While the release of new weapon skins would not normally be interesting, Valorant's returning Reaver line has a bit of a backstory. Basically the Reaver set is an internal prototype of all Valorant gun skins, released during the game's closed beta to show players that the game's cosmetics would be more elaborate than the new textures.Reavers are custom reload animations, custom melee attack, and had a "finish" animation for the last kill of the round.

When the game launched, it launched without the Reavers set (or any other set). Well, good news for fans of flashy purple weapons: later today a redesigned skin set will return to Valorant.

Riot offered a Q&A with the announcement, in which Sean Marino, the game's art lead, talks about one of the more interesting issues for a modern development of this scale: data miners. Future Valorant content like skins and agents have always been leaked ahead of Riot's plans, and the Reaver set was no exception.

"As we continued to work on the skins over the last few months, we accidentally leaked file names into the build, which the data miners kept picking up," Marino says. "Similarly, the Store team used Reever as a placeholder image for thumbnails, which had the unintended effect of sometimes 'popping up' in the menu."

So Riot decided to take advantage of this by intentionally leaving a trail of breadcrumbs: the only problem was that people who were good at finding things they weren't supposed to ... . is that they didn't trace it.

"Inspired by Datamin's frequent leaks, we attempted a teaser campaign to announce the return of the leavers by intentionally leaking spooky file names in the 1.09 and 1.10 patches," says Marino. Because none of the data miners were aware of the intentional leaks."