[2020] VALORANT 1.03 Patch Notes

We’re keeping an eye out but overall agents were looking fairly healthy so we opted to give y’all some time to play and develop the meta in the early days of Rated.

We’ll likely be making some tweaks next patch, though. Generally speaking, we don’t want everyone to feel like the game meta changes wildly every two weeks, so if we’ve got a chance to go light with changes we’ll probably take it and use that extra time to analyze the meta’s development.

Twin Shadows? You mean spooky ghosts?

Sorry, I don't work on this stuff but we appreciate the feedback! Balance team just works on game content work, not features like Rated, queues, matchmaking, etc.

Viper's one of our most complex agents and was rarely getting played pre-buff - we didn't want to back to back buff her, since a lot of players were getting back into her kit and trying her out after the first buff and we expected there to be some learning curve going on.

We're keeping an eye on her, though - if she continues to need buffs we'll continue to buff her, we're just trying to tread lightly and not slam big buffs in back to back patches.

RIP doggo smite. I still call chickens wraiths, I'm ancient

Reyna's not bad, but she's not objectively strong either. She's not the strongest agent in any MMR range, and actually isn't even the strongest Duelist agent in any MMR range. She's still pretty good on average, and we're talking about whether we can make changes to make her a bit less frustrating to play against... but unless something changes this upcoming patch, Reyna changes likely won't be centered around cutting down her power (since she's not too strong in any MMR range right now).

This comment lower in the thread explains it really well, actually

https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/hmuao8/valorant_103_patch_notes/fx7e4ii/

This was minor enough to keep out of patch notes. The change did go in

The mission was removed with this patch. It didn't make the cut for patch notes, but the change was made

Heyo! We're having a tough time with that bug, it just doesn't consistently show up for us in testing. We've put in a speculative change, but we did not include it in the patch notes because we're not confident it will fix the issue. If it's still happening for folks after the patch, getting me your logs would help a ton!

Professional play and Rated queue are very different beasts and we approach balancing on those metrics very differently. We don't solely balance the game around pro play - we look at all levels, because we care about all of our players. Also, pro play generally tends to take a bit to adapt to more recent changes; when teams practice with a certain comp, switching things up and being confident enough to pull them out in a tournament takes time.

So, yeah, we're keeping an eye on Viper here overall, but I just don't want to set the impression that her having a 1% pick rate in a tournament means she absolutely deserves buffs (it could, but it's not a guarantee, especially after just one patch in a very early pro meta). There are going to be a lot of metas in Valorant that exist in pro play that don't translate to standard play and vice versa, and we need to be able to balance both accordingly.

Hey Swagsparian! Input queue means the time in which your input (firing the gun in this case) will be queued up. for example:

You left click twice with the guardian within 0.1175s. The gun fires but your 2nd left click was done while the weapon is firing. The 2nd shot will come out when the gun is able to do so.

If you left click twice but the 2nd click was outside of the queue time and still within the weapon's firing state, the 2nd shot will not come out.

This change doesn't make the weapon shoot any slower than its Rate of Fire, its intended to make consistently shooting the weapon feel more smooth and not feel like it "jams" when you're mashing the fire button. Hope that clears it up!

We have a tentative fix for this elusive bug, but it will be in 1.04 - it barely missed the cut for 1.03.

If this bug happens to you often, these steps might make it less frequent: - Keep your client on the AGENTS page while waiting for match start - Close programs that can cause a lot of disk activity (file copies, downloads, etc.) while playing

I wrote that so I can probably give some context - the Guardian is still pretty versatile in terms of the broader weapon arsenal. A dedicated long range weapon would be something like the Marshal or the Operator, where you’re at a substantial disadvantage in close range engagements - the Guardian is intended to be stronger at long ranges, but still strong enough to be usable in close/medium range, even if it’s not optimal.

The Rifle weapon class tends to be defined by its versatility compared to other weapon classes - they’re generally powerful at all ranges, even if they get beat by specialized weapons at the edges (snipers long range, shotguns short range). That’s what the versatility component means there - we want it to still be usable in medium and close ranges, but just be best used at longer ranges than the other Rifles in the Arsenal. If you want to use a long range leaning weapon that doesn’t get destroyed if you’ve got to clear some close range angles, the Guardian’s there for you.

This is a broader design question I’m not the best equipped to answer (I’m in insights, not design) but I think one key difference between us and League is that we get “free freshness” via our map ecosystem. League games are always one big accumulator function which makes the curve of a game feel different, but it always takes place on SR which has a patch meta.

For us, having different maps, different sides, and different economic states I think makes a “single patch meta” hopefully feel much more diverse; the meta on Ascent may not be the same as the meta on Bind, you play both offense and defense in a single game, etc. I think that’s a cool thing that gets us a lot of variety and freshness on any individual patch.

Of course! Regarding accept/decline - unfortunately I don’t work on the feature side of the project so I can’t really speak to stuff like match accepts/queues/etc at all

The logs will be here:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\VALORANT\Saved\Logs

You can send them to me via a google drive link, pastebin, or any other site like that. I don't need any more for 1.02 version of the game, but if you see issues in 1.03, that would help!

Gotcha! Yeah the patch isn't out yet so you'll definitely see no change yet

Yup we intended to, I meant my team didn't submit the change in time. That's why I am trying to be a bit proactive in messaging it out. My apologies!