Really interesting and very good of Riot to share this.
Only thing that surprised me is the lack of mentioning of community management as an input for balance. They mentioned player surveys, but Riot seems to place a big priority on actively listening and contributing to communities like reddit. I think they have demonstrated it’s important to them in their behaviors, which is great, but surprised it’s not part of their framework.
Anyway, good read, thanks for sharing.
The community is great at identifying broad problem sets paired with blazing hot pitches to solve very personal, specific needs
I would say we invest a lot of effort (as demonstrated by the article) in educating y'all so you can have a meaningful dialogue with us. What impacts our decision making most is when y'all hold us accountable to shared values that we've discussed and help us understand how our actions/impact don't ladder up.
I think that counts under "sentiment data," even if not directly mentioned. They also talk about devs watching streams later to gather this data on Raze, which definitely falls out of the scope of a survey
This is correct. We read many message boards, watch a lot of streams and directly talk with players to gather sentiment data on top of the surveys we send out.
No disagreement on the hot takes - I actually work on a tactical shooter PC game, so I appreciate that the balance doesn’t always net out positive ha.
And I’m def not saying you guys should be sorting the subreddit by new, but I do think there’s always a ton of great community led analysis in games like this, and you get to leverage the wisdom of larger volumes of people than you wouldn’t with structured research.
As you pointed out though, it’s important to know what to ignore. All research methods have their strengths and weaknesses.
Anyway, no real disagreement in anything, just interested to hear your guys’ perspective on it. Thanks for sharing.
EDIT - To clarify, when I say collective wisdom I don’t mean the collective as a whole is smart, but I’m saying iterative development of research from large groups can be powerful. Look at something like Wikipedia as an example, or communities for ARGs.
oh yeah I totally agree with you. In reality the team reads and shares internally every insightful post we find, whether here, on social media, or stream clips (we watch a lot).
That said, the reason we don't typically say public pitches shape our decision-making is because typically community diatribes on "how to fix X" are great at fixing a specific problem for a specific person, but fail to take into account broader audiences, technical limitations, or other factors. That's totally fine!
Being a game designer means learning to take in and solve for many audience perspectives rather than hyper-serving your own individual perspective/pains. But that's also why the most valuable thing a player community can give us is a meaningful, well-intentioned breakdown of their pains, along with some ideas as to what may help alleviate said pains. The best way to encourage that is to say we're always listening, but we can't really push people to crowd-source solutions because, as mentioned, said solutions tend to be selfish (not meaning that in a negative way).
Really interesting and very good of Riot to share this.
Only thing that surprised me is the lack of mentioning of community management as an input for balance. They mentioned player surveys, but Riot seems to place a big priority on actively listening and contributing to communities like reddit. I think they have demonstrated it’s important to them in their behaviors, which is great, but surprised it’s not part of their framework.
Anyway, good read, thanks for sharing.
We care a ton about player feedback and we love interacting with you all on social platforms like this. I worked with DCole to build the framework above, and the reason we don't have social media as an input for "players" is because it's inherently biased - if we only took in English-speaking social media, we'd be inherently biasing towards one population of our playerbase. We want to understand player perception and needs across the globe, so it's important for our sentiment gathering to be unbiased and global.
For example, I've got a survey on balance-related topics I'm looking to field today. It's in the following languages:
English, Russian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish (Spain), Turkish, Spanish (Mexico), Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean.
I've still got more languages to add for future surveys as we build out our infrastructure further, but it's a solid start. Gathering player sentiment in an unbiased way is very much a scientific process and is one of my primary contributions to the balance team; it's also much different than community engagement!
Can anybody tell me what the "Tac-Cycle" has to do with balancing? They say that they use it for balancing or that they designed Raze according to it but the explanation they give in the article doesn't fit that.
From how they explain it with examples like "What territory of the map do we own? Do the opponents own?" it sounds more like a mental exercise you should use while playing to help improve your ingame decision making.
Tac Cycle is our north star in terms of design philosophy. Whereas we have our "bands" for the data we take in to look at the game state, the Tac Cycle helps us understand if something is healthy for the game or not, regardless of where it sits in the bands. It's basically our core thesis for what the game is about, and all of our content should layer into that philosophy cleanly. If it doesn't, then something is up and we need to investigate.
Damn, this is such an incredibly thorough write-up. I'm a software engineer, so I write a lot of documentation, and this post is like a guidebook on how to design an important repeatable process, whether that process is in video game development or craft beer brewing.
Great job to the Valorant devs for what is clearly a huge amount of work and thought put into the balance process, and particular props to Milkcow for some really excellent technical writing!
Thanks! Appreciate the compliments. Balance and game health need to be structured to have a strong foundation and processes that are repeatable for years... maybe even over a decade.
I’m with you - global audience research is part of my remit on the game I work on, so I feel your pain. I do think there are ways to account for the social media limitations you said as there are very few countries without a strong social media presence (even if they are different networks), but I realize it becomes unwieldy at a certain point and limits your agility. Anyway, thanks for explaining. Appreciate the time and very impressed to hear from two of the team directly.
Yup, for sure. Social media can helpful to source opinions and understand the broad strokes of sentiment; it's less precise than crafted survey work, though. We like to be able to view player sentiment trend over time and adjust in response to the changes we make, which is generally a lot harder to do and less reliable to do with social listening than a solid survey framework. Social media definitely has its place in helping us source issues and understand some of the nuance behind them, though!
Okay, but I still don't really understand how you would use that cycle to design a new agent for example
I'll preface by saying I'm not a designer, so my work doesn't really get checked against the tac cycle. But the short answer is - we wouldn't. Going through designing a new agent has a ton of different processes and frameworks to think through - the way the tac cycle would come in is when we're playtesting the agent or looking to sign off on the kit or not. If the agent's gameplay fundamentally breaks the tac cycle, something is wrong.
The Tac Cycle is super high level; it's not something we look at to inform or generate ideas for design, it's something that serves as a boundary around the content we make and a reminder of the kind of game we're making.
Okay, so I just misunderstood the article a bit. Thank you so much for your thorough answer! And have a lovely weekend :3
Of course, I hope you do too! Best of luck in your games.
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