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Can a seemingly useful app be harmful to your overall player experience? Read on to see why some players are worried that this rising trend of tracker apps is harmful to Valorant.
The tried and true formula for online first-person shooters, where you and your squad battle it out against the enemy team, is always popular with the fans, and Valorant is no different. However, a competitive environment tends to create a certain type of community, where your score and rank are the most important factors. Tracker apps, used to track your stats and score in more detail, can be the reason some players feel down and inadequate while playing Valorant.
How Can Tracker Apps Ruin Your Valorant Experience
Usually, tracker apps are beneficial to your gaming “carrier”. Having the ability to track your Valorant score and statistics can give you helpful insights into how well are you performing each game, and give you a general idea of where can you improve. But, there is an unintended dark side to all of this.
Focusing only on your (or a teammate’s score) can make you lose sight of the big picture, as mentioned in one Reddit post. Obsessing over the K/D ratio or the win rate can lead players into a negative mindset that everything in the game is about the numbers. Moreover, this can lead to a “blame game”, where people blame each other’s score, usually after a lost match. Redditor AG_Matt said: “It’s a psych-out tool. People definitely have this feeling that they need to keep their stats just right when they use those trackers, OR use the enemy rank and KD as an excuse for why they did poorly in a match.”
To make matters worse, when playing with strangers, some may quickly check out your stats and then draw a conclusion about your performance based on your win rate or some other stat. As the OP said: “I have also had people admit they will dodge people if they don’t have a 50% win rate in their recent games…”
Are Tracker Apps in Valorant Really to Blame?
Well, both yes and no. Yes, because checking those apps offers you no real in-game benefit, and a recent score is not representative of someone’s skill. As Individual-Fan-5672 stated: “What advantage does it give you? It doesn’t. You’re all the same elo with the same potential. I’ve seen a 1-16 cypher ace to win a tied game and I’ve seen a 32-4 Jett whiff an entire mag. “
On the other hand, the tracker itself is not to blame. The issue lies with the people obsessing over scores and not focusing on playing the best they can. One Redditor puts it nicely: ”People are the problem. It’s not the game developers job to fix people. Don’t take away something nice like stats from the players and limit us because horrible people will still be horrible people.”
It is great to check your stats from time to time, but players shouldn’t use it as the only representative of your skill. People can have bad days, be put in a badly organized squad, or on the flip side, be put in a high-skill squad where every match is a breeze. Your score is the combination of all those factors, but your score does not represent how good and useful a teammate you are.
For more on Valorant, check out How to Fix Match History Not updating, Valorant: Best Controller Agents Tier List, and How to Play Clove in Valorant.