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People’s private names for Valorant map spots are delightfulSee you at Kitty Cat
See you at Kitty Cat
Valorantis great, when it isn’t making me sad. So goes myValorant review. Friends are a key component of Riot’s snazzy new wizard FPS, primarily because they won’t (usually) swear at you when you do something stupid. A nice side benefit, though, is that you wind up with your own private and superior ways of describing parts of the map. These are important, because you often need to very quickly communicate where an enemy is.
It’s the linguistic Wild West, and it delights me. Spawns become Oreos. Bombs get “defrosted”. I asked Twitter for a peek into the private nomenclature of other friendship groups, and I’m very glad I did.
I will lead with what other people have come up with, because honestly they’re far more inventive than us.
Jason Coles (editor ofThe Indie Game Website) told me that his friends “call one of the areas BBQ”, even though “it’s definitely not a BBQ”. He didn’t tell me where he meant and I spent a very enjoyable five minutes trying to figure out where on earth he was talking about. Or where on… Ascent?
It turned out he meant here, in the part officially marked B-main. I haven’t asked how this happened and that’s part of the appeal.
My favourite, though, came fromGames Radarguides editor Ford James. He told me that Lamps on Bind “is now sometimes called Kitty Cat because a friend sprayed over it with a cat spray and it kind of stuck”. He also told me it’s commonly called “U-Haul”, because… well, because some streamers from the early days ofValorantmisheard the developers say “new hall”, ifthis Reddit postis to be believed.
Relatedly, and very nearly as good, Henry Stenhouse told me that for his group, “anywhere we don’t know on any map is called Graffiti because of one time we played a randomCS:GOmap that had graffiti on five different places, confusing us all”.
Some of those make sense. Loads of bomb sites offer an elevated position where people often snipe from, and those tend to universally be called heaven (or just “high”). That’s good. That’s snappy, and generalisable. Everyone will immediately know where you’re talking about.
That’s not true of Hookah on Bind, which only sort of makes sense, despite that being more common than the official “Window”. It’s all because players came up with their own agreed on names before Riot came up with official ones.
I’m not denying that the spot does look a bit like a hookah bar, but I still had to ask. And while I do find this sort of thing delightful for the most part, there is also a degree to which it is exclusionary. It’s an opportunity for the many arseholes of Valorant to pour scorn over newer players, which they are all too eager to take.
But screw them. Play with pals if poss.
Ascent Attacker Side Spawn IS clearly Oreo, when you think about it.
