In Valorant, you can now purchase the Reaver weapons. They were already discovered during the beta through datamining and have since been eagerly awaited. However, the developers at Riot Games are disappointed with the dataminers. They should have recognized the emergence.
What happened? The Reaver set served as a prototype for all Valorant weapons and was found by dataminers during the closed beta. They featured special reload and melee animations and had their own finishing move for the last kill of a round.
Many players were looking forward to the launch of these weapons, which were not released for months. However, since November 3, they are finally in the game.
What is so curious? In time for the release, the developers at Riot Games shared the story behind the weapons.
They also revealed that they felt sympathy for the fans who had been eagerly waiting for the Reaver weapons. Therefore, they hid hints about the release of the set and hoped that the dataminers would enjoy the cool find and spread it.
But unfortunately, they did not understand the signs at all.
“We laughed ourselves to death over the irony”
What did the developers say exactly? In a Q&A about the weapons, Sean Marino, the Art Lead of Valorant, discussed the background of the weapons. It first concerned the story with the datamining in the beta:
As we continued working on the skin in the months leading up to release, we accidentally leaked file names in the build that were repeatedly picked up by dataminers.
The store team also used the Reaver weapons as placeholders for thumbnails, which had the unintended effect of haunting the menus from time to time, so we saw countless posts [and] felt bad because all of this only fueled rumors like ‘Reaver is the next skin line.’ Even though the Reaver weapons were still months away from release.
However, the developers wanted to utilize the datamining to hype up the weapons later:
The frequent datamining leaks inspired us to create a teaser campaign, where we intentionally included some eerie file names in patches 1.09 and 1.10 to announce the return of the weapons.
The dataminers could have had the chance to announce the Reaver weapons in advance and bring their find from the beta back into the spotlight. But they did not see the hints:
We laughed ourselves to death over the irony […], because none of the dataminers noticed the intentional leaks, causing our big-brain teaser to fail.
However, Marino did not reveal exactly what hints there were.
Valorant is one of the most successful free-to-play shooters and enjoys great popularity. This was also due to the Twitch campaign that Riot Games utilized. But Valorant is not alone in this, as this list shows:
