Altombre

I'm really happy to hear you're feeling heard, we love this game as much as the rest of you and care a ton about your feedback. Please continue to talk to us and help us make the game better.

Bullet tagging is something we're looking at right now! No details or changes yet, but we've gotten a lot of feedback from the community about it and it's getting talked about internally.

This is a bug fix! We’ve had the line for awhile, it just wasn’t playing in the right instances. Hopefully this should improve game wide clarity on when Sage is using her ultimate.

We agree! We have a fix for this in the next patch.

There's definitely been discussion on this, it's just a bit of a more involved problem to try and solve for since visual clutter is so scary in our game and all of of our artists are working hard on other content that we need to finish to ship the game.

So the short answer is - no changes on that in this patch, we're aware of this though and will continue to keep it in mind if we can swing in for some lightweight QoL changes at some point.

Of course! I was a player far before I was a game dev, and there's no worse feeling than being invested in a game and feeling like the devs just don't care or listen. That's one of the reasons I joined Riot in the first place.

We're looking into this now, just not feasible with the current state of the client in beta. Hoping we can add it down the line!

No apologies needed, this bothers me too (also an MMO nerd). I'll look into this

Let me clarify - we use Reddit and Twitter to stay in touch with the community and communicate about the game. One of my roles on the team is to provide data for us to make decisions off of though, which is why we utilize things like surveys and data analytics to gather objective measurements of sentiment and content performance. Valorant's a global game and we can't keep in touch with player sentiment just by checking out some English-speaking social media channels from time to time, which is why we have these other sentiment gathering tools to lean on.

One of our core tenants on the balance team is to not "kneejerk" and be methodical, thoughtful, and data-informed with our changes, so if you're worried about us freaking out over Reddit threads we've all been through it before on League and other game dev jobs in the past.

Raze is a good agent, but isn't grossly strong by the numbers by any means - we're looking at fractions of a percentage difference in terms of her performance compared to other agents, and we've been watching her performance decline over time as players get more experience in the game and playing against her.

That being said, some of her abilities aren't meeting our clarity goals for how severe their punishment is, so we're hoping these changes will help (there's actually a lot involved in those audio changes there). On top of that, reducing it down to 1 grenade will encourage Razes to be more thoughtful about their utility, and rewards good Razes by giving them access to more grenades than the baseline with kill resets.

She's strong enough that she can take a thwack on the head right now and stay perfectly viable, while also giving everyone a bit more breathing room and information to get comfortable. If she ends up being too weak after these changes as time goes o...

Yeah, hopefully with grenade change will also lower the amount of kills and ult points she's generating as well. We're definitely keeping an eye on things.

Only walking in the slow! Running and jumping will still make noise.

We definitely watch Reddit, Twitter, etc. but also send out periodic surveys to gather player opinions on a variety of topics; just spinning things up right now.

On that point - we want to continue gathering data from this change to see how effective these nerfs will be, but there is a change we're shipping on audio clarity for the ult. When she uses her ult, you'll not only hear her voice line, but also an equip sound for her rocket launcher that can be attenuated in 3D - similar to how you can hear Phoenix's fire coming from a specific location when he starts ulting. Basically, if Raze ults nearby you, you should be able to audiolocate her based off of the rocket equip sound and play accordingly.

This may still not be enough information, especially with Razes who are good at Satcheling themselves forwards to augment their speed with their ult out, but it hopefully will provide better texture to the information you're getting and we can work from there. Rest assured we will continue to make changes if she's not meeting our goals here!

It's worth calling out that walking in the slow field is even slower than normal walking - it'll still take you quite some time to get through, but should reduce some of the free information and certainty of safety that Sage gets when throwing her slow orbs currently. We felt giving players a slow, silent option adds more texture to the entire ability instead of the previous iteration, "make noise or don't interact with it"

You’ll definitely be getting email surveys, and the ones about gameplay content and balance will almost certainly be written by yours truly. Building surveys and analyzing data from them is one of my responsibilities on the team. We’ve sent out a few already, actually!

No need to worry on this one - we'll be involved more frequently than that. Like Trevor said in the video, we don't want to commit to a specific cadence right now because we want to figure out what works best for the game's health and community, but it's incredibly safe to say that we'll be patching much more frequently than 6 months.

We'll be gathering feedback from you all over the course of closed beta (and past that) on topics like this - how balanced you feel various pieces of the game are, how you feel about the current rate of change in the game, etc.

Oh yeah, I'm trying to speak to the philosophy on paper but that doesn't mean that we don't care about the pain players are experiencing. The balance team is committed to making the game numerically balanced as well as an enjoyable experience, and we hear the frustration around Raze. We're definitely looking at some changes to make soon.

Yeah, I totally feel you on this.

For your first point - yeah, Raze is the only character who has such lethal punishes, even if she's gated in applying them. I do think Phoenix, Jett, and Sova can apply some "invisible pressure" at round start with their ults, but it's less severe so I feel you. I think you hinted at my response here later in your comment, but our hope is that accessing that power should come with tradeoffs that do feel meaningful - giving up a Sage's stall/heal power or a Viper's zone control to get Raze's lethality should feel like an interesting choice. To your point, if it feels like not a choice at all, we've f*cked up and should swing in with some changes. I think we're all on the same page here.

To your second point, yeah I agree that we have to be methodical in how we add things like this. Ultimates are allowed to be disruptive, as we want them to feed into a team's tactical decision making loop for each round, but if there are too many that...

Yeah, I hear you on this - ceding ground all the time isn't a viable strategy. I'm not a designer, so I'm not an authority on this, but I can speak to my experience at least - I hope it can help a bit. There's two things that I personally have found in spaces like this:

One, it helps a lot that Raze doesn't start the game with her ult - you've gotta play a few rounds before then. By then, I know where Raze has historically been playing, and I respect that portion of the map a bit more instead of ceding everything. She can obviously mix-up and show up elsewhere, but then hopefully we have a bit of information that can help my team on the other side of the map by inferring which agent she could've swapped with. There are basic abilities that also create "invisible pressure" like that - Sova's dart being a prime example. Obviously Raze's ult's output is a lot more severe, so I feel your frustration, but I do think it can lead to some interesting tactics if both teams are playi...

Just to start off, I'm not a designer so it's important to set that context up front! I'm on Insights, specifically on Gameplay, so I'm responsible for things like data informing game balance, playtesting content in development, gathering feedback from players via surveys and labs, etc. I work closely with designers and the balance team, but I don't design anything - I gather data and sentiment on the stuff they make and work with them to help inform our decisions going forward.

So, I'd default to one of our designers around why Raze has this specific ult, but I can speak to it philosophically. Raze's ult is 6 points. It is very lethal, requires near-line of sight (has a small aoe, so you can hit people in corners, but you can't hit them through walls), and is on a tight time window after being equipped to be used. It's definitely sharp ability, but I personally don't feel it's fundamentally broken and can be used as a tactical tool to play around. Compared to other 6 point...