Gameplay changes coming after VCT Shanghai that might be bigger than the Viper nerf as per Riot Coleman

Hey, this was me. I just wanted to say that we're working on a video right now that will go into a bit more detail on these changes, set to launch around mid-May. Happy to answer whatever questions I can in the interim (although I can't answer everything!)

Holistically. But, it's worth noting that VALORANT is fundamentally a competitive game - and if the game doesn't function at the highest level, we think we've failed. We tend to bias towards high level or pro balance because that is the pinnacle of VALORANT play that, as players learn and get better, they should be aspiring towards. That's not to say we don't want the game to be balanced for all of our players, though - we definitely do.

It'd just be a strange state of the game for the game to get worse or less balanced the better you get at it. Why would you keep investing time, then?

All that being said, yeah we're looking at things holistically. I personally believe these changes should feel relevant for all of our players, not just professionals.

Kind of, broader scope than agents - we have a few teams that have sections. The Live Game team (we do balance and such) is one of the teams that has a section. Can't go into details on the specifics quite yet but I'd be sure to watch it!

We'll be rotating it in early June, right after Masters Shanghai!

8.11 will be other agents

For 8.11 we have agent balance changes and an update to the map rotation; those are the things that the Live Game team will be talking about in the video specifically.

There aren't any current plans to bring Replication back this episode, no

We'll have more details on that front just explaining where things are at in that May video as well.

Yall are owed a deeper explanation on this, but the short version is that:

• Replication saw very low player numbers, to the point of queue health concerns (players waiting in queue for long periods of time OR playing in pretty lopsided/unbalanced matches). There just weren't that many people who played it, even if it might not feel that way for folks who loved it.
• Replication takes a non-negligible amount of work for us to maintain, given the unique nature of the bugs it can create with all the interactions there. It creates a little pocket of special issues we have to address that are only relevant in Replication, whereas most of our bugs permeate across many of our modes (meaning when you fix them, you're improving the experience in lots of different places)
• Replication also is difficult to maintain in terms of performance, with some players in some scenarios (for example, 10 vipers) in our minimum spec machines falling to really low FPS thresholds or generally having a bad experience
• Replication is also an overhead for our agent designers when building new agents; it takes a decent amount of work to figure out interactions between all the agents and how they'll work to get things to not break and it slows down our development process for making new things

When you put all of those things together, and very few players are playing the mode, we've opted to set it down for now. It's not off the table that we could bring it back in the future, but we'd need to find a way to solve these problems, and right now it feels like we have bigger things to prioritize to keep the game healthy.

Hey! This is a great question. I also appreciate you challenging the perceived mindset while also being super respectful.

Candidly, this is a really difficult space, and I think deeper topics like this are probably better handled over voice than text. I think there are a few things I can highlight, though:

• When we make content, we do aspire for it to be relevant in as many environments as possible. That means across the spectrum of skill (lower skill to higher skill) as well as across the spectrum of coordination (lower coordination to higher coordination).
  • Pro play is high skill, high coordination.
  • Playing in Premier with a crew of lower ranked friends might be low/medium skill, high coordination.
  • Playing in high level solo queue would be high skill, low coordination. Et cetera.
• I agree that some of our content doesn't feel as relevant as it could be across some of these variables. Some things feel a lot better in high coordination, or feel like they don't hold up in high skill. We see these as opportunities for sure.
  • That being said, the goal is as many environments as possible - not all of the environments. We don't think every piece of content has to be super successful everywhere. It may seem like a reasonable stance in a vacuum, but the reality of that is that you start severely limiting your design space in terms of what you can actually make.
    • SOME content is naturally going to be a bit better in pick-up play, and some content is naturally going to scale better with coordination. We think that texture is okay, but it's about finding a sweet spot of fun texture, not frustrating lack of viability, if that makes sense.
• Ultimately, we think VALORANT is a team game that is the best version of itself when played in a high skill, high coordination environment. But, we recognize that many of our players play in low coordination environments (solo queue) due to the ease of access, and everyone's on their own personal journey of skill. I'm hopeful that over time, we may see more and more folks start to engage in Premier as well, to be able to access more of that coordinated environment regardless of their level of skill.

Like I said, there's a lot here and it's a nuanced discussion. There are always going to be some differences between environments across these spectrums - skill and coordination - and our job is to try to find a sweet spot where we can satisfy as much of both spectrums as possible without homogenizing our content and shooting ourselves in the foot in the long term as a result. And, when push comes to shove, we do lean slightly towards higher skill and higher coordination, as we believe that's where VALORANT is its best - it is a competitive, team game after all - and we hope that we can provide players avenues to continue to improve and play the game in team environments throughout their time with us.