EvrMoar

I've owned both the Shidenkai and Ice, I haven't noticed my ice wearing and I've had it for almost 6 months? There are areas where my wrist sit, or center circle where my mouse usually moves, that has slight discoloration but no noticeable drag differences. It has so far lasted longer than my Shidenkai. The Shidenkai definitely reminded me of a coating that wore away, and the Ice feels more like a surface(you can't really tell its coated).

That being said, I've been busy moving the past few months so I haven't used it as much as I normally would have been. I love the Ice and would probably just eat the 35$ every 6-12months if it does wear out, just because I enjoy it so much.

The forward-facing rank doesn't determine the matchmaking, or skill difference in your games.

We could make 80% of all players be silver, but you would still get matched against the same players around your skill. So the games feeling like a dice roll isn't due to the rank pools we chose.

I think it's actually a good thing that you started to define plat as "games felt fair". That means you are seeing a difference in skill when climbing ranks "Plat feels different then X rank" are statements we want to hear and why we balance distribution this way.

I think lower ranks can feel chaotic to some people who expect a certain way to play, and players are often very swingy in skill. I think this leads to believing there are smurfs, or you run into a cracked player, in lower ranks. Players in low ranks play in lots of weird ways, that throw players expecting a certain way to play the game out the window. Also some players only are good at X agent, or X map. There ar...

I am a PC Peripheral ADDICT. I buy too many Mice, Keyboards, and Mouse Pads.

I really like the glorius mouse ice pad, I really like the hybrid coated mouse pads with low friction.

https://www.pcgamingrace.com/products/glorious-element-mouse-pad-ice

...

To start, we don't balance our ranked distribution based on what League is doing or their system. While I do talk with their designers, the Valorant team believes in the decisions from my team to do what we believe is the correct distribution for Valorant.

There are two outcomes I'd like to hit when setting our ranked distribution:

1.The community can start to paint a picture of skill related to that rank; "That was a Gold play", "That player has the crosshair placement of a Bronze player", etc.

2.Climbing ranks feels like you've increased in skill to get there, and by getting better at the game that rank increase feels meaningful. This prestige can also be seen in the population % of each rank, especially at the high ranks.

So with the above goals in mind you have to decide on 1 of 2 ways to balance your distribution:

1.You balance based on MMR, so every rank is even. For example; Iron = 500, Bronze = 600, Silver = 700, Gold = 800, etc. Beca...

Any system is just trying to measure your skill against someone else, because the first step of creating a match is being able to find two similar skilled opponents/teams. There are lots of systems that actually don't look at Win/Loss and only care about performance like KDA(just depends on the game).

A Matchmaker's goal is to find a way to measure player skill and ensure fair matchmaking. You do this by figuring out how to measure players(This is MMR in most systems), then have the match maker guess the outcome of a match(the higher MMR team should win). It doesn't matter if MMR is based on performance, or win/loss, or even total money earned, etc. You want to find the thing that will predict player skill, or the match outcome, the best.

If you were to just measure win/loss, and create a win/loss MMR, then you go back and check at how often a team with a higher Win/Loss MMR actually wins, this is how to measure if your MMR system is working. If you make a system wh...

If you have good data scientists, and know the goals of what your system is supposed to do, it isn't too complicated. We have people who have dedicated their careers to match making and rating systems, or people who are just amazing mathematicians. Games have been working on match making for a while now, and you have systems like True Skill 2 which can detect way more than players even realize. Highly suggest watching a GDC talk by Josh Menke to learn more about this space if it interests you.

You can see a comment I made on this deeper in the thread: ...

TECHNICALLY if you wanted to try to calculate missed or faked ability usage:

You could bounce a couple traces around corners, or check to see if an ability was in the eyesight of an enemy player(so they looked at the ability means it effected their judgement), then look to see if they moved from that spot, were dealt damage, etc. There are some other ways as well, but our system does not take into account fake abilities because there would probably be a large false positive % to them.

All hypothetical, but it probably isn't worth the work in the long run to determine fake or missed abilities.

As for a system that can determine ability usage, that's pretty easy and our system does do this. You could look at any ability, how many people it hits, what it is doing, etc. and figure out its impact. I'm not going to talk about how we do this, or how the systems evaluate abilities, but every ability could technically have a measurable % it helps win a round or get a...

All ranks got squished, even previous radiants started Diamond 1. Soft resets push all ranks down, it helps prevent inflation or players who get boosted and sit higher than they belong.

We also made adjustments to how your MMR is calculated which caused movement in ranks and where people belonged. This is because we pulled out a system that weighted MMR based on number of games played.

Episodes are about 6 months, you'll have plenty of time to improve and get back to gold if you choose to.

Well, maybe you can explain me why every match doesn't end up close. Then why is there in every game 1 player performing utterly bad. Why do I get matched with 2nd or 3rd accounts who doesn't take ranked seriously.

