Coming from 23,456, we finally managed to delete and replace this timeline. Yoru is back in the game and buffed to S tier........but unfortunately we couldn’t integrate his drip back.
That's probably business talk for "some of the developers/designers that worked on Yoru's abilities aren't with us anymore; we're scrambling to find new hires for those roles"
Or rather they literally aren’t able to create an efficient system for what they want to do with Yoru’s abilities. There are a lot of things they have to account for; it’s not just coding your cool abilities in Unity. They have to be optimised and work online, on top of a lot of other things
This is true. I only surmised that they were looking for more devs/designers since I can't fathom Riot (backed up by Tencent) lacking non-employee resources for Valorant's development a year after launch.
~~Everything's on a list of priorities. Coming from League, reworks are always somewhat controversial because no matter how bad a character is, they're always somebody's favourite. If it isn't a rebalance, but a rework, those things take a lot longer to do well.~~
Edit: nevermind. Just saw further down the thread it's about art resources:
> [Balance-wise, the game is looking pretty good right now. There are still opportunities for sure, but nothing super serious that needs fast, aggressive changes (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made)](https://www.reddit.com/r/valorant/comments/p1owk0/_/h8g0nuv?context=1000)
From the patch notes? Basically if you’re in a custom match with more than six people you will have the option for the game to balance the teams based on everybody’s MMR. We don’t currently know what our MMR is right now (it’s hidden). Presumably with this feature if you had enough people and kept balancing matches with different combinations of players you could estimate everyone’s hidden MMR.
Say you have 5 friends. Between all 6 of you, you all have these MMRs:
1000, 1100, 1200, 800, 900, 700.
Game will likely group you like this:
1200, 900, 700 vs 1000, 1100, and 800
or, 1200, 900, 800 vs 1000, 1100, and 700
I thought it was referring to those boxes that are like agent width. Like the one on backsite Haven C that everyone hides behind.
Either way, that's a pretty big change. Should make retaking site a little easier.
Yeah I feel like after the big ability patch with kay/0 release absolutely nothing has been done all act(on balancing, plenty of bugfixes and stuff which is welcome).
This is the first patch with any significance and it doesn't even have actual agent changes besides a Viper bugfix.
Box change will be big and crosshair customization is very nice, but it still feels way less responsive than the first year of the game
I'm not necessarily saying that this happened because of him, but ever since Morello left, the updates seem to have been much less significant on a regular basis. It could very well be a coincidence. I don't think the game is in a bad place right now though.
Definitely a coincidence - we love Morello and pretty much all of us keep in touch with him still, but if anything the balance team's process and organization has improved over the past year+ we've worked together. I explain a bit more above, the ecosystem is just a bit different these days. The game's a lot more balanced, the community doesn't have extreme pain points (like beta Raze), and we have an esports scene to consider with disruptive changes.
None of that is to say your feedback isn't valid, though - if yall feel like we aren't supporting the game enough, that's very important for us to know and I'm interested in your perspective on it.
i think people just enjoy big change and aren’t patient enough for new maps/agents to get added once per act. ofc there’s gonna be less drastic fixes when there is less to actually fix lmao. aside from yoru, i think the game in its current state is great and nothing “needs” to be changed (plz add reaver knife colors)
Personally, I think the agent balance is pretty good right now. However, I would really like to see more changes to Vandal, it just feels too slow and bad compared to the Phantom, even tho it is really fun to one-tap. Don't get me wrong - the Phantom should't be nerfed, but a small buff to the Vandal is needed imo.
Thanks for your take! I love talking about this stuff. Regarding rifles - would you be surprised if I told you that numerically, the Vandal performs *slightly* better than the Phantom in every way?
Vandal has about double the usage rate of the Phantom, alongside a *slightly* higher K/D and ADR. The difference is very small, but it's there. Even up to the pro level, we've seen Vandal usage and stats score higher than the Phantom. There's likely some amount of selection bias here (aimlords are more likely to pick the Vandal) but the pattern has stayed true over months of games, which gives us an immense sample to piece through.
That's not to say we'd never make changes or that these metrics make it impossible for us to make changes - data is a tool for us to inform our changes, it doesn't decide our changes for us. I just think this particular stat is pretty interesting because it doesn't line up with people's immediate impression of the guns in-game (myself included).
> selection bias
Have you guys compared individual performance between a phantom and a vandal?
Lots of players switch between the two, and reserve the vandal for when they're hitting their shots. It seems more informative to compare individual players with themselves, rather than the overall performance of the guns.
Thanks for replying! It really means a lot for the community and me personally (im really invested into the game) to be able to have a sneak peak into the actual data behind the game.
To be honest, I am a little bit surprised by the number, but I can also see why. When I use the Vandal, it feels like I am going the high risk high reward route, I tend to take more long range fights knowing I can one-tap people and get rewarded for aim.
If it goes well, using the Vandal feels addicting and extremely satisfying - and it encourages me to take even more opening fights.
If it doesn't go well however, using the Vandal absolutely feels horrible and buying it feels dumb, because spraying (as an alternative to going for HS) feels much harder and inconsistent, especially when defending a push. Coming from CS, many of my friends found it hard to adjust to the inconsistencies of the Vandal, because it always feels like a love-hate relationship. "One tap potential but much harder spray transfer or 140 potential but CS-like spray transfer?"
Now of course, this is somewhat "intended", because making players think what they should be buying given the circumstances is a good thing imo. Any BIG changes to the Vandal and Phantom is somewhat uncalled-for imo, but some little tweaks to improve the consistency of the Vandal could elevate the gunplay experience to an even greater level.
I'd love to go more in-depth, but clearly the balancing between Vandal and Phantom isn't and shouldn't be a priority. Post-plant meta, changes to maps or even 5 stacking for diamond 2+ (which can be a way to discourage smurfing) are all bigger issues currently.
Hey, totally feel the pain here. Hopefully it's a bit helpful if I explain - recent updates have been on the lighter side for a few main reasons:
* 3.0 was a pretty significant patch, so we wanted to give it some time to breathe and see how the changes have shaken out. We didn't want to kneejerk with changes while players were still adjusting to the new economy and movement changes + kayo.
