[2021] VALORANT Systems Health Series - Intro

Hi!

We’re devs who together work on Gameplay Systems in VALORANT—specifically the Social and Player Dynamics team (friends system, text and voice chat, and monitoring player behavior), as well as the Competitive team (competitive systems, MMR,and matchmaking)—here to lay out plans for a series of articles meant to go in-depth on some popular topics.

Something that you’ve voiced to us is that you want more transparency around the Competitive and Social & Player Dynamics (SPD for short) space. Sure, patch notes provide some updates of the things we changed in VALORANT, but we think it’s important to show the impact of our work so far and what’s ahead for this space.

Starting this week, we’ll begin to share a series of deep-dive articles, each of which will cover a very specific topic within our teams. Some articles will share more about the work that’s already happened (and the impact we’ve measured as a result) and some will focus more on planned or ongoing work in a certain area.

Below is the list of areas that we plan to cover. All articles are meant to be a way for you to learn more about topics that you’ve told us that you want to hear more about:

• AFKs - Those players who stop playing in the middle of a game
• Gameplay toxicity - Such as Intentionally feeding, friendly fire, etc.
• Text/Voice chat toxicity - The people who ruin it for everybody
• Smurfs, or secondary accounts - We know, probably our most requested topic
• Matchmaking/match fairness - in Competitive queue

As we mentioned, we’re planning on releasing these articles periodically. The first topic we’ll dive into is AFKs in VALORANT, and it’s coming out tomorrow.

You can track the series as it updates by clicking the tag found at the bottom of this article.

One last thing! We’ve never done something like this before, so if you have feedback, comments, thoughts, please let us know. It’s possible we don’t hit every topic that you’ve raised concerns over, so if there’s something you don’t think we’ve covered that you’d like to see get some love, please tell us.

The best way is to keep posting your concerns/feedback on your favorite places (Discord, Reddit, etc.) and we’ll see them. Or find the authors of the respective articles above (when they post, we’ll include a link!). You can also always tag the comms team and they can share it right away.