Altombre

Tac Cycle is our north star in terms of design philosophy. Whereas we have our "bands" for the data we take in to look at the game state, the Tac Cycle helps us understand if something is healthy for the game or not, regardless of where it sits in the bands. It's basically our core thesis for what the game is about, and all of our content should layer into that philosophy cleanly. If it doesn't, then something is up and we need to investigate.

We care a ton about player feedback and we love interacting with you all on social platforms like this. I worked with DCole to build the framework above, and the reason we don't have social media as an input for "players" is because it's inherently biased - if we only took in English-speaking social media, we'd be inherently biasing towards one population of our playerbase. We want to understand player perception and needs across the globe, so it's important for our sentiment gathering to be unbiased and global.

For example, I've got a survey on balance-related topics I'm looking to field today. It's in the following languages:

English, Russian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish (Spain), Turkish, Spanish (Mexico), Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean.

I've still got more languages to add for future surveys as we build out our infrastructure further, but it's a solid start. Gathering player sentiment in an unbiased way is very much a scientific process and...

Because it fills a volume, not a fixed area. If you use it in a hallway, it’ll go further because the space is narrower. Out in the open it’s always the same square, but it adjusts based on other geo. Constantly updating that UI asset on the minimap may be possible within our performance budget but I’m no engineer and can’t speak to it.

Basically, the short version is that the shape and edges of the ult vary wildly based on where you place it.

Ah don't worry about it, it's all good. Yeah I talk with Nick and Sal about stuff like this literally every day. Tagging is something we still heavily believe in philosophically, but it's also something that's historically been a pain point throughout our entire development cycle - pre-launch, friends and family, closed beta, and now live. And frustration with bullet tagging was consistent across MMR ranges, believe it or not - high MMR players, even in the top fractions of a percent, reported the same levels of frustration as low MMR players.

We've been testing iterations for awhile now, and believe that this version still achieves our design goals for tagging while not feeling as jarring or disruptive. We're keeping a close eye on it, but rest assured we're not sacrificing our design goals here; this is something we feel is a good way to help alleviate some of that frustration while still achieving what we're hoping to achieve with the tagging system.

Increase of 1 second to a 6 second total cool down on Q activations. It went from 5 sec cd last patch to 6 sec cd this patch.

It’s a 1 second increase in the cool down. Previously you had to wait 5 seconds to reactivate your Q after previously activating it, now you have to wait 6

We haven't leveraged player sentiment heavily since launch, since we've wanted to give players time to breathe a bit and learn the game (we leveraged it during CB though). We definitely split by engagement and MMR ranges to understand a spectrum of sentiment, so we know what feels frustrating/fair at different skill levels.

Sentiment tends to be more supplementary data - we don't inherently balance off of it and don't have strict "bands" we respect and monitor like we do with game performance data. But, it's helpful for us to understand the player experiences across our audience and contextualize how the performance numbers actually feel.

I imagine you're just using them for the purpose of an example, but yeah we don't filter by age or gaming background to make some opinions more "legitimate" than others. Yall are Valorant players now. We filter by game metrics to understand the player, like MMR, games played, agents played, etc. etc.

For sure - I'll poke around today and see if there's something weird going on under the hood here.

Personally, Viper is one of my most played agents, and I’d take this wall change for a 1 second window between Q activations without batting an eye. That’s not to say we’re not wrong here, we certainly could be, but give it a shot and let us know what you think. I think these changes are going to open up a lot of options for her.

I am! We’re testing that Guardian price change internally, just haven’t been able to get enough reps to feel confident shipping it yet. Stay tuned on that one, if we go forward with it next patch seems like the likely candidate.

We’re gathering some updated player sentiment on Reyna this week to understand player perceptions of her, so it’s something we’re keeping an eye on but we don’t see anything super egregious right now in terms of data.

Triforce coming to the shop next

This is a great question. I’m pretty confident the answer is no, since decay is more “max health reduction” than actual damage, but to be honest I’m not completely sure off the top of my head. I can check in a little bit

It’s a spicy one for sure. In Viper’s case, it’s pretty opt-in: you’ve gotta step into her Molotov to get this applied to you, so it’ll be much rarer than other debuff effects in that regard. There’s no denying that the debuff is quite strong though.

We’ve normalized it so the ability does the same damage it did before while applying fragile. So, it does, but the ability does “half damage” to compensate now, making its net damage output the same.

Oh! Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

We explain in the patch notes, but we want to create clearer windows to push her one way smoke setups. When combined with much more flexibility of wall placements and the new fragile debuff on snakebite, we felt there was a risk of her feeling very oppressive on defense.

Snakebite + Raze Satchel gotem

If it’s not listed, assume it’s unchanged!

Yeah, between the wall cast paradigm change and this one we didn’t want to add any more power until seeing how this plays out. It may look like a minor change on paper but there’s a ton of power loaded into these two changes. If we have to reel it back, we will, but Viper’s got a good amount of room for buffs while remaining in a healthy range, so we’re hopeful for now!

Yup, that’s a good callout. Let me see if we can add that in...