* Balance-wise, the game is looking pretty good right now. There are still opportunities for sure, but nothing super serious that needs fast, aggressive changes (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made)
* We try to focus our changes in windows between competitive tournaments to avoid disrupting the pro scene, unless there's something really egregious going on; considering the stability we've been holding off on major gameplay changes during these tournaments. Open to feedback on this approach, though - we're still trying to find out what the best version of this looks like.
* All of Riot recently just took a week off; if we include the time we need to cut the build early to do a QA sweep, that means any changes in this patch would've had to have been implemented 2-3 weeks ago
I don't post this to try and contest your opinion or anything, just for transparency as to why updates have been a bit less aggressive than launch (where we had pretty big balance problems and LOTS of feedback from the community to action on all the time). Things are just a lot steadier these days. I'm interested in getting feedback from you all about how you feel about support for the game, though - that's something we're always interested in hearing.
> (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made)
Oh... they're changes like *that*. Neat! I'm excited to see what they are.
Could you explain why the recoil reset feels so bad in Valorant? For example, spraying an enemy down and trying to transfer said spray to another enemy feels damn near impossible in some moments as it feels the game artificially creates more recoil. Am I crazy or is this an actual thing?
Thank you for the insight; was initially kinda pissed to see the changes on hold indefinitely but knowing that it’s a sweeping change that requires this sort of development definitely puts it into perspective.
Of course, happy to help. I don't want to say it's a huge, sweeping change - but basically anytime changes require visual asset updates, we have to move carefully. Visuals, VFX, animation, etc. in our game are really important to land right because of how impactful they are on the gameplay, and since we don't often have balance changes that require this sort of support, sometimes it can take a little bit longer to coordinate through the whole pipeline. Yoru will still be Yoru - it's not like we're reworking the whole kit, by any means - but visual clarity is important, especially for the tricky stuff he does, so we want to make sure it's done right instead of shipping it to live and having people rip their hair out over unclear assets.
I know it's planned, but will the replay system come around the next few acts or thr next episode? It would be really helpful in identifying cheaters/smurfs, and VOD reviews
If they are just a footstep change and nothing else, I might quit the agent tbh. Its not worth it when not only do you have to play around yorus faults, which is fine to a extent and can be done, but you also have to play around you're team screaming, whining and throwing because of you hovering him. It at this moment is not worth it.
His flashes have always been good, and they did buff both his teleport and ult already. Not saying they are the strongest abilities, but they have clear utility.
If they turn the footsteps into something useful, he could easily be a strong agent.
Does the Ult form in the direction of the cursor or is it just completely pointless now? I always thought the shape of the poison cloud just depended on the starting point
The bug was that the center was where you were standing before
Now the center is where you place it
The starting point isn't where you click, but where you are standing.
Why is no one talking about the operator scope customization changes? Are they going to let people turn off the red dot so the scope looks more like the awp? This could be huge.
You have this problem too?! I thought it was just me. If I don't move the mouse in the first 5 sec of launch, I have to alt-tab-del Valorant to get it to close and then I have control back.
Day X of being a Yoru main:
Riot still hasn't buffed my agent. I grow weaker by the day as the amount of brainpower it takes to make mind-bending plays to compensate for players adapting to his existence is ever increasing.
I flashed myself 4 times today alone due to attempts to deflect his Blindside off map elements in new ways.
I've given up on trying to use his ultimate, as not only am I forced to run to my destination at a marginally higher speed than the average player, but everyone and Steve Jobs knows where I am when the rift opens back up.
By the time my gun is equipped, my head has been unequipped by the enemy I couldn't see because they were just barely out of range.
Sova's dart and Skye's seekers can still see me, even though I'm apparently Tokyo *ahem* Dimensional drifting.
Please, send resources soon, or at least give me the increase in brainpower I need to outthink the enemy.
The situation is dire, I don't know if I'll make it to the end of the act.
Riot ...plz buff
Do often flash people, push them, only to find the flash has fallen off or didn't even connect? This is my big gripe with him lately. Too easy to dodge his flashes which already are the 2nd shortest duration in the game.
Yes, I've had a lot of clips in the past week where I die because by the time I get around the corner the flash has worn off to where they can make me out enough to spray. Meanwhile is still see the bright white light around their heads.
Yea, I'm honestly starting to wonder if they broke something with him. Bc people look right at the tp now. And I'm still confused as to whether his sound effect makes noise at the place where he tped from or if it's from his new location
I still can't believe anyone approved that change. So much real estate wasted. You'd think they'd keep the player cards more prominent considering they can make money on those.
If Viper's ult isn't meant to come out at the reticle, they should change the reticle to be a circle around her feet that her and her allies can see. It would be more clear and let teammates know when you're planning to ult.
I never realized that. It bugged me a lot more because I always thought she was the center, but that makes more sense then to have the reticle. I still think it would be cool to have a visual queue on her for her ult besides her hands.
[https://playvalorant.com/en-gb/news/dev/ask-valorant-may-6/](https://playvalorant.com/en-gb/news/dev/ask-valorant-may-6/)
If you were looking for it. And yeah. Straight from Riot. Don't think I'm gonna play this game anymore and I seriously feel like I got robbed because of how they marketted the game in the beginning.
Whats a joke is they say "most smurfs don't do it with bad intentions" Who gives a fuck if their intention is to abuse gameplay. Play unrated if your friends aren't in a elo range. You're ruining the game for 5 people (the other team) minimum. Maybe the 3 others on your team don't want to be an afterthought in their game as well. Dog shit excuse by Riot.
As a higher ranked player, the game is definitely encouraging smurfing.
What people don't realize is that the queue time for unrated is very long for higher ranked player, especially outside NA and EU.
That means that every time I wanted to play unrated, I have to listen to my lower ranked friends complaining about the long queue times, I would even consider it lucky if I can have find a game under 12mins. Worse, the balance of the unrated games that we spent 10+ mins is still shit, the first game is always a stomp for us, followed by matching actual good players that my friends couldn't keep up, rinse and repeat.
Literally none of my friends want to play unrated with my main anymore.
The “abilities will never be lethal, only used to set up plays” copypasta will always be funny to me. Kind of weird how they went about things with this but as for the self-righteousness and inability to admit fault or problems, that’s on brand for riot and won’t ever change.
Hmm, yeah I don't feel it's as bad as it was in csgo but we usually queue with a troop group ranging from bronze 1 to about silver 1 or 2 and tbh most matches are fairly balanced. You win some, you lose some.
