[2020] VALORANT Patch Notes 1.08

Fun fact, she’s still one of the highest winrates in the game across all MMRs!

I do think that historically (as in, going into Closed Beta) we expected Viper to be stronger than she was due to a couple of prolific Viper players internally. However, since we've launched to live, Viper has underperformed for quite some time, despite a series of fairly substantial buffs. We don't balance off of gut feels like that, we balance off of data, and the data doesn't carry those same biases.

Personally, I'd argue that we gave Viper several sets of "greatly buff" changes with her wall going through walls, being able to maintain fuel on her Q and E at once with no penalty, applying fragile to her molotov, and stopping decay on allies... but she just hasn't seen the same success that Omen and Breach have.

We will continue to make changes to the agent to get her into a good spot, and while she is improving steadily, she's not there yet. We're actively playtesting further buffs to ship, but generally speaking, we prefer to make more measured, methodical changes than large sweeping ones, especially when we're dealing with a character that's too weak (Viper, Breach) compared to characters that are too strong and warping the meta (Sage, Killjoy).

Ultimately, Viper and Breach have consistently been the weakest agents in our game since launch, and they're also the characters with the highest burden of coordination. We still need to work to find the sweet spot to get these agents viable in matchmaking while not breaking the competitive scene as well, and our first foray into that are these Breach changes. He's clearly getting a lot of pro play, but in matchmaking, Breach is actually still the weakest agent in the game, especially in high MMR. This may seem like Breach got one big buff that catapulted him to viability, but for matchmaking he's still in the same place as Viper currently - better than before, but still needs work.

I totally understand the frustration feeling like your favorite agent isn't good enough; we don't want that to be the case either. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our community to make measured changes that we feel we understand and will positively impact our game overall, and these higher burden of coordination agents make that a very tough line to tread at times while we're still learning how changes manifest in the matchmaking scene of our game.

At the very least, don't worry that there are a few "Viper mains" on the balance team with our noses stuck up thinking players are just bad or she's in a good spot right now. That's not the case. We know she needs work, we just want to ensure we're making the right changes to maintain her identity and push her into viability without warping the game in unhealthy ways.

It's understandable why people have these types of responses to patches. Making changes that are sup-par is an easy way to burn trust with players. We are bound to make mistakes, and I personally have made changes back on LoL that took MONTHS to regain trust from the players

On VALORANT, we're taking a more conservative route to balance early on in the game's life-cycle. It's important that the game stays competitive and the time and effort that you all are putting into the game isn't wasted. Each week we are learning something new about how you all are playing the game, and we need to take that into account rather than making sweeping changes every two weeks.

Those Sage mains are crushing it!

Let me know what you find. K, thx.

I'd say we have taken a more conservative approach with Sage since Closed Beta which has lead to the issue today. We were way off on what we thought her power level was early on and we've made measured changes over multiple patches to address that.

The issue today is that... well... we've hit her multiple times over many patches where it may of been better for us to be less conservative earlier and rip the bandaid off quicker. It sucks for Sage mains to constantly see her in patches. We think she's in a much better state today and is still impacting the game in a healthy way.

That was me that said that in the upper thread! We use a few metrics:

Game Winrate (non-mirror): What's this agent's winrate in games where they're not playing against themselves? i.e. if one team has a Sage and the other doesn't, what's Sage's winrate? We don't look at mirror matches here because every mirror match gives an agent a 50% game winrate (one wins, one loses), so the higher an agent's pickrate, the more their winrate converges to 50%.

Round Winrate: What's this agent's chance to win any given round on defense? On offense? We can look at this one in mirror matches and non-mirror matches, since we mainly use this to understand if an agent's power is manifesting heavily on one side of the map.

Pickrate: What % of teams pick this agent?

We look at all of these metrics (and a bunch of others, these are just the simplest) across all of our maps and all of our MMRs. For example, Sage's winrate improves as MMR improves, to the point where she's the highest winrate agent in our highest MMR bracket. However, her winrate in the worst bracket (0-25% MMR) is still higher than almost every other agent in that bracket. She's easily one of the Top 3 agents in the game in terms of power right now.

For context, when we nerfed Sage in 1.07, she had roughly a 90% pickrate with a 55%+ winrate in all MMR brackets.

We look at winrates in all mmrs, not just dia/imm. We also do actually care about people complaints (I field surveys every patch to understand how players feel about the state of the game, as do many of my colleagues), because we want to make sure the game is not only balanced, but enjoyable to play. But yeah, to your point, sentiment is not balance. If we have an agent that's balanced but miserable to play against, we do want to change that, but that's more of a pure design consideration than a balance one and we approach those problem sets very differently.

That was her winrate on patch 1.06, and had been for quite a few patches before that too despite our smaller changes. Post-1.07 she’s looking a lot healthier, although still strong, in spite of sentiment floating around that she’s too weak or gutted now

She's much more in line with other popular agents now - her pickrate is roughly equal to agents like Omen, Raze, and Jett now, instead of being a little less than 2x their pickrate.

We don't have anything externally facing and I haven't dug around in too many of the external sites yet, so it's hard for me to say!