Altombre

If anything this is a good proof for my other comment - when we decided to make these skins, Guardian was intended to be a “premiere” weapon alongside the Vandal and was a popular weapon in playtests so the skins team decided to make skins for it.

But now we’ve realized it’s not living up to that power level and have repurposed it at the 2500 price point as a somewhat more niche weapon. But it’s got two upgrading skins and the Phantom has none.

If we could magically conjure skins quickly... do y’all think we’d intentionally decide to sell two Guardian skins and no Phantom ones? Doesn’t seem like it’d make much sense to me given how popular those two weapons are comparatively nowadays. But, given the dev time we made the decisions we did and are catching up to current meta. Like I said before, this stuff just takes awhile to make!

I can! The very short answer is we use data analytics and surveys to identify groups of players we're interested in testing with, and then send out email invites to ask them to come playtest with us.

Obviously things are a bit different now with quarantine in the US, but we're still running tests, discussion groups, etc. with players in the same way, just remotely. If you're interested in this sort of thing, check the email you have associated with Valorant periodically - you may find a survey or email there that asks about your availability to playtest on a given date!

These gun skins actually take quite a long time to get made, and the team was making weapon design changes internally all the way up until the release of our Friends and Family test build shortly before Closed Beta. At the time we made the call to make a lot of these skins, the Phantom was definitely more of a second fiddle niche weapon defined by its silencer and more controllable spray, with the Vandal being the default premiere rifle. The Phantom's since been buffed up to be similar in power levels to the Vandal, but the skin representation calls trail behind that due to development time.

It's definitely not some big brain marketing scheme like the posts below imply... the game's just constantly evolving, and it takes much longer to concept out and then develop an entire skin line than it does to tweak weapon numbers in development. We're not intentionally withholding all the dope Phantom skins we've got locked away, these things just take awhile to make!

Of course! Regarding accept/decline - unfortunately I don’t work on the feature side of the project so I can’t really speak to stuff like match accepts/queues/etc at all

This is a broader design question I’m not the best equipped to answer (I’m in insights, not design) but I think one key difference between us and League is that we get “free freshness” via our map ecosystem. League games are always one big accumulator function which makes the curve of a game feel different, but it always takes place on SR which has a patch meta.

For us, having different maps, different sides, and different economic states I think makes a “single patch meta” hopefully feel much more diverse; the meta on Ascent may not be the same as the meta on Bind, you play both offense and defense in a single game, etc. I think that’s a cool thing that gets us a lot of variety and freshness on any individual patch.

I wrote that so I can probably give some context - the Guardian is still pretty versatile in terms of the broader weapon arsenal. A dedicated long range weapon would be something like the Marshal or the Operator, where you’re at a substantial disadvantage in close range engagements - the Guardian is intended to be stronger at long ranges, but still strong enough to be usable in close/medium range, even if it’s not optimal.

The Rifle weapon class tends to be defined by its versatility compared to other weapon classes - they’re generally powerful at all ranges, even if they get beat by specialized weapons at the edges (snipers long range, shotguns short range). That’s what the versatility component means there - we want it to still be usable in medium and close ranges, but just be best used at longer ranges than the other Rifles in the Arsenal. If you want to use a long range leaning weapon that doesn’t get destroyed if you’ve got to clear some close range angles, the Guardi...

Professional play and Rated queue are very different beasts and we approach balancing on those metrics very differently. We don't solely balance the game around pro play - we look at all levels, because we care about all of our players. Also, pro play generally tends to take a bit to adapt to more recent changes; when teams practice with a certain comp, switching things up and being confident enough to pull them out in a tournament takes time.

So, yeah, we're keeping an eye on Viper here overall, but I just don't want to set the impression that her having a 1% pick rate in a tournament means she absolutely deserves buffs (it could, but it's not a guarantee, especially after just one patch in a very early pro meta). There are going to be a lot of metas in Valorant that exist in pro play that don't translate to standard play and vice versa, and we need to be able to balance both accordingly.

This comment lower in the thread explains it really well, actually

https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/hmuao8/valorant_103_patch_notes/fx7e4ii/

Reyna's not bad, but she's not objectively strong either. She's not the strongest agent in any MMR range, and actually isn't even the strongest Duelist agent in any MMR range. She's still pretty good on average, and we're talking about whether we can make changes to make her a bit less frustrating to play against... but unless something changes this upcoming patch, Reyna changes likely won't be centered around cutting down her power (since she's not too strong in any MMR range right now).

RIP doggo smite. I still call chickens wraiths, I'm ancient

Viper's one of our most complex agents and was rarely getting played pre-buff - we didn't want to back to back buff her, since a lot of players were getting back into her kit and trying her out after the first buff and we expected there to be some learning curve going on.

We're keeping an eye on her, though - if she continues to need buffs we'll continue to buff her, we're just trying to tread lightly and not slam big buffs in back to back patches.

Sorry, I don't work on this stuff but we appreciate the feedback! Balance team just works on game content work, not features like Rated, queues, matchmaking, etc.

Twin Shadows? You mean spooky ghosts?

We’re keeping an eye out but overall agents were looking fairly healthy so we opted to give y’all some time to play and develop the meta in the early days of Rated.

We’ll likely be making some tweaks next patch, though. Generally speaking, we don’t want everyone to feel like the game meta changes wildly every two weeks, so if we’ve got a chance to go light with changes we’ll probably take it and use that extra time to analyze the meta’s development.

They’re pop rocks. Sticky, make crackling noises. Mystery solved

I agree, I think there's lots of cool potential for a waterbender fantasy character on the roster, some interesting ability concepts there. Maybe some day!

Sage is actually a geomancer. She's the earth bender. She doesn't use ice.

Everyone thinks she does though! We don't have a waterbender on the roster.

Of course, I hope you do too! Best of luck in your games.

I'll preface by saying I'm not a designer, so my work doesn't really get checked against the tac cycle. But the short answer is - we wouldn't. Going through designing a new agent has a ton of different processes and frameworks to think through - the way the tac cycle would come in is when we're playtesting the agent or looking to sign off on the kit or not. If the agent's gameplay fundamentally breaks the tac cycle, something is wrong.

The Tac Cycle is super high level; it's not something we look at to inform or generate ideas for design, it's something that serves as a boundary around the content we make and a reminder of the kind of game we're making.

Yup, for sure. Social media can helpful to source opinions and understand the broad strokes of sentiment; it's less precise than crafted survey work, though. We like to be able to view player sentiment trend over time and adjust in response to the changes we make, which is generally a lot harder to do and less reliable to do with social listening than a solid survey framework. Social media definitely has its place in helping us source issues and understand some of the nuance behind them, though!