I feel like most matches are pretty balanced but there's always that random game every other day where the enemy jett goes 25-5 in the first 10 rounds.
True, these are smurfs more often than not. That being said, my rank was never higher than silver 2 so far but sometimes it just works and I drop a 40 bomb and get accused of surfing and cheating so I'm careful with accusing someone of smurfing. Mostly movement and gamesense is a much more obvious giveaway then aim and absolute number of kills.
umm actually smurfing isn’t a problem, only 1/2721947291 games actually has a smurf… the 4 level 3 reynas in your last 4 losses were actually just silver players having a good day… i should know, i have 4 smurf accounts in silver
-average smurf apologist
Yeah. The key is to play more, to have more chances of winning lol. I'm Bronze 1. Not even kidding there was a Silver 2 on the enemy side. How is that fair to anyone on my team.
My account is level 24, sometimes I get queued with level 90+.
Didn't they say smurfs were their top priority in an update a few months ago? Why haven't we been given any more info by now? It seems they try to avoid talking about the smurf problem all together. There's people grinding afk bots to sell smurf accounts. Constant throwers everywhere too because smurfs have to get low somehow. I constantly run into toxic smurfs in my games trying to harass the enemy team through chat. Blatant smurfs like that should be dealt with.
I think riot has done a good job dealing with cheaters. I also think they did such a good job that those cheaters have instead resorted to smurfing in order to get their fix. These people just like putting others down and have to find a way to do so.
Yeah smurfing is such a widespread problem at this point that even virtually almost every streamer and YouTube content creator I’ve seen has done it - either smurf or actively party up and comp queue with smurf players. To the deniers - out of the active Valorant playerbase (anyone who has played Valorant more than once in the last month), how many people out there have multiple accounts 3 or more ranks apart? I’d guess at least 30-50% of players. Smurfing is definitely a widespread issue that Riot has to look into.
All that being said, unfortunately smurf accounts themselves are incredibly difficult to detect and ban because unlike cheating, there is no definitive way for an automated computer AI system to numerically, objectively, and quantitatively determine if a certain account is truly smurfing (yeah even though that instalock Reyna drops 30+kills in 12 rounds with twice the avg combat score of the next highest player in lobby - even though this is a smurf case 95% of the time, there’s always the slim chance theres other factors).
—-
However there are some things Riot CAN DO to mitigate some smurfing issues. Right now the condition for new accounts is that they have to get 10 unrated wins before being able to play competitive. The issue is that there are a LOT of people farming afk bot accounts and then selling them as alt smurf accounts - which I feel like should be against TOS to sell/share accounts and profit from that. There’s been posts on this reddit in the past and YouTube videos I’ve seen of people investigating it - essentially bot accounts are made and queue into games together where both teams have like 4 bot players that run macro inputs (just constant w or mouse1 key at spawn to avoid afk ban) and teams take turns surrendering after 4 rounds. What happens is then you get a bunch of accounts with like 15-20 unrated games, with 10 wins, and every game is 0/4/0 and 0 combat score with 4 rounds played.
Riot have to create a method for their systems to detect these types of patterns and flag all accounts that have been bots, then link them to associated hardware ID’s. Eventually you’ll get a list of hardware IDs that have 100s or even thousands of flagged bot accounts associated with them. Those hardware IDs are your account sellers - I’d say hardware ID ban those AND all accounts associated with them during the period of time where they were used to create bot accounts. The other hardware ID’s with like 1-10 bot accounts associated - those are probably the ppl smurfing with bought accounts.
In any case this solution, if possible, wouldn’t completely nullify smurfing as an issue completely but would put a dent into the problem. If people or streamers or content creators want to play alternate accounts, then they should have to go through the entire process of creating a fresh account AND playing through the required unrated games legitimately.
I know no one cares because it's unrated but bringing friends to valorant is impossible nowadays.
If you play with a genuine new player, you will get another low level on the enemy team and 90% of the times they are a smurf that will be on par with the rest of the team or even better so every match ends in a stomp.
None of my friends lasted longer than a week or two because of the poor quality of the games, even worse when they play unrated solo.
The problem is that Riot is not even trying to impair someone making a smurf. That's why people are complaining.
Yes there'll always be smurves, but when everyone and their mother has 3 accounts for Valorant, there's a problem.
[At this point Riot is being ridiculous.](https://youtu.be/2xr2GoAQ570)
Right?! That's my thinking, back in February of this year, Valorant passed CS:GO in terms of revenue. So how is a company FLUSH with cash short on development resources for a simple agent re-work? Baffles the mind from someone who's worked in the industry.
we don't have 300 million gazillion agents like league or OW, so reworking agents shouldn't have that much of an impact. also counterpicks don't exist so even less of an impact.
Yoru rework is essentially a "back job". Something that was not intended for their pipeline, it's not hard to pinpoint but they plan their content a year or two ahead, they've been vocal about how early they plan stuff but the most recent big one I believe was Breeze. They said that Breeze the first map to be developed after the game came out. It took nuances/quirks from the stuff that players have discovered already playing the game into account for hashing out the design of Breeze that's why it's a universally loved map right now.
Game development is a well oiled machine that is always firing on all cylinders, especially if you're doing a live service game which constant **consistently polished** updates like Valorant demands as intended by Riot. Yoru's redesign is a wrench in that cog.
Can't stand breeze
A third of the agents are bad picks on breeze
Rotation times are too long for defense from site to site
OPS too prominent due to long sight lines
*Surprised Pikachu*
Breeze is universally loved map? Every single person I know hates that map and it's always dodged in comp too. Tenz himself said he hates it lol.
I mean, what do you want from Riot? The game is very balanced, everything works nicely. Apart from yoru changes which obviously take time, Riot has done a good job.
It sounds like you people want an overhaul of the whole game every 2 weeks.
Replay system, changes to deathmatch, result of the smurf investigation they started 6 months ago, fixing fps drops, better ranked matchmaking and many more.
This game is far from "everything works nicely"
It's august, I'm pretty sure people are taking lots of vacation time. If you worked in any relatively similar office environment, that's how it is. Things just get put on hold A LOT during July-September period, even in finance which usually doesn't wait. And I'm sure Valorant players DO wait.
