Keeping up with Killjoy: Weekly Valorant recap

This week, Valorant headlines were dominated by the VCT Stage 3 Challengers 1 tournament in both EU and NA.

We'll give you a brief recap of both along with the patch that went live, focusing on fixing some key issues with the game.

EU might be the most competitive region in all of Valorant, with several teams battling for supremacy.

FNATIC, who seemed like the best team in EU during their Masters 2 run, was knocked-out relatively early in the tournament.

Team Liquid, the other Masters representative from EU, fell to FPX in the same round as FNATIC.

Acend ended up winning the tournament without losing a match, facing G2 in the finals.

The final four of Acend, G2, Guild, and FPX have booked their ticket to the EMEA playoff for Masters 3.

NA was a different story. Any NA Valorant fan could've predicted the top four teams and the winner.

Sentinels ran the table yet again, but suffered a loss to XSET in the Upper Bracket Semifinals. They unsurprisingly worked their way through the Lower Bracket and avenged their loss in the Grand Finals.

100 Thieves, XSET, Sentinels, and Team Envy have now qualified for the NA playoffs but Sentinels remain the team to beat.

#1 PLAYOFFS SEED.

It's coming home! pic.twitter.com/6qplLUoLcv

— Sentinels (@Sentinels) July 11, 2021

We got a patch this week, but it didn't bring any balance changes to the game.

This was probably because of the ongoing VCT, which would be affected by any buffs or nerfs Riot brought to Valorant.

Instead, we saw some agent bug fixes, social bug fixes, and a fix to the account leveling system that was introduced at the start of Act 3. You can take a look at the full list of patch notes here.

We could see some balance changes ahead of Challengers 2, but that might not be until next week.