Altombre

I'd love to, to be honest - just need to work with our writers to see if we can get another article out at some point!

She’s actually back to being the highest pickrate and highest winrate agent in the game, too. People still tweet at us asking for buffs tho

I wish I could go into specifics, but I don't want to make promises that end up being untrue. Yoru's always walking a tightrope - finding the right balance between Yoru's ability to infiltrate behind enemy lines and giving heads-up enemies enough information for him to play around him is tough. Right now, his tuning is probably too fair, so we're trying to find ways to empower Yoru to infiltrate and outplay enemies without making it feel like the game state just falls apart any time Yoru is in a game.

I know that's pretty vague, but I can't go into anything more specific unfortunately since it's still a bit out

I think Astra and Viper are pretty different, although I can understand some of the comparisons. In general, we like that Viper has persistent, high footprint, higher commitment, threatening smoke - all of those aspects are pretty unique to her and we’d like to maintain what we can there. Viper commits to her smoke placement more than other controllers, but is able to smoke much larger areas for more of a round as a result, and her smokes are more threatening to push through or play around. We’re experimenting leaning into some of these aspects to see if we can get her into a better spot for solo queue without homogenizing her or detracting from her identity.

Astra has global presence and some defensive value, similar to Viper, but she has much less smoke coverage and uptime (only 2 smokes max out at once, which are tiny domes). She’s more about being flexible and adaptable across the map and challenging the user to optimize her utility in any given round, with some of her ...

It may not seem like it, but we really want to ship these changes as soon as possible too. We just only have so many sets of hands and a lot to juggle - there are more changes we'd like to make than we can realistically ship, so we've gotta prioritize for the sake of balance.

Assuming Astra lands in a reasonably balanced spot, Yoru & Viper will be getting priority for changes. I know it's disappointing for y'all to keep seeing this delayed - it's disappointing for us too. Rest assured that we will get these out as soon as we can once the dust has settled a bit.

If anyone has any questions, happy to answer what I can in here.

Sorry, I just work on gameplay, not game systems - can't speak to anything on this front since I lack context

Yeah, we're working on the tournament realm stuff right now, so this is a temporary problem - that being said, we DO want to keep tournaments & live as similar as possible, just because we think it's exciting to see pro teams playing in the same meta as live. But, it won't necessarily be a blocker like it can feel like at times right now.

Masters is getting played on this patch, so we’re avoiding disruptive changes (Astra isn’t available to play in Masters so she’s an exception).

For full transparency, 2.05 will likely be a lighter patch as well as we keep an eye on Astra’s launch and ensure it’s healthy. Past that point though, we have a gap in tournaments and some time where we may be able to ship some of those changes in that 2.06-2.09 window.

Being able to see bomb defusal status in Astral Form? Yeah, we don't like this behavior and are looking into options now. I'm not sure how easy/difficult changing this would be since I'm not an engineer, so I can't make promises on timelines, but we're not fans of this behavior and are seeing what we can do.

Hm, maybe. But even then, Omen can smoke one area for an extremely long time if he dedicates his (free) signature to it alone, while also having his gun up and using different utility. It's an interesting idea though, try it out!

The interesting thing about Astra is everyone plays her differently. I play her a lot more reactively, spreading my stars around the map and responding to how picks develop. I know other folks on the team who play her a lot more proactively, using her stars to take space and cross angles like what's been suggested in this thread. She's pretty flexible, it's all about how you apply it - we have seen some folks who want to play more backline and spend time in Astral form trying to support their allies with reactive utility too. It's an interesting style to try to master!

Yup, that's intended! It's a pretty tight window that's highly telegraphed. I encourage everyone to try it out on live and see how it feels.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the "infinite" part here, but we didn't get rid of Astra's reclaim option providing a brief burst of smoke. Reclaiming stars puts them on a cooldown and ensures they won't carry over into the next round.

Yup!

Not yet, because masters is getting played on this patch and we don’t want to introduce disruptive changes to live agents there. Astra won’t be eligible to play in Master’s so she’s an exception!

Fun theory, not the case tho! Astra was an original idea. We went through a few iterations of her ult before landing on the wall - she’s actually quite different from Viper in terms of her general play pattern.

Correct. Because any game that has Sage on both sides will just give us a winrate of 50% when one Sage loses and the other Sage wins. We do still look at round-level winrates on attack and defense to see how an agent’s power is manifesting across a match, and you can use mirror match data in those sort of analyses and compare situations in mirror matches or non-mirror matches, but for match winrate we don’t use mirror matched games.

Does your team control for pickrate? I'm primarily asking because it looks like you have Killjoy as the highest winrate agent, but we stopped using direct winrate internally awhile back because we have mirror matches in our game, which means that the higher an agents' pickrate, the more their winrate converges to 50% (because they play against each other more often, slowly converging them to 50%).

This is probably why you have Killjoy as the strongest agent for so long, because she has a decent winrate but more niche playrate than other agents, making her flat-out winrate (including mirror matches) higher. We've used non-mirror match winrate for awhile now and our data ecosystem looks quite different in terms of power because of this! Sage is incredibly strong rn, but her pickrate is so high that her winrate in these visualizations is being compressed down to 50%.

That's not how her heal works, actually - 25 "points" of her heal heals everyone in the radius for 25. So 25 points of her heal is theoretically worth 100 points of healing, if you heal 4 teammates at once for 25. Skye could theoretically heal 400 with one charge of her heal if all her teammates managed to take 100 damage to their health over the course of the round without dying.

I don't work in this area so I'm not qualified to speak to specifics, but we are absolutely aware of the problem and have a team (social & player dynamics) looking into solutions here. Lots of smart folks are thinking about stuff like this and we want to curb this toxicity, absolutely.

Hey! I don't work on this program, but reached out to a Rioter who does to pass along some of the philosophies here.

A lot of comments have already clarified this, but just to chime in - the goal of this program is not to divide genders in competitive play, but rather to support the communities of women who exist in VALORANT and highlight incredible players of those communities. The end game is not to separate genders or to create a separate league - we just want to provide more opportunities for everyone to learn, grow, compete at a high level, and be celebrated by the VALORANT community at large.