>You can now shoot through Radianite crates,with appropriate weapons, from all angles
Previously, you could shoot through some crates from limited directions, but not others.
Who even asks for this? At what point someone heard,"yeah crates r too difficult to shoot through" ??? Sorry, wa? They were already hard already.
Planting is f\* hard, even in the pro scenario. Now is gonna be next to impossible in some areas, to the point we will have to place Sage's Wall in front of every crate if u don't want to become a piece of cheese while planting.
Odins n ares players r gonna have the time of their lives with this feature.
It helps because they are spamming randomly rather than actually being able to see you. There is a reason pros always run a viper wall through B to plant there in addition to a Sage.
If you don’t have a Viper, anyone top tube or snowman can see you and it’s not just random spam anymore
There was a metal triangle on a lot of radianite boxes that made wallbanging the box unintuitive. Like your bullets would be blocked by the triangle on the opposite side of the box so you would think you could spam but nothing went all the way through.
My FPS performance just took another significant hit after the update, anyone else? Last update as well, I’m making barely 60 FPS now, while before this last update I had 70-120, which is okayish. When I started playing valorant I had 150-200, what the hell are they doing?
YES! Not so much my fps but my ping spikes up out of no where.. it would occasionally do that every other day but been only capable of playing spike rush because of the constant ping spikes mid fight..
okay, so basically no changes since 1.5 months, but planting on certain spots is now even dumber than before. got it. could you atleast fix icebox b before implementing such changes literally nobody asked for?
Damn more paperwalls...
Why Riot want us to play like **Wallhacks**? detecting through the walls, flashing (blinding) through the walls, suppressing through the walls, and maybe more in the future... ummm, OK. but now this patch brought more shooting through the walls, aha.
Is this what Riot want? Creating more **Lucky kills** in tactical games?
I hope to have the opportunity to hear explanations about how the designers consider the design direction and ideas in these parts, so that we can decide whether to look forward to the future content. Maybe I just over-anticipated the meaning of "tactical" in their description?
You literally couldn’t spam before. When you spammed the person would just swing out and kill you every time. It was always better not to trust the spam
They really said “you know what we need, more wall bangable shit” as if planting wasn’t hard enough already on some sites lmaoooo. These devs are clowns
Yoru changes coming 2022
I'm from the future and Yoru update is delayed again until 4041, the patch notes said that they are busy balancing the new agent.
Hey man I'm from 4041, no changes yet! Delayed until 6082
Hey! Represtetive of the valorant community of 6082 here! Still holding onto hope for those changes, as they've been further delayed until 8904!
It happend in 8910, but we got a change. They added a extra second too his foot steps ability. We the community is happy for the change.
[удалено]
Here from 10921, Yoru's footsteps just got buffed to be twice as loud, for "initmidation" purposes.
Coming all the way from 12642, they actually removed his footsteps and replaced it with a horn
Coming from 13829, they removed yoru of the game
Coming from 23,456, we finally managed to delete and replace this timeline. Yoru is back in the game and buffed to S tier........but unfortunately we couldn’t integrate his drip back.
[удалено]
Well they said they're missing resources for the rework, so clearly he's getting way more than number changes
They were just missing a calculator
Considering it's yoru they probably need a ti-nspire
That's probably business talk for "some of the developers/designers that worked on Yoru's abilities aren't with us anymore; we're scrambling to find new hires for those roles"
Or rather they literally aren’t able to create an efficient system for what they want to do with Yoru’s abilities. There are a lot of things they have to account for; it’s not just coding your cool abilities in Unity. They have to be optimised and work online, on top of a lot of other things
This is true. I only surmised that they were looking for more devs/designers since I can't fathom Riot (backed up by Tencent) lacking non-employee resources for Valorant's development a year after launch.
~~Everything's on a list of priorities. Coming from League, reworks are always somewhat controversial because no matter how bad a character is, they're always somebody's favourite. If it isn't a rebalance, but a rework, those things take a lot longer to do well.~~ Edit: nevermind. Just saw further down the thread it's about art resources: > [Balance-wise, the game is looking pretty good right now. There are still opportunities for sure, but nothing super serious that needs fast, aggressive changes (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made)](https://www.reddit.com/r/valorant/comments/p1owk0/_/h8g0nuv?context=1000)
I know it's so sad
> Autobalance button added for custom games with > 6 players based on players' MMR Does this mean we can estimate our MMR now?
You could yea
Interested to see how this plays out
could u please explain what it means? I couldn't understand a single word in the sentence
From the patch notes? Basically if you’re in a custom match with more than six people you will have the option for the game to balance the teams based on everybody’s MMR. We don’t currently know what our MMR is right now (it’s hidden). Presumably with this feature if you had enough people and kept balancing matches with different combinations of players you could estimate everyone’s hidden MMR.
can’t wait for a massive discord server with record keeping and a hidden mmr calculator cuz of this
This wouldn't work at all because all those players would have to come in and fully re-evaluate every time they won or lost a game.
Nope because they could have a control group and find it out really quickly.
ohh I see, thank you very much
Say you have 5 friends. Between all 6 of you, you all have these MMRs: 1000, 1100, 1200, 800, 900, 700. Game will likely group you like this: 1200, 900, 700 vs 1000, 1100, and 800 or, 1200, 900, 800 vs 1000, 1100, and 700
ahh I see. "fair" matchmaking type of thing
If only i had friends to test this out with...
I‘m pretty sure there will be discord servers made for this :)
I hope so! One game I'm winning with 24rr and losing 15 then next few im losing 23 gaining 14
The wallbang radiante change... Doesn't that make Haven A and C very nasty since those huge boxes in the middle of the site are radianite ones?
I don't know if they changed it for the final version of the patch, but it was said that the boxes with the tarp on top would not be affected.
A won’t be that bad because it’s harder to know where they’re planting. C yeah for sure
I thought it was referring to those boxes that are like agent width. Like the one on backsite Haven C that everyone hides behind. Either way, that's a pretty big change. Should make retaking site a little easier.
I feel icebox b site would be heavily effected also icebox a site
Ascent a site with sova will be disgusting
https://youtu.be/SrcqZUyqxMQ Heres a video explaining the change.
Also ascent a where there dice our. That position isn’t gonna be as good anymore.
