 Error.’ It is certainly due to heavy servers load.

Find How to Download GTA 5 For Free Here.

How To Download GTA 5 Free on Epic Games Store

Anuj Rautela
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How To Download GTA 5 Free on Epic Games Store

Due to on-going quarantine all across the globe, gaming services like Microsoft Xbox and Google Stadia have gained a significant spike in the number of their subscribers. From a while, Epic Games has also been giving away free games to be downloaded to their fans and players worldwide.

GTA V is still one of the most selling games indicating to the fact that people are still buying the game. Epic Games has finally decided to host a huge giveaway by making GTA V available for free to download from Epic Games Store. The game will be available on the store for a free download till 21 May. After that, the game will be available again but with the old price.

How to Download GTA V from Epic Games Store for Free

You’ll only be able to download GTA 5 from the Epic Games store for free until May 21st.

All you need is an Epic Games Store account. If you don’t have an account, you can create one free of cost.

Once you are registered, you will be asked to download the Epic Games launcher on your PC.

You need to download the same and log in to the Epic Games store.

Once GTA 5 goes live on the Epic Games Store, you can search for ‘GTA 5’ in the search bar and you will get the option to download the game through the launcher.

IEM Melbourne postponed to 2021

Maël Valentin
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IEM Melbourne postponed to 2021

IEM Melbourne, which was scheduled to take place later this year has now been postponed to August 2021, ESL has announced. The decision comes in with the accordance of most of the global networking events and conferences which got delayed or cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The new dates for IEM Melbourne are 21-22 August 2021, scheduled to take place at Rod Lever Arena. The attendees who had their tickets booked for the 2020 event will have automatic access to the new event in 2021. However, gamers who wish not to attend the event in 2021, can request for a refund from Ticketek within a month.

IEM Melbourne 2020 stands cancelled.

Previously, plenty of esports and gaming events had to face the brunt of the restrictions in place due to the global pandemic outbreak, ESL’s DotA 2 events were recently cancelled, alongside Valve cancelling their official The International for the 2020 edition.

More details about IEM Melbourne will be available at ESL’s event page.

CSGO: 5 Tips for Aiming like the Pros

Sonu Banerjee
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CSGO: 5 Tips for Aiming like the Pros

Good aiming is crucial for any first-person shooter, but in competitive games like CSGO proper aim can perhaps be the most important skill a player can have. No amount of external skillset can compensate for your inability to aim.

Sooner or later you’ll have to take your time to improve your aim if you’re looking to get better at the game.

Here are 5 CSGO aiming tips which guarantee improvements

Sensitivity

Finding the perfect sensitivity for you is non-optional in a game like CSGO. Even a 0.1 difference in sensitivity can be the difference in winning or losing a skirmish. You might be playing the game for 1000 hours without taking your time to consciously find your ideal sensitivity which will result in you getting stuck somewhere down the ladder of ranks.

Finding the right sensitivity for you is fairly simple, there are plenty of guides available online to do it, it only takes you about a few minutes and is almost always worth it. This video by TheWarOwl does a good job at explaining how to find both your normal sensitivity and your zoom sensitivity, which you have to fine tune if you’re an AWP user.

Practice

Found your dream sensitivity? Now time to try things out practically. Hop on to a custom server on a training map like training_aim_csgo 2 or aim_botz, both of which are popular maps and can be freely found on the workshop.

Set a goal for yourself, like having a 95% accuracy on the former and 100 kills per minute on bots for the latter. Now the tedious part – don’t stop till you achieve the goal you’ve set. It may take you hours at first, but it’ll be worth every minute spent in the long run. Think it’s hard? Here’s a video of a player doing the 100-kill challenge in 31 seconds.

Deathmatch

So you’ve set your sensitivity and completed your practice goal? Congrats, you get to the part where you get to pop some heads vs real players in a deathmatch. Why didn’t I put this in the practice section? Because unlike practice, this is actually fun.

Shooting moving opponents is an entirely different experience than shooting at innocent stationary bots. Join a deathmatch server, preferably a free-for-all community server. Focus simply on tapping heads of enemies you see. For the first ten minutes, don’t spray, even if the enemy is right in front of you. Focus entirely on the enemies’ heads and try to get one taps with the AK.

Essential CSGO guides:

For the next ten minutes, focus on spraying and only spraying. Try to perfect your recoil control in the ten minutes. Regardless of how far your enemy is, spray him down.

Now for the final ten minutes of your deathmatch, do a combination of tapping, bursting and spraying. Kill enemies just as you’d do in an actual competitive game. You’d be surprised at how much you’ve improved in the last few hours you devoted to the game.

Gear and Settings

Photo: CSGO Tips

Having good gear is essential if you want to get past a certain level in gaming. You have to invest in a good gaming mouse, a good mousepad to go along with it, and a good keyboard.

Try to look online for the gear of the pros if you feel lost. Most pros’ gears are very costly, but you can be sure that those gears will be the best you can get for your money.

Other than gear, make sure that your mouse settings in the game are all good. Most importantly, make sure your m_rawinput command in the console is set to 1 to disable the mouse acceleration which is generally unwanted. You can also take a look at the configs of pros to get an idea of their mouse settings.

Mindset

You’ve refined your mechanical skills and ensured that your gear is on point. Now the only thing left to conquer is your mind. 

Remember, not all aim duels can be won in CSGO, no matter how good you are. No matter how much your mind wants to take a second peek at mid against the enemy awper holding the angle, you should know that the odds won’t be in your favour. Know which duels to take, and always keep thinking a step ahead of your opponents.

Try to study the different maps to get a clear idea of the advantageous positions you can hold to get the upper hand in duels. That knowledge along with your precise aim will be enough to wipe enemies off their feet.

Have you become a decent marksman but still finding it tough to move up the ranks? Read our guide on five things you might be doing wrong in CSGO to get an idea on what’s pulling you back.

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