PAX Arena VALORANT Invitational

The PAX Arena VALORANT Invitational was the second Riot Games Ignition Series event for North America. It featured 20 teams (16 of the best competitive teams and 4 influencer squads) competing for a $25,000 prize pool. Starting with round-robin groups, the tournament concluded with an 8-team, single-elimination playoffs bracket. Sentinels prevailed as the champions, but there were several teams who impressed throughout the event.

The event garnered attention and widespread praise for its production quality and exciting matches. With a peak viewership of 80,000 (which held the top viewership spot on Twitch at that time), it was one of, if not the, most-watched VALORANT events up to that point!

You can catch some of the highlights of the event here!

As the head admin, my responsibilities included:
- Authoring the gameplay ruleset
- Staffing a team of admins
- Creating handbooks for players & admins
- Communicating all updates to team managers
- Resolving all match-related issues (connection, rule questions, etc.)
- Coordinating matches for broadcast with the producer and observers

Some of the challenges I enjoyed facing in this role:
- Managing a team of five admins to host eight concurrent matches during group stage
- Developing a map pick/ban process for a best-of-five finals with only four maps available (pioneering ground for pro scene)
- Streamlining data collection processes pre-match so that broadcast could highlight map pick/ban and agent selections for each game

Please use Luke Thompson as a reference for my work on this project!


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