AWS and Riot Games name winner of Valorant Champions Tour Hackathon

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Riot Games revealed at its AWS re:Invent conference the winners of this year’s Valorant Champions Tour Hackathon. This year, the hackathon was the Esports Manager Challenge, where participants use AWS’s generative AI and Riot’s extensive suite of esports data to build tools for esports managers to scout talent and build new strategies. According to AWS, 3,200 people participated in the challenge, with the winning teams splitting a prize pool worth $61,000.

The winners were Adrian Tan and Christina Chen, with their VCT Team Builder application. This tool uses a digital assistant with a chat interface that offers, among other things, customizable team suggestions based on player attributes and stats. The tool uses LLMs and machine learning via Amazon Bedrock to create its suggestions based on available data about players and teams, and includes “agent-specific team aggression ratings, player performance and map positional analytics.”

Ashwin Raghuraman, AWS senior solutions architect and one of the 12 judges of the hackathon, spoke to GamesBeat in an interview about the winning tool: “Basically they were building an application which is hosted on AWS and the large language models are using Bedrock to train so that as a prospective team manager, user of the application, you could basically just have a chat interface where you can interact with the model and ask these prompts.”

Raghuraman said it wasn’t just the interface or the use of generative AI that gave the winning submission the edge: “But then also we wanted them to integrate some follow up prompts and create justification. One of the things we were judging is understanding the justifications for how the model is pulling the data. That is actually a big part of the hackathon, is getting the data in a format that it is easily accessible for both retrieval by the model, but also understandable by the human who is reading that retrieval of the data.”

According to AWS, VCT Team Builder won the hackathon 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.” As the creators say on the VCT Team Builder Devpost page: “We are proud of the way our team worked together to brainstorm ideas, solutions and workarounds for the challenges we faced. We believe we stretched the goals to develop a high performing application that is designed with the end-user’s needs in mind.”

Raghuraman added that Tan and Chin made several decisions that gave their submission an edge over other candidates: “They made a lot of very smart decisions on how to use different large language models for different purposes… That was, like, one of the main things that stood out for the AWS side, and on the Riot side, the data visualization was really good. They were able to bring in their game knowledge, but also did a really good job of using all of the different data sources that we provided.”

Doug Stevenson, Riot’s director of software engineering for esports tech, offered some advice for future hackathon participants in a statement: “When participants invest time to appreciate and support the nuances of players everywhere, it clearly shows in their work. Not only do these submissions win, but the key learnings and takeaways help Riot make sure players win, too.”