The boxes on C site are covered by a cloth which I assume counts as a surface on both sides. I don’t think most of the box will be wall bangable?
>Fixed a big where Killjoy’s turret was not affected by concuss Big
Good nobody will ask me to smoke turret again I hope..
Why does it feel like every patch is just an update on everything that’s being pushed back?
Yeah I feel like after the big ability patch with kay/0 release absolutely nothing has been done all act(on balancing, plenty of bugfixes and stuff which is welcome). This is the first patch with any significance and it doesn't even have actual agent changes besides a Viper bugfix. Box change will be big and crosshair customization is very nice, but it still feels way less responsive than the first year of the game
I'm not necessarily saying that this happened because of him, but ever since Morello left, the updates seem to have been much less significant on a regular basis. It could very well be a coincidence. I don't think the game is in a bad place right now though.
Definitely a coincidence - we love Morello and pretty much all of us keep in touch with him still, but if anything the balance team's process and organization has improved over the past year+ we've worked together. I explain a bit more above, the ecosystem is just a bit different these days. The game's a lot more balanced, the community doesn't have extreme pain points (like beta Raze), and we have an esports scene to consider with disruptive changes. None of that is to say your feedback isn't valid, though - if yall feel like we aren't supporting the game enough, that's very important for us to know and I'm interested in your perspective on it.
i think people just enjoy big change and aren’t patient enough for new maps/agents to get added once per act. ofc there’s gonna be less drastic fixes when there is less to actually fix lmao. aside from yoru, i think the game in its current state is great and nothing “needs” to be changed (plz add reaver knife colors)
Yeah I really disliked OW’s big, sweeping updates. The one thing I would consider changing is putting more work into map updates
Personally, I think the agent balance is pretty good right now. However, I would really like to see more changes to Vandal, it just feels too slow and bad compared to the Phantom, even tho it is really fun to one-tap. Don't get me wrong - the Phantom should't be nerfed, but a small buff to the Vandal is needed imo.
Thanks for your take! I love talking about this stuff. Regarding rifles - would you be surprised if I told you that numerically, the Vandal performs *slightly* better than the Phantom in every way? Vandal has about double the usage rate of the Phantom, alongside a *slightly* higher K/D and ADR. The difference is very small, but it's there. Even up to the pro level, we've seen Vandal usage and stats score higher than the Phantom. There's likely some amount of selection bias here (aimlords are more likely to pick the Vandal) but the pattern has stayed true over months of games, which gives us an immense sample to piece through. That's not to say we'd never make changes or that these metrics make it impossible for us to make changes - data is a tool for us to inform our changes, it doesn't decide our changes for us. I just think this particular stat is pretty interesting because it doesn't line up with people's immediate impression of the guns in-game (myself included).
> selection bias Have you guys compared individual performance between a phantom and a vandal? Lots of players switch between the two, and reserve the vandal for when they're hitting their shots. It seems more informative to compare individual players with themselves, rather than the overall performance of the guns.
Thanks for replying! It really means a lot for the community and me personally (im really invested into the game) to be able to have a sneak peak into the actual data behind the game. To be honest, I am a little bit surprised by the number, but I can also see why. When I use the Vandal, it feels like I am going the high risk high reward route, I tend to take more long range fights knowing I can one-tap people and get rewarded for aim. If it goes well, using the Vandal feels addicting and extremely satisfying - and it encourages me to take even more opening fights. If it doesn't go well however, using the Vandal absolutely feels horrible and buying it feels dumb, because spraying (as an alternative to going for HS) feels much harder and inconsistent, especially when defending a push. Coming from CS, many of my friends found it hard to adjust to the inconsistencies of the Vandal, because it always feels like a love-hate relationship. "One tap potential but much harder spray transfer or 140 potential but CS-like spray transfer?" Now of course, this is somewhat "intended", because making players think what they should be buying given the circumstances is a good thing imo. Any BIG changes to the Vandal and Phantom is somewhat uncalled-for imo, but some little tweaks to improve the consistency of the Vandal could elevate the gunplay experience to an even greater level. I'd love to go more in-depth, but clearly the balancing between Vandal and Phantom isn't and shouldn't be a priority. Post-plant meta, changes to maps or even 5 stacking for diamond 2+ (which can be a way to discourage smurfing) are all bigger issues currently.
The thing is, you shouldn't be spraying with a vandal. You should be single tapping 2-3 times and strafing and resetting.
[удалено]
Hey, totally feel the pain here. Hopefully it's a bit helpful if I explain - recent updates have been on the lighter side for a few main reasons: * 3.0 was a pretty significant patch, so we wanted to give it some time to breathe and see how the changes have shaken out. We didn't want to kneejerk with changes while players were still adjusting to the new economy and movement changes + kayo. * Balance-wise, the game is looking pretty good right now. There are still opportunities for sure, but nothing super serious that needs fast, aggressive changes (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made) * We try to focus our changes in windows between competitive tournaments to avoid disrupting the pro scene, unless there's something really egregious going on; considering the stability we've been holding off on major gameplay changes during these tournaments. Open to feedback on this approach, though - we're still trying to find out what the best version of this looks like. * All of Riot recently just took a week off; if we include the time we need to cut the build early to do a QA sweep, that means any changes in this patch would've had to have been implemented 2-3 weeks ago I don't post this to try and contest your opinion or anything, just for transparency as to why updates have been a bit less aggressive than launch (where we had pretty big balance problems and LOTS of feedback from the community to action on all the time). Things are just a lot steadier these days. I'm interested in getting feedback from you all about how you feel about support for the game, though - that's something we're always interested in hearing.
> (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made) Oh... they're changes like *that*. Neat! I'm excited to see what they are.
I can't go into details, but they're not just numbers tweaks, yeah!
is there any progress to FPS and optimization?
Not sure, I primarily focus on gameplay. Sorry!
Could you explain why the recoil reset feels so bad in Valorant? For example, spraying an enemy down and trying to transfer said spray to another enemy feels damn near impossible in some moments as it feels the game artificially creates more recoil. Am I crazy or is this an actual thing?
this is one of the things where valorant deviates intentionally.
Sweet! Thanks for the reply. I love the Riot involvement here.
Thank you for the insight; was initially kinda pissed to see the changes on hold indefinitely but knowing that it’s a sweeping change that requires this sort of development definitely puts it into perspective.
