As you may have heard, Riot Games announced access for developers to Valorant’s API. This is really great news but… if you hear it for the first time, then you got on the right page. In the article below we are going to answer for the next questions: When will R.G. provide access? What API is? What does that mean? And why developers want it so bad?
Let’s get started.
What API is?
API (Application Programming Interface) – is the way one computer program can communicate with another one. If that definition looks way too complicated for you, here is another one. This access will permit different sites and programs to see and show your statistic (kills, deaths, assists, etc) – it is an example for Valorant. Many e-sport teams’ leaders and organizations are watching tops of players by their stats often, so it is a chance for talented gamers to get an invitation for the tournaments, special events, or even in an e-sport team. Yes, it rarely happens, but it does happen. So pretty soon you also will be able to see your Valorant stats at 3rd party websites. This will be possible after the Riot releases public API for developers.
(the list of stats you can see below).
Which Valorant stats we are talking about?
We are talking exactly about:
- Kills
- Deaths
- Assists
- Rank
- Level
- The number of victories (and percentage)
- The number of failures (and percentage)
- Percentage of your firing into the head, body, arms or legs
- Percentage of which agents are you picking
- Winrate
- Headshots
- Maps, you are playing on
- Which skills are you using the most
- Which skills you never use
- BattlePass progress
- Contracts’ progress
- How much time you spent in Valorant
Why is that information so important?
As we already said, it will help you to get popular. Valorant, just like many multiplayer games, has special events, tournaments, broadcasts on Twitch, YouTube, international championships, etc. We all know that only e-sport teams can join them and you certainly saw/heard messages like “*Name of the team* invited a new player with *nickname* to join them for the next tournament” or anything familiar. But how they understand who is worthy? API is the answer. When companies open access to API of their games, many organizations, teams, companies starting checking it and looking for best of the best, to offer them a perfect opportunity, job, and maybe even glory.
Next reason – you can see your stats. Some resources offer a possibility to connect your game account. After that, they import your API information and show it to you in an easy-to-understand way (using beautiful design instead of code lines). Not all the players care about such detailed information, but some do. Moreover, it is just an interesting statistic that may help you to become a better player.
BattlePass awards using the same technology to check what you have done during the battle and fill the progress line, which after reaching 100% will grant you with a new contract level (for the agent you picked), which in turn will give you cards, new graffiti, skins for weapons, trinkets, etc.
Also, this technology analyzes how do you play, comparing it to the previous rounds and matches, to figure out the answer to the question “Does somebody have cheats on?” If so, it sends the request to the ValorantAntiCheat program.
API has been used for many more different cool things, but they are not as important for us (as players), as they are for developers and Riot Games itself.
When will R.G. open the access?
Representatives of Riot Games had said they were going to open the access in two weeks after the official release of Valorant (it released on 02 June 2020), but as we can see they are having some problems with it. They opened the possibility for everybody interested in developing to sign up. A few days ago, the Valorant team’s representative said: “We need a few weeks more for that, I guess. But we have a lot of work to do, so we cannot name the exact date”.
The main idea from those words – developers want to open access, and they are working on it right now. They just need a little more time, which is normal. While we all are waiting, there is enough time for playing some matches in Valorant.
