VALORANT’s new favorite feature is great, but it has one small problem

For the VALORANT fan with a large collection supplemented by new bundle deals, opportune store listings, and Night Market deals, managing their active skins has always been a chore. But following the release of Patch 5.07, players can now mark a handful of in-game items as favorites, including skins for each weapon.

The feature is a welcome addition, one VALORANT has taken from games like Fortnite that have massive skin collections that have grown too large for the consistent player to be able to manage, even if that player only owns a fraction of the total items in the game. Players in VALORANT so often forget to swap skins between matches, and without the option to do so during the game, they have to wait until the end.

But as nice as the new feature is for players who want to show off all aspects of their collection, there’s one small but key issue: you cannot equip or favorite specific color variants of upgradeable skins. If you have a skin favorited with color variants, it randomly selects a color variant at the start of a match.

A part of my personal VALORANT collection that’s important to me is that the gun buddies match the skins. For the Phantom, I use the red variant of Recon because it matches with the Riot gun buddy (don’t ask me how I got it), but its other color variants don’t match. For the Vandal, I use the Boba buddy (pink) and there’s a handful of skins that can match that, but only in specific variants. That gun buddy only matches with the default Prelude to Chaos skin and clashes drastically with the other three color variants.

This is an exceptionally small problem, and I’m very aware of how elitist I sound by complaining that my Riot gun buddy doesn’t match the skins I bought. But it’s also a small problem that could be corrected with a very small fix, by letting people save which color variants are their favorite. And I can’t be the only one who cares about matching gun buddies to skins, right?