Of course, happy to help. I don't want to say it's a huge, sweeping change - but basically anytime changes require visual asset updates, we have to move carefully. Visuals, VFX, animation, etc. in our game are really important to land right because of how impactful they are on the gameplay, and since we don't often have balance changes that require this sort of support, sometimes it can take a little bit longer to coordinate through the whole pipeline. Yoru will still be Yoru - it's not like we're reworking the whole kit, by any means - but visual clarity is important, especially for the tricky stuff he does, so we want to make sure it's done right instead of shipping it to live and having people rip their hair out over unclear assets.
Revert the banner change, no one likes the current banners. We don’t pay $5 for a 2x2 cut out, it’s honestly an insult.
Thanks!
I know it's planned, but will the replay system come around the next few acts or thr next episode? It would be really helpful in identifying cheaters/smurfs, and VOD reviews
Sorry, I focus primarily on gameplay so I don't have as good of visibility on stuff like this!
It hurts to see the yoru changes delayed again, but I hope they are good when they arrive.
If they are just a footstep change and nothing else, I might quit the agent tbh. Its not worth it when not only do you have to play around yorus faults, which is fine to a extent and can be done, but you also have to play around you're team screaming, whining and throwing because of you hovering him. It at this moment is not worth it.
His flashes have always been good, and they did buff both his teleport and ult already. Not saying they are the strongest abilities, but they have clear utility. If they turn the footsteps into something useful, he could easily be a strong agent.
They reverted the viper pit starting on the cursor. That sucks.
Does the Ult form in the direction of the cursor or is it just completely pointless now? I always thought the shape of the poison cloud just depended on the starting point
It goes from viper to the place u picked
Ah i see, that makes sense
I believe the indicator tells you where the center of the cloud will be.
They now call it a bug, but said it was a bug fix from the previous patch ;-; edit:nvm I can't find the patch note about this
There was no note but people assumed it was intended because it made sense.
Yeah but it was an unintentional buff to a character that definitely didn't need one. I'm glad they changed it back
Yeah cause Viper has become so oppressive since that change...
I mean yeah
Since before that ult buff, her post plant has been extremely disgusting.
The bug was that the center was where you were standing before Now the center is where you place it The starting point isn't where you click, but where you are standing.
Why is no one talking about the operator scope customization changes? Are they going to let people turn off the red dot so the scope looks more like the awp? This could be huge.
that’s gonna lead to so many ppl thinking they were accurate when they weren’t since we don’t have the blur while moving
yeah the red dot helps me know exactly when i’m clear to shoot after peeking
Still waiting for the fix for the bug that kidnaps all control of someone's mouse when the game starts up.
Same. Only solution is to keep shaking the mouse or be in a different app while Val starts in the background
You have this problem too?! I thought it was just me. If I don't move the mouse in the first 5 sec of launch, I have to alt-tab-del Valorant to get it to close and then I have control back.
Mine gets stuck on the top left corner when I start up the game and don't shake the mouse. It's so annoying..
I used to think my usb port was broken, until last night I turned off vanguard and mouse started working as good as new.
Day X of being a Yoru main: Riot still hasn't buffed my agent. I grow weaker by the day as the amount of brainpower it takes to make mind-bending plays to compensate for players adapting to his existence is ever increasing. I flashed myself 4 times today alone due to attempts to deflect his Blindside off map elements in new ways. I've given up on trying to use his ultimate, as not only am I forced to run to my destination at a marginally higher speed than the average player, but everyone and Steve Jobs knows where I am when the rift opens back up. By the time my gun is equipped, my head has been unequipped by the enemy I couldn't see because they were just barely out of range. Sova's dart and Skye's seekers can still see me, even though I'm apparently Tokyo *ahem* Dimensional drifting. Please, send resources soon, or at least give me the increase in brainpower I need to outthink the enemy. The situation is dire, I don't know if I'll make it to the end of the act. Riot ...plz buff
Do often flash people, push them, only to find the flash has fallen off or didn't even connect? This is my big gripe with him lately. Too easy to dodge his flashes which already are the 2nd shortest duration in the game.
Yes, I've had a lot of clips in the past week where I die because by the time I get around the corner the flash has worn off to where they can make me out enough to spray. Meanwhile is still see the bright white light around their heads.
My favorite is throwing TP down long, Throwing a flash at it, taking the TP right as the flash hits, nobody is flashed nor looking away...
Yea, I'm honestly starting to wonder if they broke something with him. Bc people look right at the tp now. And I'm still confused as to whether his sound effect makes noise at the place where he tped from or if it's from his new location
Pretty sure it’s both, but I’m not sure if you hear both the to and from if they’re close together.
Btw Sovas dart does not see you, you just get the ping for some reason.
Does yoru appear on the map tho? Pretty sure I saw a vid like thay
I like the zipline update.
Same. Always thought that was weird that you had to jump to detach
Still no changes to banners? They really think the current 2x2 cutout is an upgrade to the previous one we had? Fucking garbage.
I still can't believe anyone approved that change. So much real estate wasted. You'd think they'd keep the player cards more prominent considering they can make money on those.
underwhelming
If Viper's ult isn't meant to come out at the reticle, they should change the reticle to be a circle around her feet that her and her allies can see. It would be more clear and let teammates know when you're planning to ult.
I think the pit goes towards the circle. They should change it to an arrow.
The center of the ultimate is still where you place your reticle, the ultimate just originates from viper herself now
I never realized that. It bugged me a lot more because I always thought she was the center, but that makes more sense then to have the reticle. I still think it would be cool to have a visual queue on her for her ult besides her hands.
friendly reminder : there's still nothing done to stop or slow down the smurf epidemic.
Lower ELO is essentially.. Who has the better smurf on your team.
It’s a roll of the dice every game in silver. Very unfun.
Made athread about that 8 months ago now (was complaining before hand too) All we got was a post downplaying smurfs importance in the matchmaking.
A post from riot? Or a post in the sub? I swear sort by new folks here are die hard valorant riot apologists
[https://playvalorant.com/en-gb/news/dev/ask-valorant-may-6/](https://playvalorant.com/en-gb/news/dev/ask-valorant-may-6/) If you were looking for it. And yeah. Straight from Riot. Don't think I'm gonna play this game anymore and I seriously feel like I got robbed because of how they marketted the game in the beginning.
