While cosmetics don't directly impact gameplay, they can influence the way certain people play, like the Valorant Champions bundles.
Just like last year's Vandal, the Phantom skin that's part of the Valorant Champions 2022 bundle rewards getting frags above all. For every five kills, you'll weapon will evolve, reaching a total of 25 frags in a match will let you see the most stylish version of the Phantom.
If you also bought the knife, you can see a special animation of you're top fragging with over 25 kills, not an easy feat to accomplish by all means and could potentially lead to certain players taking a different approach that could be hurtful to the team overall just to net some frags.
As a result, players have taken to social media and even the official Valorant subreddit to criticize Riot's approach with these skins, stating that they should've rewarded team play over individual skill.
In a thread that's garnering hundreds of upvotes, user PseudoHuman92 wondered why, if Valorant was a team-based game, the skins looked to reward individual and sometimes selfish play.
Isn't this a team game? They could easily incentivize and support winning as a team but instead, they chose to support top fragging. Apart from not every role being designed to top frag, it also enables people to chase for kills instead of playing for winning the round. I don't think they will change it but I wish they would.
The debate has seen people on both sides of the fence, with some agreeing with the point stated by the original poster, while others explaining that the whole point of such a skin is how exclusive and how hard it is to trigger the effects.
MrSquidJd, a fellow Reddit member, replied:
I understand your point in that most roles will fail to get the aura due to being more defensive/not kill heavy - which the red crystal aura thing now partially helps with as you don’t need to necessarily top frag (but it isn’t a perfect solution as you still need kills. Perhaps something based on hero role could be added to show usefulness to the team instead? I dunno.
Have you had issues running into a greedy player looking to nab kills for themselves by lurking rather than helping the team enter site? We hope not, so you can enjoy all the cosmetics coming with Episode 5 Act 2.
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