Altombre

Of course!

I wish I could weigh in here, but I'm a data/strategy guy - anything about the guts of how the game ticks functionally just isn't my area of expertise. Sorry he's dealing with that, that sounds super frustrating. :(

This is true, it is on a private patch. But, we try to maintain parity where we can for a few reasons:

Aspirationally, we want to feel like pros are playing the same version of the game as the broader playerbase is. It just helps the whole ecosystem feel connected, which is something we care about - as a player, you can watch tournament games and then go play the same game state on live.

Practically, it helps pros by not forcing them to context switch between environments. Yes, they can scrim teams on the tournament environment, but pros also play live Val to practice in their free time, and keeping the state of the game similar helps here.

Logistically, it gives us clearer time windows to organize around, and hopefully also helps the playerbase feel like they have a beat where the tournament ends, after which a period of some changes begins.

All this being said, VAL has a LOT of tournaments, and we are working through how to more efficiently ship ch...

It’s definitely been a bit - but you can expect patch notes with more gameplay changes coming up fairly soon. We’re trying not to shake things up too much during Champions but we’ve got some changes we’re excited to ship after it’s over (spread out over a few patches - we just want to ship what we can, when we can)

We appreciate y’all’s patience while we worked through this; we’ve been doing some team restructuring to get balance changes prioritized and better supported going forward, and I think we’re in a much better spot now. We’re excited for you to see what we’ve been working on!

Honestly it's not that we're not excited, it's just that it's really hard to go into details regarding things like delays. We're super bummed about not being able to ship stuff like the Yoru changes as quickly as we'd like, but a lot of it is just internal logistical stuff that doesn't make much sense or is very satisfying to talk through outside of Riot.

We care and, at least from my experience, are still just as tuned in to how the community is feeling. Some subjects are just tough to weigh in on without unintentionally setting a ton of inaccurate expectations from the community. It's a tough spot to be in, engagement-wise.

/r/ValorantCompetitive is normally pretty active.

We talk about Skye a lot but she’s actually not a balance problem - 49% winrate and her winrate gets worse the higher MMR you get.

That being said we know she’s strong in pro play (from our conversations with pros) and can be frustrating to play against (from our surveys we send every patch), and we also play the game a lot ourselves at a reasonably high level and feel some of the frustration too, hence why she’s a topic of discussion. I can’t promise anything or go into details but we’re very aware of it, she’s just got a few more moving parts than some of our more cut and dry balance topics.

Kayo’s weak in matchmaking. Likely needs buffs - we’re investigating.

Weapon balance is looking pretty good for the most part, but we think there are some opportunities for us to make things feel better. No big outlier balance issues, though, primarily design philosophy stuff.

We have changes we want to make, we just need resources from other teams to make them happen. When balance changes are just numbers tweaks, we can take it on ourselves - when we have to involve other disciplines (animation, VFX, etc. etc.) it takes time to incorporate it into their already-busy schedule.

It's a bummer for us, too, but we absolutely have changes. We just can't commit to a date that they'll actually ship quite yet.

Jett’s been a topic of ours for quite some time, she’s just a bit more complicated when it comes to shaving away power. She’ll likely see changes.

That being said, Jett’s primarily a problem in pro play. In standard matchmaking her winrate is one of the healthier ones around 50%. Sage, Killjoy, and Reyna are the strongest agents in matchmaking by a decent margin, people just don’t talk about them as much!

We actually do often test changes like these, but Killjoy isn’t in a position where she needs compensation buffs. She’s one of the highest winrate agents in the game, and we’re unsure of how much of a winrate dip tagging reduction will actually manifest in, so we’re playing this one safe.

Killjoy’s winrate could drop by 2% and she’d still be in the upper half of the roster. She’s very strong - we’re keeping an eye on her, but I very much doubt that she’s going to end up too weak after these changes.

There can be some amount of that, for sure, but fully ready stuff for months after release isn’t super common. What tends to be more common is content that’s fairly gameplay locked, but needs a lot more work for other disciplines to clear before shipping (like art, QA, engineering, localization, etc)

It obviously differs a lot for games as a service compared to boxed product games, too!

We're actually not sitting on it, game dev just takes a lot longer than people think it does.

Sorry, I focus primarily on gameplay so I don't have as good of visibility on stuff like this!

Of course, happy to help. I don't want to say it's a huge, sweeping change - but basically anytime changes require visual asset updates, we have to move carefully. Visuals, VFX, animation, etc. in our game are really important to land right because of how impactful they are on the gameplay, and since we don't often have balance changes that require this sort of support, sometimes it can take a little bit longer to coordinate through the whole pipeline. Yoru will still be Yoru - it's not like we're reworking the whole kit, by any means - but visual clarity is important, especially for the tricky stuff he does, so we want to make sure it's done right instead of shipping it to live and having people rip their hair out over unclear assets.

Totally! I wouldn't say it's a total overhaul, but art/visual assets in our game are very important to get right because of how much they can impede gameplay. Any time changes involve things like that, it takes a lot more time and resource management to get folks onboard and get the work prioritized vs. all the other stuff our talented artists have on their plates

Thanks for your take! I love talking about this stuff. Regarding rifles - would you be surprised if I told you that numerically, the Vandal performs slightly better than the Phantom in every way?

Vandal has about double the usage rate of the Phantom, alongside a slightly higher K/D and ADR. The difference is very small, but it's there. Even up to the pro level, we've seen Vandal usage and stats score higher than the Phantom. There's likely some amount of selection bias here (aimlords are more likely to pick the Vandal) but the pattern has stayed true over months of games, which gives us an immense sample to piece through.

That's not to say we'd never make changes or that these metrics make it impossible for us to make changes - data is a tool for us to inform our changes, it doesn't decide our changes for us. I just think this particular stat is pretty interesting because it doesn't line up with people's immediate impression of the guns in-game (my...

Not sure, I primarily focus on gameplay. Sorry!

We actually have a direction we're pretty confident in, it just needs more resources than our changes normally do - most of the time our changes are numbers tweaks, but whenever something needs art resources we have to coordinate with other disciplines (outside of just design and insights) a bit more. Also yeah, Yoru is a bit more complex than our other agents, so that's a component of it as well; but we've iterated for awhile at this point. It's a tough situation for us to be in, too - we want to get changes out as soon as possible.

I can't go into details, but they're not just numbers tweaks, yeah!