This is a thread of things I noticed (and some things others warned me about) after spending 14 hours producing @PlayVALORANT yesterday. Hopefully this will help others producing similar content or possibly result in some fixes from the developers. While the game is smooth

The spectator UI is anything but. First and foremost, it seems that only the defending side's HP is displayed during a match. This is the same case for the economy. During a buy, you won't see the attacking side's buy or money update live. If you open and close the scoreboard.

You'll eventually see all the guns in place but you can't see how much money is leftover, where as the defense's buy and economy updates as it happens. Makes understanding where a teams money is at very difficult for the casting side of things.

Not being able to see armor or abilities on the scoreboard is a bit frustrating. It would be nice to know who is buying armor and what abilities without having to switch to each individual agent. Armor could easily be added to the deadspace next to the player portrait.

Looking at the scoreboard further, you never see the defense rounds add up. They will always be 0. All of the rounds show as attacking color despite what side they are on but only the rounds won by the attacking side will be counted on the scoreboard.

Id also love to see some sort of breakdown on the scoreboard that gives more information on each round. To be fair, this is not something that games like CS:GO had at first either but I've come to really appreciate it. Knowing how many died or lived is great info for broadcast

Another strange UI feature is in the lower right hand corner of the screen. The chat box is up constantly with an error stating it could not be connected. Its possible this can be hidden and I'm just too dumb to realize it but I couldn't find anything in the options to stop it.

There is also very little room to add team names or scores to the overlay. With no room above and the room below being used for HP that doesn't update live, you're forced with sending information down into game play or off the edges over the map. I'd imagine this will be changed

The player portrait that displays on the left hand side feels very awkward. Its too small to display any important information but too big to blend into the UI. Would love to see them change the position on this and add K/D/A or some stats to it similar to other FPS titles.

On the spec side, the lack of x-ray is frustrating as it makes it hard to understand what is happening. When you don't have live updating HP on the attackers, its hard to know if the defenders wallbang spray is hitting or not without jumping to the perspective of the attacker.

The minimap is also far from ideal. Because the game uses player icons on the radar, you have to consciously remember which character pertains to which button, unlike say CS:GO where the radar is number based. I'd love to see them implement a number here in addition to portraits

Now onto the biggest issue.... the observing is incredibly difficult due to some poor decisions with UI and what I can only hope is a bug. When players die in the game, the UI shifts the remaining living player portraits towards the center. So if player 5 dies, everyone slides in

The issue, is that the binds remain the same. So as you can see between the last screenshot and this one, DEF sage has shifted from position 1 to position 3, but the bind to observe is still the 1 key. On the other side, ATK Omen went from 9 to 7 and ATK Sage from 0 to 8.

This is difficult to manage but then all hell breaks loose when the teams swap at half. At this point, the numbers are completely randomized from 1-5, regardless of position on the UI. Position 1 could be 5, 2 could be 3, 3 could 2, 4 could be 4.... You have no way of knowing

Without just cycling through players to figure it out. Because the slide towards the center still occurs, its a brain juggle to remember who is who at this time. I highly recommend anyone observing Valorant use a streamdeck to observe. Set key binds for 0-9 with icons for 0-9

When the teams juggle at half, rapidly cycle through the players and do your best effort to update the streamdeck profile because you won't have long. Realistically, you should write it down on a notepad so you can change it during the first few rounds of freezetime.

If you hit the bind for a character you're currently observing (which given the number juggle is entirely possible) it will still do the camera switch animation which can be really distracting. I'd love to see this animation removed but its mostly stylistic so I get it.

There are a few more weird bugs that are hard to track down. Omen's dark cover ability will occasionally cast a purple oval under the crosshair of a player you spectate after its casted. Couldn't seem to recreate it regularly but it happened occasionally.

I also noticed at random points, the camera would switch on its own with no input from me. This seemed to happen most when there were 2 Phoenix's in play and occurred frequently in 1 series covered yesterday (3-4 times, enough to notice it wasn't me hamfisting a button)

The last thing I remember (my memory is a bit foggy after 14 hours of broadcast and fixing our furnace at 5am because it broke while I was live) occasionally a players crosshair would disappear. Seemed to happen a few times but would reappear without interaction.

All in all, its not the WORST spectating experience but there is definitely a lot that can be improved. I understand that this is a beta and the spec UI was likely low on the priority list coming into it but I'm hopeful the devs can make some tweaks to smooth out the process.