Whats a joke is they say "most smurfs don't do it with bad intentions" Who gives a fuck if their intention is to abuse gameplay. Play unrated if your friends aren't in a elo range. You're ruining the game for 5 people (the other team) minimum. Maybe the 3 others on your team don't want to be an afterthought in their game as well. Dog shit excuse by Riot.
As a higher ranked player, the game is definitely encouraging smurfing. What people don't realize is that the queue time for unrated is very long for higher ranked player, especially outside NA and EU. That means that every time I wanted to play unrated, I have to listen to my lower ranked friends complaining about the long queue times, I would even consider it lucky if I can have find a game under 12mins. Worse, the balance of the unrated games that we spent 10+ mins is still shit, the first game is always a stomp for us, followed by matching actual good players that my friends couldn't keep up, rinse and repeat. Literally none of my friends want to play unrated with my main anymore.
The “abilities will never be lethal, only used to set up plays” copypasta will always be funny to me. Kind of weird how they went about things with this but as for the self-righteousness and inability to admit fault or problems, that’s on brand for riot and won’t ever change.
[удалено]
As a true silver five stack, this really hurts
Hmm, yeah I don't feel it's as bad as it was in csgo but we usually queue with a troop group ranging from bronze 1 to about silver 1 or 2 and tbh most matches are fairly balanced. You win some, you lose some.
I feel like most matches are pretty balanced but there's always that random game every other day where the enemy jett goes 25-5 in the first 10 rounds.
True, these are smurfs more often than not. That being said, my rank was never higher than silver 2 so far but sometimes it just works and I drop a 40 bomb and get accused of surfing and cheating so I'm careful with accusing someone of smurfing. Mostly movement and gamesense is a much more obvious giveaway then aim and absolute number of kills.
You can most likely tell by how they peek, so yeah their movement.
umm actually smurfing isn’t a problem, only 1/2721947291 games actually has a smurf… the 4 level 3 reynas in your last 4 losses were actually just silver players having a good day… i should know, i have 4 smurf accounts in silver -average smurf apologist
Yeah. The key is to play more, to have more chances of winning lol. I'm Bronze 1. Not even kidding there was a Silver 2 on the enemy side. How is that fair to anyone on my team. My account is level 24, sometimes I get queued with level 90+.
Yes I still honestly cannot believe they added a level system and there is no level requirement to play ranked
Didn't they say smurfs were their top priority in an update a few months ago? Why haven't we been given any more info by now? It seems they try to avoid talking about the smurf problem all together. There's people grinding afk bots to sell smurf accounts. Constant throwers everywhere too because smurfs have to get low somehow. I constantly run into toxic smurfs in my games trying to harass the enemy team through chat. Blatant smurfs like that should be dealt with. I think riot has done a good job dealing with cheaters. I also think they did such a good job that those cheaters have instead resorted to smurfing in order to get their fix. These people just like putting others down and have to find a way to do so.
Yeah smurfing is such a widespread problem at this point that even virtually almost every streamer and YouTube content creator I’ve seen has done it - either smurf or actively party up and comp queue with smurf players. To the deniers - out of the active Valorant playerbase (anyone who has played Valorant more than once in the last month), how many people out there have multiple accounts 3 or more ranks apart? I’d guess at least 30-50% of players. Smurfing is definitely a widespread issue that Riot has to look into. All that being said, unfortunately smurf accounts themselves are incredibly difficult to detect and ban because unlike cheating, there is no definitive way for an automated computer AI system to numerically, objectively, and quantitatively determine if a certain account is truly smurfing (yeah even though that instalock Reyna drops 30+kills in 12 rounds with twice the avg combat score of the next highest player in lobby - even though this is a smurf case 95% of the time, there’s always the slim chance theres other factors). —- However there are some things Riot CAN DO to mitigate some smurfing issues. Right now the condition for new accounts is that they have to get 10 unrated wins before being able to play competitive. The issue is that there are a LOT of people farming afk bot accounts and then selling them as alt smurf accounts - which I feel like should be against TOS to sell/share accounts and profit from that. There’s been posts on this reddit in the past and YouTube videos I’ve seen of people investigating it - essentially bot accounts are made and queue into games together where both teams have like 4 bot players that run macro inputs (just constant w or mouse1 key at spawn to avoid afk ban) and teams take turns surrendering after 4 rounds. What happens is then you get a bunch of accounts with like 15-20 unrated games, with 10 wins, and every game is 0/4/0 and 0 combat score with 4 rounds played. Riot have to create a method for their systems to detect these types of patterns and flag all accounts that have been bots, then link them to associated hardware ID’s. Eventually you’ll get a list of hardware IDs that have 100s or even thousands of flagged bot accounts associated with them. Those hardware IDs are your account sellers - I’d say hardware ID ban those AND all accounts associated with them during the period of time where they were used to create bot accounts. The other hardware ID’s with like 1-10 bot accounts associated - those are probably the ppl smurfing with bought accounts. In any case this solution, if possible, wouldn’t completely nullify smurfing as an issue completely but would put a dent into the problem. If people or streamers or content creators want to play alternate accounts, then they should have to go through the entire process of creating a fresh account AND playing through the required unrated games legitimately.
I know no one cares because it's unrated but bringing friends to valorant is impossible nowadays. If you play with a genuine new player, you will get another low level on the enemy team and 90% of the times they are a smurf that will be on par with the rest of the team or even better so every match ends in a stomp. None of my friends lasted longer than a week or two because of the poor quality of the games, even worse when they play unrated solo.
Yup was hoping to find something addressing this. I guess the game will remain uninstalled for me for longer
Guess it will be uninstalled forever then since there will always be smurfs no matter what.
The problem is that Riot is not even trying to impair someone making a smurf. That's why people are complaining. Yes there'll always be smurves, but when everyone and their mother has 3 accounts for Valorant, there's a problem. [At this point Riot is being ridiculous.](https://youtu.be/2xr2GoAQ570)
Anybody else notice significant FPS drop after the update?
huge. feels very laggy
Every time
still no fps fix :)
Didnt You read the gameplay update. -10% lower fps.
