[2021] VALORANT Patch Notes 3.03

Hey, totally feel the pain here. Hopefully it's a bit helpful if I explain - recent updates have been on the lighter side for a few main reasons:

• 3.0 was a pretty significant patch, so we wanted to give it some time to breathe and see how the changes have shaken out. We didn't want to kneejerk with changes while players were still adjusting to the new economy and movement changes + kayo.

• Balance-wise, the game is looking pretty good right now. There are still opportunities for sure, but nothing super serious that needs fast, aggressive changes (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made)

• We try to focus our changes in windows between competitive tournaments to avoid disrupting the pro scene, unless there's something really egregious going on; considering the stability we've been holding off on major gameplay changes during these tournaments. Open to feedback on this approach, though - we're still trying to find out what the best version of this looks like.

• All of Riot recently just took a week off; if we include the time we need to cut the build early to do a QA sweep, that means any changes in this patch would've had to have been implemented 2-3 weeks ago

I don't post this to try and contest your opinion or anything, just for transparency as to why updates have been a bit less aggressive than launch (where we had pretty big balance problems and LOTS of feedback from the community to action on all the time). Things are just a lot steadier these days. I'm interested in getting feedback from you all about how you feel about support for the game, though - that's something we're always interested in hearing.

Definitely a coincidence - we love Morello and pretty much all of us keep in touch with him still, but if anything the balance team's process and organization has improved over the past year+ we've worked together. I explain a bit more above, the ecosystem is just a bit different these days. The game's a lot more balanced, the community doesn't have extreme pain points (like beta Raze), and we have an esports scene to consider with disruptive changes.

None of that is to say your feedback isn't valid, though - if yall feel like we aren't supporting the game enough, that's very important for us to know and I'm interested in your perspective on it.

I can't go into details, but they're not just numbers tweaks, yeah!

We actually have a direction we're pretty confident in, it just needs more resources than our changes normally do - most of the time our changes are numbers tweaks, but whenever something needs art resources we have to coordinate with other disciplines (outside of just design and insights) a bit more. Also yeah, Yoru is a bit more complex than our other agents, so that's a component of it as well; but we've iterated for awhile at this point. It's a tough situation for us to be in, too - we want to get changes out as soon as possible.

Not sure, I primarily focus on gameplay. Sorry!

Thanks for your take! I love talking about this stuff. Regarding rifles - would you be surprised if I told you that numerically, the Vandal performs slightly better than the Phantom in every way?

Vandal has about double the usage rate of the Phantom, alongside a slightly higher K/D and ADR. The difference is very small, but it's there. Even up to the pro level, we've seen Vandal usage and stats score higher than the Phantom. There's likely some amount of selection bias here (aimlords are more likely to pick the Vandal) but the pattern has stayed true over months of games, which gives us an immense sample to piece through.

That's not to say we'd never make changes or that these metrics make it impossible for us to make changes - data is a tool for us to inform our changes, it doesn't decide our changes for us. I just think this particular stat is pretty interesting because it doesn't line up with people's immediate impression of the guns in-game (myself included).

Totally! I wouldn't say it's a total overhaul, but art/visual assets in our game are very important to get right because of how much they can impede gameplay. Any time changes involve things like that, it takes a lot more time and resource management to get folks onboard and get the work prioritized vs. all the other stuff our talented artists have on their plates

Of course, happy to help. I don't want to say it's a huge, sweeping change - but basically anytime changes require visual asset updates, we have to move carefully. Visuals, VFX, animation, etc. in our game are really important to land right because of how impactful they are on the gameplay, and since we don't often have balance changes that require this sort of support, sometimes it can take a little bit longer to coordinate through the whole pipeline. Yoru will still be Yoru - it's not like we're reworking the whole kit, by any means - but visual clarity is important, especially for the tricky stuff he does, so we want to make sure it's done right instead of shipping it to live and having people rip their hair out over unclear assets.

Sorry, I focus primarily on gameplay so I don't have as good of visibility on stuff like this!