Altombre

I talked about this a bit on Twitter, it's hard to convey the context in that few characters. Masters Shanghai itself is on 8.08, but they'll play on 8.07 until then. So, our hope was that by getting these changes out for 8.08, teams will have to time to actually adjust to them before having to play on them competitively rather than flipping things immediately. We also wanted to get ahead of Cypher and Viper and are trying to be more proactive with balance changes this year.

Hey! This is a great question. I also appreciate you challenging the perceived mindset while also being super respectful.

Candidly, this is a really difficult space, and I think deeper topics like this are probably better handled over voice than text. I think there are a few things I can highlight, though:

• When we make content, we do aspire for it to be relevant in as many environments as possible. That means across the spectrum of skill (lower skill to higher skill) as well as across the spectrum of coordination (lower coordination to higher coordination).
  • Pro play is high skill, high coordination.
  • Playing in Premier with a crew of lower ranked friends might be low/medium skill, high coordination.
  • Playing in high level solo queue would be high skill, low coordination. Et cetera.
• I agree that some of our content doesn't feel as relevant as it could be across some of these variables. Some things feel a lot bet...

Yall are owed a deeper explanation on this, but the short version is that:

• Replication saw very low player numbers, to the point of queue health concerns (players waiting in queue for long periods of time OR playing in pretty lopsided/unbalanced matches). There just weren't that many people who played it, even if it might not feel that way for folks who loved it.
• Replication takes a non-negligible amount of work for us to maintain, given the unique nature of the bugs it can create with all the interactions there. It creates a little pocket of special issues we have to address that are only relevant in Replication, whereas most of our bugs permeate across many of our modes (meaning when you fix them, you're improving the experience in lots of different places)
• Replication also is difficult to maintain in terms of performance, with some players in some scenarios (for example, 10 vipers) in our minimum spec machines falling to really low FPS thresholds ...

We'll have more details on that front just explaining where things are at in that May video as well.

There aren't any current plans to bring Replication back this episode, no

For 8.11 we have agent balance changes and an update to the map rotation; those are the things that the Live Game team will be talking about in the video specifically.

8.11 will be other agents

We'll be rotating it in early June, right after Masters Shanghai!

Kind of, broader scope than agents - we have a few teams that have sections. The Live Game team (we do balance and such) is one of the teams that has a section. Can't go into details on the specifics quite yet but I'd be sure to watch it!

Holistically. But, it's worth noting that VALORANT is fundamentally a competitive game - and if the game doesn't function at the highest level, we think we've failed. We tend to bias towards high level or pro balance because that is the pinnacle of VALORANT play that, as players learn and get better, they should be aspiring towards. That's not to say we don't want the game to be balanced for all of our players, though - we definitely do.

It'd just be a strange state of the game for the game to get worse or less balanced the better you get at it. Why would you keep investing time, then?

All that being said, yeah we're looking at things holistically. I personally believe these changes should feel relevant for all of our players, not just professionals.

Hey, this was me. I just wanted to say that we're working on a video right now that will go into a bit more detail on these changes, set to launch around mid-May. Happy to answer whatever questions I can in the interim (although I can't answer everything!)

Just to dispel any speculation, this is when our next map rotation will occur, yeap. Right after Masters Shanghai.

So, I talked about this a bit 4 months ago when we made this change, so you can find context in the link below. But, I want to say that our intent has always been to evaluate how this does, and we see a lot of the feedback yall are giving around how it's felt and we're talking about it internally. We hear you on the pain of the current system.

Older context: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/192g7lr/comment/kh2x5sa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I know this probably isn't what you want to hear, but just wanted to confirm that we are working on Duelist changes right now. We'll be ready to talk more details soon (we're working on a dev diary video rn), and you can expect to see some changes shipped after Masters 2.

We're in the middle of VCT right now - there'll be a map rotation after Masters 2 in June!

Hey, totally a reasonable question. The biggest cost you pay here is match quality/matchmaking for both queues. In this scenario, generally players in both queues for Swiftplay - all maps and compet-pool-only maps - would wait in queue longer for games that are likely lower quality in terms of being balanced teams. Especially if you start also trying to do party balance like avoiding putting 5-stacks against solo queuers, etc.

It's not impossible if both queues are extremely popular, but it falls apart really fast and is pretty difficult to maintain. Queue health is something we internally have to be pretty diligent about maintaining; it feels bad to be in badly balanced games and it feels bad to wait in queue for awhile, especially for a 10-15 minute experience. So, it's all a balancing act.

I think this is a reasonable take fwiw, it's something we've talked about. We just wanted to try the universal consistent approach first to see how it went.

I talk about this call on the other VAL subreddit here for a bit of context.

Hey! I can give a little context here. So, first off, this is a pretty simple change and something we'll be gathering feedback on; definitely open to reevaluating this if there's a lot of criticism here. To share some of the reasons why we wanted to pull the entire modes ecosystem into one pool:

• Right now, the majority of players who play Swiftplay still play it as a side mode, with Unrated or Competitive being their main way to engage with VAL. We've seen feedback from these players that Swiftplay games on maps outside of the map pool can feel "wasted", as they're not relevant to their main game experience, and they're mainly looking for ways to get fast reps of the VAL experience (warming up for ranked, practicing a new agent for Premier, etc.). By bringing all modes into the map rotation, we ensure that games remain relevant for folks who are also engaging in our Unrated/Compet queues, which are the vast majority of players who play these modes.
• For playe...

Hey all! Wanted to clear up any confusion re: the patch 7.04 preview for VAL:

This patch won't go live until next week, AFTER Champions. There are a lot of changes here that we've been testing for awhile, and I want to give some more context around how we're thinking about them:

Regarding timing: This is a big patch that we've been testing internally for awhile now. We're not willing to risk potentially disrupting Champions with a major patch during the tournament, so we opted to drop this patch afterwards to give player...