Lets look at your matches this act on this account: https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/Omen%23diff/matches?playlist=competitive

You've played 25 matches 19 out of 25 matches ended in 13-6 or higher. That means only 6 of your matches, out of 25, would have been considered "One Sided"(by how we measure games internally).

Even if you increase that to 13-8, 12 of your matches ended at or above...

I'm really busy today, but I want to get back to this with a good answer.

Could you link your tracker.gg, I want to talk about your matches specifically because "My matches don't end up close" does not paint a proper picture of your match history. I can't talk about facts when I don't know your matches.

Ouch

Jk, if you can't take criticism game design is probably not the place to be. Honestly, it sucks you may be having a bad experience but if a ranked system doesn't have any complaints your system probably isn't working right.

At the end of the day, the system isn't here to give you easy matches, it's suppose to test you against around your skill (at, below, and above). I would be surprised if you are truly going against Diamond opponents, instead of people who were diamond and have fallen to lower ranks. Just because someone diamond before does not mean they deserve diamond now, nor is it a reflection of that player's current skill.

We made changes that made the match maker more accurate, for lots of people that means if you were truly hard stuck or felt like you had unfair matches the system should feel better. Unfortunately, for people who may have been higher rank than they should have been those people are more likely to get pushed down. Since we made...

Doesn't effect MMR, only RR.

We updated AFK penalties this patch: https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/game-updates/valorant-patch-notes-3-0/

AFK PENALTIES

Increased maximum AFK penalty to -12 RR

Minimum AFK penalty at -8RR

AFK Rank Rating penalty can still go above the -30 RR Loss barrier, allowing you to lose over -30 RR if you AFK and lose a match

AFK penalties start at 3 rounds and escalate for each round you are AFK, for up to 6 rounds

If you are AFK for 6 or more rounds, and your team wins, you gain no RR for the win and are penalized the maximum -12 RR

We agree, it feels bad to carry an AFK player and have them...

This is asked for a lot but it's something we can't do because it causes RR manipulation and toxicity.

People would make alt accounts to AFK for a friend to help them not lose as much. Alternatively people would dog pile on players to get them to AFK, especially if they were low on the leaderboard. So lots of players would turn toxic to try and force a player to leave the match, so they wouldn't lose as much RR.

Leaving the match, or dc'ing needs to not be incentivized so you need to target the action directly. Our penalties do escalate and AFK'ing once may be a low penalty, but there are plenty of people with multi-week bans from playing competitive for AFK'ing(Trust me I get lots of twitter DM's asking to get penalties lifted). Also the system will remember if you are a habitual AFK'er even if you just served your punishment. It requires you to not AFK in order to play ranked, otherwise the penalty just becomes insane.

We also no longer award you Ranked Ra...

My biggest advice is to play the game and get comfortable first.

There are some great videos on basic mechanics, and some of the things you should probably be doing. Watching an intro guide on youtube, or beginners guide, should probably give you all the info you need.

Don't overwhelm yourself, or worry about the details. Go get comfortable with how the game feels, and just play it and have fun. I've worked on a lot of shooters and the one thing we always see, in terms of measuring skill, is that players improve and get better at the game by playing the game more. So more time played = getting better at the game.

Yes there will be a time where you can min/max and try to learn all the fancy details about the game. But I wouldn't sweat it early on. Maybe watch a skill capped video once and a while after you are done playing each day.

Good luck :)

Placements let your MMR flux up/down more then normal. If you tank your placements you lower your MMR, which will make it harder to climb in the long run. If you do well on your placements you will raise your MMR and make it easier to climb.

maybe we increased our fair matchmaking too much😎

There are two MMR's that make up your whole MMR. Part of it is encounter/skill the other is win/loss :)

You would actually be surprsied with how far match makers have come with predictability/knowing your skill.

Matchmakers know your skill because it's you compared to all the other players in the game. I highly suggest watching this talk from Josh Menke to understand matchmakers better: https://youtu.be/-pglxege-gU

Also, interlocking duelists, or playing to slay, does not work in MMR systems that take into account skill/encounter(well if done correctly). Because it's not about dropping a 30 bomb, it's who you kill that matters. Killing TenZ would give you way more rank movement than killing a gol...

I mean, I've only been at Riot 7 months, and with almost a decade of game dev I would say it hasn't substantially changed the way I work or think of game design.

We just want to make sure we get the best bang for our buck. Why would we implement SMS Verification if we have a different solution that takes less time to make while also having a better impact?

Again, I'm not saying we are or are not doing SMS, we just have to make sure we know our options, how long they take to implement, and the other side effects they may create from implementing them. I would argue it's just being smart about your decision-making process.

I've never said we can remove all smurfs, I don't think anyone on the team believes that. We agree that whatever we do will only reduce it, and we want to make sure that we choose the best solution.

If there was a verification type system, remember some players that aren't smurfs will be blocked by it.

If there is a system th...