Altombre

We agree. Brimstone buffs are coming very soon!

Honestly, we've been doing that for awhile now

This is so awesome to see! It's clear you all have put a ton of work in - backstories, kits, and in-game mock art support each of the agent pitches so well.

I myself am not a designer, but I work very closely with them; I'm gameplay insights, so I work on the balance team, play in our daily design playtests, and work on agents and maps that are in development. If there's anything you're looking for specific feedback on or have questions about, let me know! Definitely will be reading through these for awhile :)

This really means a lot, thank you. I'm excited for when we get to show you all the cool new stuff we've been working on!

Thanks so much for playing and supporting Valorant. And keep letting us know what we can improve on!

This is correct! This one will probably be the last Duelist, for a little bit - the other roles could use some new agents as well.

Yeah this one's a bit different! Definitely less of an entry role. Duelists are definitionally meant to secure kills for your team and exert lethal pressure; so far that's been largely by entrying, but having a more lurk-focused Duelist is something we've wanted to try for awhile.

This will probably be the last Duelist for a little bit, at least - the other roles (controller, sentinel, initiator) need some love.

We definitely want to push boundaries and see what's possible! We also know that pretty much every time we release a new agent, there'll be groups of players who think that we've gone too far, that we're intentionally releasing OP characters in an attempt to make money, or that we just don't understand the game or are disconnected from the player experience - but I hope with time (and assuming we don't screw things up too badly) we can build some trust with yall that we can make some out-there concepts work in a tac shooter. Killjoy was definitely scary, given the stigma against turrets in FPS games, but I feel like we got through it alright, and Skye seems to have landed reasonably well as well for a low personal agency, high utility supportive pick.

This next agent will be on the spicier side, for sure. Excited for the discourse that follows, as always haha

My understanding is that we’ve provided some amount of API, but I’m not sure if it’s at the same level of League’s or not (just not the area I work in). I’m hoping we get some solid third party sites up and running soon similar to the League scene!

Super excited to have a blog post where we can speak a bit more candidly about what we do. Balancing perception and reality is always tough, and there's still a lot we can learn about and improve on the balance process, but it's been an awesome journey so far.

It's not touched on too much in this article just due to word count, but working with data is actually only a fraction of what we do; a good chunk of our time is spent building out frameworks and philosophies for how to use that data; no amount of data is useful if the team isn't aligned on what metrics matter, how we want to use them, and what sorts of decisions we'll make off of them.

This is the type of stuff we talk about all the time! The numerical impact of abilities vs. the saliency of those abilities' impacts are very different; it's why we see agents like Breach get selected as OP quite often and Sage as UP, when in reality Breach is actually quite weak and Sage is quite strong. Finding opportunities to make powerful outputs more appreciable and satisfying could help close this gap. In regards to your specific question around Sage's win rate in rounds where she ults, it's pretty high. There are lots of confounds to control for here - economy, number of allies/enemies alive, etc. - but we did do this investigation awhile back, and when controlling for other factors, Sage's ult is the most influential ult in terms of actually winning a round.

Stuff like this is why balance is tricky. I personally have been a huge advocate for incorporating player sentiment into our balance frameworks, so that we're not only tunneling on the data itself, but also tha...

Hey! Super interesting question. I'm not a designer, I'm in insights - basically I do product strategy and data ecosystem work to help out with the gameplay space (agents, maps, balance team) to help us make better decisions there, so I actually don't know how to do this stuff!

This is a super interesting question though, so I'll make sure our designers see it. Thanks for bringing it up!

I understand it can look similar from the outside, but the game balance team and the folks who make decisions on things like our UI in competitive queue are very different.

Jarate already exists in the game on Viper's Snake Bite tho

We're looking at this, just have been holding off changes during First Strike, and want to make sure we're really understanding what the core of the issue is (cause bungling a shooting/movement change could make our combat feel really bad really quickly).

But, rest assured that we're talking about this and looking into it.

edit: This isn't to say we're committing to making changes - we just recognize it's been a hot topic lately and want to analyze and understand it further.

We're definitely looking at this and it's been a topic internally for awhile before any of the TenZ clips started circulating - we've just been holding off on any major changes during First Strike and want to analyze this a bit more.

edit: To be super clear, this isn't to say we're committing to making changes - we just recognize it's been a hot topic lately and want to analyze and understand it further.

I appreciate that! We're trying to strike a balance here, so keep giving us feedback on how we're approaching changes overall.

Probably Episode 2 start, most likely.

We're playtesting with some Brim buffs right now that are pretty promising :)

I’ll pass this along, thanks for the heads up!