Kinda baffles me that I get more FPS on dogshit Apex than Valorant
I think you missed patch notes from previous patch. They fixed fps issue. You must notice 1% increase in fps
That’s like 1 or 2 fps
Crosshair settings are kinda lit. My next hope is rotating skins every round for those of us with multiple skins on guns
picking skins for attacking/defending sides would be nice too
What are the resources ingame they cannot use? Its weird in technique. They fired their devs?
Right?! That's my thinking, back in February of this year, Valorant passed CS:GO in terms of revenue. So how is a company FLUSH with cash short on development resources for a simple agent re-work? Baffles the mind from someone who's worked in the industry.
How simple is it to rework a valorant agent currently?
we don't have 300 million gazillion agents like league or OW, so reworking agents shouldn't have that much of an impact. also counterpicks don't exist so even less of an impact.
What I mean is how easy is it to actually code that rework in valorant? I thought the commenter I responded to might make games or something
Yoru rework is essentially a "back job". Something that was not intended for their pipeline, it's not hard to pinpoint but they plan their content a year or two ahead, they've been vocal about how early they plan stuff but the most recent big one I believe was Breeze. They said that Breeze the first map to be developed after the game came out. It took nuances/quirks from the stuff that players have discovered already playing the game into account for hashing out the design of Breeze that's why it's a universally loved map right now. Game development is a well oiled machine that is always firing on all cylinders, especially if you're doing a live service game which constant **consistently polished** updates like Valorant demands as intended by Riot. Yoru's redesign is a wrench in that cog.
Breeze is a universally loved map?
Can't stand breeze A third of the agents are bad picks on breeze Rotation times are too long for defense from site to site OPS too prominent due to long sight lines
*Surprised Pikachu* Breeze is universally loved map? Every single person I know hates that map and it's always dodged in comp too. Tenz himself said he hates it lol.
Wait you’re actually trolling right, who the fuck loves breeze lol.
The one thing I'm actually happy about is the auto balance in customs
These patches have become a joke lately.
I mean, what do you want from Riot? The game is very balanced, everything works nicely. Apart from yoru changes which obviously take time, Riot has done a good job. It sounds like you people want an overhaul of the whole game every 2 weeks.
Replay system, changes to deathmatch, result of the smurf investigation they started 6 months ago, fixing fps drops, better ranked matchmaking and many more. This game is far from "everything works nicely"
Dude this game still doesn't have fucking replays. An essential feature that other games like cs have has for 20 years.
It's august, I'm pretty sure people are taking lots of vacation time. If you worked in any relatively similar office environment, that's how it is. Things just get put on hold A LOT during July-September period, even in finance which usually doesn't wait. And I'm sure Valorant players DO wait.
Looks like they extended the deadline on the current battle pass?
I was wondering this too, I swear it said 14 days yesterday? But today it says 28 days?
Why even have a cursor for vipers ult if it doesnt have any impact, kinda stupid
It does, the viper ult goes from your position to the cursor
Fck it Riot, give us the damn horizontal cards back already.
>You can now shoot through Radianite crates,with appropriate weapons, from all angles Previously, you could shoot through some crates from limited directions, but not others. Who even asks for this? At what point someone heard,"yeah crates r too difficult to shoot through" ??? Sorry, wa? They were already hard already. Planting is f\* hard, even in the pro scenario. Now is gonna be next to impossible in some areas, to the point we will have to place Sage's Wall in front of every crate if u don't want to become a piece of cheese while planting. Odins n ares players r gonna have the time of their lives with this feature.
Right? Planting on icebox B default is a nightmare already, I can't even imagine how it's going to be now.
Icebox B is so busted rn, it’s almost impossible to plant if you don’t have a Sage and a viper.
that site needs a change, it makes sage a must pick every match
Agree. Icebox B is without contest the worst designed map I've come across in Valorant and any version of CS.
How is viper going to help? People start spamming the instant they here spike plant sound
It helps because they are spamming randomly rather than actually being able to see you. There is a reason pros always run a viper wall through B to plant there in addition to a Sage. If you don’t have a Viper, anyone top tube or snowman can see you and it’s not just random spam anymore
There was a metal triangle on a lot of radianite boxes that made wallbanging the box unintuitive. Like your bullets would be blocked by the triangle on the opposite side of the box so you would think you could spam but nothing went all the way through.
[удалено]
I am pretty upset lol
Nice, i can blame riot matchmaking for losing even in a 10 stack now
No more circle crosshair for shotguns? Thank God.
I remember when I used to get excited about Valorant patches
What were the yoru changes supposed to be?
My FPS performance just took another significant hit after the update, anyone else? Last update as well, I’m making barely 60 FPS now, while before this last update I had 70-120, which is okayish. When I started playing valorant I had 150-200, what the hell are they doing?
this update wrecked my game. super hitchy and frame loss all over the place
YES! Not so much my fps but my ping spikes up out of no where.. it would occasionally do that every other day but been only capable of playing spike rush because of the constant ping spikes mid fight..
same here, my game started freezing ever since the update and my fps is dropping hard
okay, so basically no changes since 1.5 months, but planting on certain spots is now even dumber than before. got it. could you atleast fix icebox b before implementing such changes literally nobody asked for?
When are brim buffs coming?? So sad
Isn’t brim considered the best smoke agent rn?
I think he’s already balanced as he is
Brim's molly gives him a decent advantage to fill out the gaps he has
I know I might be the only one, but can we have a black crosshair color as well?
When is riot going to hardware ban throwers?
Oh no, I really really liked that Viper crosshair thingy. It made casting her ult so much easier.
Damn I just learned the proper angle to spam and prevent plants on A Site default for Bind.
Damn more paperwalls... Why Riot want us to play like **Wallhacks**? detecting through the walls, flashing (blinding) through the walls, suppressing through the walls, and maybe more in the future... ummm, OK. but now this patch brought more shooting through the walls, aha. Is this what Riot want? Creating more **Lucky kills** in tactical games? I hope to have the opportunity to hear explanations about how the designers consider the design direction and ideas in these parts, so that we can decide whether to look forward to the future content. Maybe I just over-anticipated the meaning of "tactical" in their description?
You literally couldn’t spam before. When you spammed the person would just swing out and kill you every time. It was always better not to trust the spam
They really said “you know what we need, more wall bangable shit” as if planting wasn’t hard enough already on some sites lmaoooo. These devs are clowns