How Collegiate Valorant Is On The Rise
“I feel like there’s a decent amount of money in Valorant right now, I think just not enough people know about them. There’s actually a lot of tournaments and leagues that like have decent payouts. I’m sure if more people knew, more people would be switching from Overwatch or CS:GO. I think once more people switch over, the level of competition will just naturally go up. Some of these tournaments just need to market better.”
Level Up is a series of interviews with esports professionals, coaches, and individuals playing their part in innovating the competitive gaming scene. Follow their story and advice as we shed light on their journey.
Valorant was released on June 2, 2020, by Riot Games and was met with an immediate success. This rapid success, along with the pedigree of Riot Games has led to a growing Esports scene within the game. All in hopes that Valorant will become the next big Esport: many players from Counter-Strike Global Offensive (CS:GO), Overwatch, and even Fortnite have flocked to the game to try and create their own success story. However, it’s not only players flocking to the game. Esports teams, outside organizations, and universities have been attempting to put their foot in the door to find success.
At the top of universities in the scene is UC Irvine’s Valorant club team. They’ve not only recently won the IVCi x UCEA Valorant tournament and took home $5,000, but also came second at Andbox’s Valorant Spring Rally under the name “Judge Judies.” Their accomplishments have happened as a club team without receiving support from anyone outside the team. Ronald “Renanthera” Ry, the Head Coach of UCI Esports, has stated they’re waiting for an official collegiate league supported by Riot before UCI Esports is willing to look into offering scholarships and other benefits to a Valorant roster.
The team at Insights had a chance to talk to Victor “GoZiggOrGoHome” Lin, the Manager for UC Irvine’s Valorant team, to look at the start of the UC Irvine’s Valorant team, what the collegiate Valorant scene looks like today, and what he thinks needs to be done to ensure collegiate Valorant is successful going forward.
Q: How did you get into managing Valorant?
Valorant came out around the time when I was still a student in the spring. So, I was playing Valorant a lot. I looked into collegiate tournaments to see if they had any for the spring, but I saw that they had some for the summer. So I wanted to see if recent grads could play, and for most of the tournaments in the beginning half of summer, all the recent grads could play. I just played that for fun. And at some point, the tournaments started requiring the same school, and the three of us already were from UCI, so I wanted to look for two more. That’s when I reached out to UCI Esports.
They weren’t doing anything at the time. So essentially, what we decided on was, I would just help construct a team of five and hopefully build a core for the school year. And if we did, maybe we would look into something relating to scholarships, but that didn’t end up working out. So, I’m just here helping the team out by being their manager as a volunteer. I do enjoy it, though. I play a lot with the guys on the side, and it’s fun. That’s kind of how I ended up in this situation.
Q: How was UC Irvine’s Valorant team started?
Initially, we were playing collegiate tournaments as a group of friends. We were called “Judge Judies” at the time. Three of us were from UCI, and two of us were in grad school. And like I said, some tournaments needed all five from the same school. After I started to see those types of tournaments become more common, I realized we needed to put together a reliable team of five. So, I decided to step down because I wanted a solid five before the school year to compete in the upcoming tournaments.
That’s why I reached out to UCI Esports. I told them, “Hey, I have three players, and we’ve been doing well in these collegiate tournaments. I want to see if you have any players and see if we could all play together in some tournaments this fall.” UCI ended up canceling their tryouts for Valorant, and so I asked for the list they had. From that list, I was able to hold tryouts for UC Irvine around mid-September. That’s how I found Nibbler and Plat1num. They were both ranked highly in the closed beta. Platinum was immortal three, and Nibbler was Valorant (the highest rank in the closed beta). That kind of solidified our final roster going forward which was: Nibbler, Ferg, Nacho, Plat1num, and June.
I was just trying to build a resume for the UCI team by doing what I could to help them win tournaments. So that next year’s team might be able to get scholarships or something similar even if I don’t. I didn’t care about really getting anything. I just wanted to see everyone else do well.
Q: Why is UCI Esports not fielding a varsity Valorant team?
UCI Esports is pretty reasonable at explaining why they can’t give us support yet. Especially right now, the budget is at an all-time low due to the arena being closed and COVID-19. We’re all waiting for Riot to announce a league just as they have done for collegiate leagues for League of Legends. This will entice UCI in fielding a scholarship team for Valorant. Not just for the money, but also for the extra publicity an official league would bring. Riot hasn’t announced any collegiate leagues for Valorant yet, so right now, we’re just at a standstill.
I tried to explain that to my players, and they were a little upset at first. But, I told them, “Listen, a lot of big tournaments are coming up. Do you guys want to practice a lot, because we’re just a club team? If not, you guys should practice and play the game a lot because you enjoy the game. You guys are probably one of the best teams right now, and you will make a lot of money just from these tournaments. If Riot does announce a league next year, you guys are for sure going to get support because of all the results.” I like to make them think there’s something in the future. At the same time, though, I didn’t want to bring false expectation because you never know, they might not announce anything. At the very bare minimum, they’ll be winning a lot of tournaments or placing high and getting a decent amount of money.
