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Delete every agent except Phoenix and replace his voice actor with Will Smith. Also only make bulldog skins from now on so people actually use it. Make all the sound effects acapella and make the classic right click only work half of the time so it's even more rng dependent.

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over 2 years ago - /u/Riot_R3DALERT - Direct link

Hey, thanks for the feedback! So I took a good hard look at this, and I think there are some interesting ideas here, and I want to take them point by point.

Bulldog skins I'm with you. There are a lot of rounds where a bulldog would probably be as effective if not more effective than a vandal based on the positioning and play style, and I hate that teammates will often forgo valuable utility for a "better" gun. Honestly Zedd's bulldog skin is pretty dope and is what I'm going to stick with for a minute I think, but I understand it may not be everyone's cup of tea, so yeah, all for variety.

Speaking of personal taste, I share your love of RNG. I tell people that the random plasmids level in BioShock is one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, so I'll talk to some of the design folks about the classic. I think it merits consideration, along with some other RNG type options around movement and abilities.

I'm not a sound designer, but a capella sound effects present something of a gameplay clarity problem. A lot of human hearing is built around the frequencies of speech, so a lot of the sound in the game has to be built to skirt around those mid-range frequencies where voice comms are supposed to live. One solution might be to pitch the vocal recordings outside of that range, so you could get acapella sound If you're down with having it sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks did the recording. I'd have to talk with our audio director to make sure there's bandwidth to take this on, but I know that when the audio team folks get passionate about creating a great player experience they really go the extra mile.

This brings us around to Phoenix... This one's a toughie. I think this would have more technical hurdles than balance ones. I'm speculating here, but I'm pretty sure the technical burden of unlocking the ability to select multiple the same agent on the same team far outweighs that of simply limiting team size to one. Speaking for myself, I actually think there's a good deal of Player Value to 1v1s-only in matchmaking cues outside of Replication. I'm not sure whether queue times would become more or less of an issue, but I imagine the servers starting several more game instances per minute would require some problem solving. I don't know any of the engineers names on the subreddit by heart, so I'll just ping them at work this morning.

Will Smith is another complexifier to Phoenix, and for more reasons than that it means brushing aside the amazing Afolabi Alli from our English cast. Will Smith would only provide value for those who speak English, and we publish valorant in 23 languages. I'm not even that worried about securing Will's time to record. My issue is that in order to create the same player value around the world we have to teach Will his lines in all of those languages. While I don't doubt Will's ability to learn his lines phonetically, I think if I put myself in the shoes of, say Brazilian players, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air speaking in American-accented Brazilian Portuguese might distract from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.