devtrackers.gg
Yeah this does not bode well for me. I have been really happy about how they handled balance up to this point, I do not like the sound of making bigger patches with more changes to swing things harder.
Yeah this does not bode well for me. I have been really happy about how they handled balance up to this point, I do not like the sound of making bigger patches with more changes to swing things harder.
It's less that we want to intentionally disrupt things and more that we want to be more confident in shipping changes to move the needle. Yoru and Viper are good examples; Yoru's been out for over 2 months now and the entire community has generally come to the agreement that he's really bad and not worth playing.
That's a failure on our part, in my opinion. An agent shouldn't feel like a trap to play for that long without us intervening. Viper is a more difficult case, since she's just very complex, but we've wanted to ship some improvements for her for awhile now and have been playing more conservatively than we should have been.
Like always, we'll gather feedback on this approach and continue to iterate forward - but more than anything this is about doing the types of changes we want to do more consistently and holding ourselves accountable to those outcomes.
I honestly don't see Yoru as a failure on your guys' part. He came out a little weak, but I had faith you guys would give him a few small tune ups which I think were all he needed. And from what we have heard, the main reason these changes for him didn't come sooner were due to the Masters tournament, which is an understandable reason.
I think what I'm trying to say is I'm a bit worried we will end up with a balance meta cycle that feels really swingy. One of the reasons I stopped playing games like Overwatch and Fortnite, for example, was that it felt like they would balance so aggressively that the meta would just swing from one overpowered strat to another, with no actual balance in the middle. I'm hoping this doesn't become the case with Valorant as well. Either way, thanks for explaining the motivation behind the shift.
Oh yeah, I definitely don't think we want to do that either. We mostly just want to be more proactive in addressing agents that have clear issues and feel more comfortable moving quickly and adjusting, rather than making yall wait for such a long time for updates.
In general though, we want our balance updates to feel natural, not hyper disruptive. I don't think that'll change.