Valorant First Strike: Riot’s Rules

Valorant first strike rules — The first Riot-produced Valorant tournament (Image Credit: Riot Games)

Riot Games' aptly named Valorant tournament First Strike is fast approaching! Riot Head of Competitive Operations Alex Francios has already revealed some very important rules for would-be competitors of the first-ever Riot-produced Valorant esports tournament.

First Stike will be a multi-region Valorant tournament series put on by Riot Games and this blog post goes over the rules and policies of this upcoming Valorant tournament series. In order to play, you will have to follow some ground rules set out by Riot Games. This is the first version of competitive policies for Valorant tournaments meaning these rules could be changed or updated in the future.

If you wanna play, you're gonna need to know the rules.Here's what you need to know about the rules and policies coming to VALORANT esports. https://t.co/bna74m8lct
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) October 16, 2020

A detailed and comprehensive rulebook is available for download if you follow the link in the blog post recently made by Riot Games.

Here is the TLDRand important takeaways from First Strike’s tournament rules:

You must be 16 years or older to participate in any part of the First Stike Tournament and some regions may require you to be 18 years old if a cash prize is involved.

The 18 years old requirement, is less on Riot Games and more on the country’s laws.

Teams must lock in a roster of 5 Starting players and must make the information public.
Players cannot be added or dropped from this starting roster for the duration of the First Strike tournament.
At least 3 of the 5 roster members must be residents of the team’s region.
There are exceptions to change the roster if a player is not available and unable to play.
Each team may have one coach present and this coach can be active during Agent selection, Map Selection, Time-outs, Half-time, and between maps.

So no mid-game coaching unless there is a timeout. Yes, let's please avoid the CS:GO fiasco!

The official Match lobby will be set to “Tournament” mode with “Overtime: Win by Two” turned on.
The map pool consists of Bind, Haven, Split, Ascent, and an additional map to be added near the end of Episode 1: Ignition.

Maybe we will get to see Icebox at some point during First Strike?

Teams will ban and pick maps according to a step by step process before the map beings.

There is a detailed step by step process for picking a map, needless to say, it involves teams banning a map each and then the teams take turns picking which map to play on.

Both teams pick Agents at the same time and may pick whomever they want.

There are no banning agents like you might see in LoL where they ban champions before a match. Valorant simply has too small of an agent pool for that to happen.

These are the most relevant rules that you may be curious about. We look forward to the first Riot produced Valorant tournament and the bright future of competitive Valorant. Read more about the First Strike Tournament right here in our previous article.