[2022] As we near the fourth episode, what are your thoughts on the direction that this game is heading?

All of us here come from unique gaming backgrounds and have seen different rates and significance of patches. For example, I came here from League of Legends, so a two-week patch cycle with consistent changes is nothing new to me. While the patches for this game feel less drastic than League, I don't necessarily believe there's anything wrong with that. I'm especially curious about the focus on "agent balance" for the next few months and what it'll mean for the meta.

I'm also interested in the perspective of players from other games too. CSGO players might feel refreshed by how frequent the updates are, while Overwatch players might fear that eventually VALORANT will have far too many agents if they keep adding them at this rate. I never played R6 so I can't predict what those players are going to say lol.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the updates so far?

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Originally posted by DarthGrievous

Overwatch players might fear that eventually VALORANT will have far too many agents if they keep adding them at this rate.

OW never suffered from too many characters. In fact, it's on its deathbed right now because there's no new heroes releasing. It suffered from slow balance patches which is what I'm worried about. We rarely ever get balance patches because of VCT and stuff for the past few months. It took 1 year to rework Yoru. That said it's better for characters to be underpowered for a long time rather than overpowered.

We hear you on this front. Balance is a much bigger focus for us going into this next year, and we've restructured the team to be able to support balance much more consistently going forward.

It's hard to explain it in a way that doesn't come off as corporate jargon, but transitioning from a "launch the game" team structure to a "support the live game forever" team structure takes some time, and we had a few really brutal bottlenecks that made it difficult to ship things fast. I'm personally really looking forward to being able to ship more and have more conversations with you all about balance in VAL going into 2022.

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