Anna Donlon & Joe Ziegler

Hi everyone,

If you’ve been following along, you probably heard our announcement that VALORANT is launching to most of the world* on June 2 (yes that also includes you OCE!). That’s in a few weeks (we also said that)!

We also know that in announcing our launch date we raise a number of questions, with the largest being the title of this piece:are we ready? Every week we’ve touched on a number of questions, concerns, and hot topics, but it’s an entirely different conversation when launch is around the corner.

New week, new us. From the last week to this one, our family and community of VALORANT has grown exponentially, and we’re happy to be able to see players in Latin America, Brazil, and Korea getting into the closed beta! Welcome! And now that you’ve all been playing VALORANT, we assume you also have endless questions that we’re here to answer.

We’re going to keep our intros short because there are three topics we’d like to cover. The first is one we’re passionate about: peeker’s advantage. Specifically, in the times when an enemy player comes around the corner and appears to be running and gunning while still being accurate. Here’s David Straily, VALORANT’s technical engineering lead to explain:

Hi all! Let’s get right to it:...

… And we’re back! We’re a month into the global rollout of the VALORANT Closed Beta, and while we’re all just a little tired, it’s also been a lot of fun. Last week (if you caught it), we announced that our top priority heading into May was to get as many of our regional servers online and running as soon as possible, and we’re so happy to be speaking to a new set of regions today. Welcome Korea, welcome Brazil, and welcome Latin America.

Speaking of Latin America, now we’re getting to the real challenges of this closed beta. As of writing this (it’s April 29 right now), we’re still not sure if we’ll have our Mexico City datacenters online for May 5. Dave Heironymus, VALORANT’s technical director, will have more insights on this.

But first... we want to talk about something that’s close to our hearts and an inevitable challenge we’ll need to overcome in a competitiv...

Another week of VALORANT Closed Beta in the books, and it looks like we’re getting (somewhat) into the rhythm of things. Over the past two weeks, we’ve been able to patch multiple times to address emergent exploits, fix many bugs (including a revolver-wielding camera that we thought was hilarious), and make our first (but definitely not last) balance change of the closed beta.

But a community at play is also one that never sleeps, and we’re already seeing new things to tackle. So without further ado, let’s get to some emergent topics.

We saw how much you all loved Paul Chamberlain, VALORANT’s anti-cheat lead, the first time around, so we brought him back to quickly chat about some additional Vanguard bugs he’s seeing in the wild, and some adjustments we’ve made from your feedback.

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The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of activity as we keep stress-testing VALORANT, its server infrastructure, and underlying technology. We’ve learned many, many lessons over this short period of time and want to stay open and transparent in how we keep going. So on that note, we’re spinning up a weekly ‘State of the Closed Beta’ post where we can answer questions and discuss topics we’re seeing raised all around the world.

First, now that the honeymoon is over with some VALORANT players (two weeks!), we’re seeing some real discussion happening on every competitive players’ favorite topic: game balance. In particular? Raze. And how a damage-oriented agent can exist in the tactical shooter space. Here’s VALORANT’s lead game designer, Trevor Romleski, to talk about Raze, how w...