Q: As a club team, how much time is invested in the team from players and staff?
We don’t do any VOD reviews for the most part outside of tournaments, and the amount of practices is pretty low right now. Initially, I was going to coach the team too, but I like the way Nibbler does it because he is also an IGL (in-game leader), so he’s really patient and has a lot of time. He brings people into custom games to show them the basic defaults he wants to do. The defaults are explained as: you flash this, and you smoke this at this timing. He works with the players a lot. He’s like their IGL and their coach. At most, I would talk to him and give him some suggestions that they should try. We don’t like to really go out of our way a lot to do anything too specific. In the beginning, they practiced a lot because they had the UCEA tournament coming up, and they hadn’t played much together. They know how to do their own boot camp. Or they just practiced against a lot of teams, and now they’re pretty comfortable together. So, they don’t practice as much because there’s not much going on.
Q: What resources are you guys currently given as a club team from your university and people outside of it?
Currently, we’re not allowed to play under UCI Esports at all. And we can’t use their logo either. At most, we get some degree of social recognition and support from the university. As for the club, we don’t get much from them either. But some tournaments require player verification. Recently, we had to sign up for a tournament that required this, so we needed a school administrator and a school coordinator to sign off on logo waiver forms and player verification forms. They have helped us in that sense, where they helped verify our players for us to be eligible to play. They help show that they’re enrolled and have good enough grades. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. No actual monetary or peripheral support. It bothered me a little at first, but I learned to accept it pretty quickly because there are reasonable explanations as to why we can’t get support.
Q: What is the quality of tournaments and or leagues inside the collegiate Valorant scene?
Other schools tend to favour the weekend tournaments where there’s a group stage or a double-elimination bracket. They just duke it out on Saturday and Sunday for like $3,000. Anything above $1,000 people are relatively down to play and compete for. So I’d say prize pool wise, things have been pretty generous in my opinion, considering there are not many announcements. I think these tournament organizers are doing a good job getting sponsors. Valorant is a pretty big game now, so many people want to get their foot in. In terms of production, there is one big problem right now. I think there are decent casters, but the one problem is not having enough spectators. Because even in pro games, spectators aren’t that good, and they miss many things. All these tournaments should figure out how to do a better job of getting better spectators or even training spectators. Not sure how easy that is, and I’m not sure if that’s their fault. Overall, I’d consider the quality to be relatively high.
Q: What kind of support is being given to the scene from Riot, universities, and tournament organizers? Do you think it’s enough?
I’m not sure how many schools give scholarships, but I think Valorant would be a pretty big game. So, it’s good to provide scholarships. It’s also more audience-friendly than, like, CS:GO. Because I know for many schools, the problem is they see terrorists and counter-terrorists. That’s a loaded topic. Valorant is a lot better in that sense. It’s also visually more appealing. I believe it’ll become more spectator friendly. But as far as support from Riot, honestly, I think the biggest thing is once they announce something, a lot more universities, like UCI, would be willing to jump in and support players. But at the moment, I don’t think it’s enough. I think many of these big prize money tournaments and their sponsors are just trying to get their foot in before Riot announces something. But, if they ultimately don’t announce something or don’t announce something soon enough, then I think the money might just run dry.
Q: How would you like to see the Valorant collegiate scene change to ensure it’s successful as it grows?
Honestly, Team Liquid did something cool. A while back, we played in this thing called West Coast War. It’s like 64 teams, and the winner gets to compete in a Team Liquid tournament with other amateur or pro teams. Stuff like that, where these organizations give a chance to compete for a bigger prize. We’re just getting to play against better competition; I think that might help the collegiate scene a lot. There’s not a lot of good teams, even including us. I don’t think we’re that good, either. Once the level of competition gets better, I would like to see more organizations get involved.
Also, I feel like there’s a decent amount of money in Valorant right now. I just think there’s not enough people that know about them. There’s actually a lot of tournaments and leagues that have decent payouts. I’m sure if more people knew, more people would be switching from Overwatch or CS:GO. Once more people switch over, the level of competition will just naturally go up. Some of these tournaments just need to market better. I’m sure they can get a lot more viewers too on their streams. These collegiate tournaments right now probably average 50 to 100 viewers, but some of them actually have really good production value. They could definitely be getting like 200 or 300. I’m not sure if it’s a marketing thing, or people just aren’t interested. The word just needs to get out there more.
To learn more about Victor “GoZiggOrGoHome” Lin and the great players on the UC Irvine Valorant team, be sure to follow GoZiggOrGoHome on Twitter.
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