AWS and Riot Games Announce the Winner of the VALORANT Champions Tour Hackathon: Esports Manager Challenge

LAS VEGAS-December 3, 2024-At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.comcompany, and Riot Games are announcing the winning teams for the VALORANT Champions Tour (VCT) Hackathon: Esports Manager Challenge. Over 3,200 individuals used AWS's generative AI services and Riot Games' rich esports data to develop solutions that can help esports recruiters scout VCT talent and create game-winning strategies.

Ashwin Raghuraman, senior solutions architect at AWS and one of the 12 AWS and Riot Games judges, conceptualized the challenge to inspire innovative solutions in esports using Amazon Bedrock. "We were particularly impressed by projects that showcased end-to-end user experiences with well-justified reasoning and accurate data recall," Ashwin said. "Standout entries included sophisticated team composition recommenders that factor in map-specific strategies and agent synergies in VALORANT. These projects not only demonstrated deep technical proficiency with tools like Amazon Bedrock but also a deep understanding of the game's meta and strategic nuances."

The winning teams below will split a prize pool worth $61,000-including cash prizes, AWS promotional credits, meetings with AWS and Riot technical leads, and tickets to the 2025 Champions Tour. Details about the winning submissions and bonus prizes will be announced on the AWS OnAir: Sports podcastat AWS re:Invent 2024.

• First place -VCT Team Builderby Adrian Tan and Christina Chin
• Second place - VCT Scoutby Aravind Dasarathy, Dhruv Kamalesh Kumar, Rudra Sett, and Akshay Gunjur Surya Prakash
• Third place - VCT Manager Assistantby Colin Hwang and Cameron Toy
• Honorable Mention - Alm Assistby Akmar Chowdhury, Joe Hoang and Osmond Jian
• Honorable Mention - Beat Buddyby Akshat Namdeo
• Honorable Mention - Biot by Lim Bing Feng and Calvin Koay
• Best Mixed-Gender Team Submission - TactiXpertby Kushagra Dixit
• Best Cross-Regional Team Submission - VCT Scoutby Aravind Dasarathy, Dhruv Kamalesh Kumar, Rudra Sett, and Akshay Gunjur Surya Prakash
• Best Rising Star Selection - VCT Manager Assistantby Colin Hwang and Cameron Toy

Developing the VCT Team Builder
Adrian Tan, data scientist, and Christina Chin, UX/UI and solution designer, met as colleagues in data and AI consulting in Sydney, Australia, and maintained their friendship through VALORANT. The two combined their love for data and the game on this challenge, with Adrian crafting technical solutions for Christina's data visualization and UX/UI design ideas.

Their winning entry uses machine learning and LLMs via Amazon Bedrock on AWS to propose optimal teams, generate role assignments, evaluate player contributions, and suggest strategies based on player attributes and statistics. The tool also offers team customization and performs deep-dive analyses on each player's attributes and statistics, including agent-specific team aggression ratings, player performance and map positional analytics. The team's VALORANT knowledge helped build specific features such as a Team Builder Score, which uses machine learning to weight statistics for each role.

Using the Amazon Bedrock Converse capability, Adrian and Christina built an LLM-driven agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application that retrieved Riot's and other third party data, and provided high quality responses. The judges selected this tool as the winner for its clean UI and workflow, detailed analyses, statistics, breakdowns of players, deep dive into agent capabilities based on maps and recommended strategies, and fast response generation.

Future hackathon opportunities
For future participants, Doug Stevenson, director of software engineering for esports tech at Riot Games, emphasizes the need to approach submissions with a player-first mentality. "When participants invest time to appreciate and support the nuances of players everywhere, it clearly shows in their work," Doug said. "Not only do these submissions win, but the key learnings and takeaways help Riot make sure players win, too."

This year's challenge follows last year's League of Legends Esports Global Power Rankings Hackathon. For more information on building the next generative AI tool for esports, be on the lookout for more exciting AWS and Riot Games hackathon opportunities in 2025.

About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers-including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies-trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth's Best Employer, and Earth's Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Riot Games
Riot Games was founded in 2006 to develop, publish, and support the most player-focused games in the world. In 2009, Riot released its debut title, League of Legends, which has gone on to be one of the most-played PC games in the world. In the years that followed, Riot released VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics,Legends of Runeterra, andLeague of Legends: Wild Rift. Riot's titles have led to the creation of some of the most-watched and widely recognized esports in the world, culminating in events like the League of Legends World Championshipand VALORANT Champions Tour (VCT), which are watched by millions of fans each year. Riot has also expanded its IP through multimedia projects across music, comic books, board games, and Arcane, its Emmy-winning animated series.

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