Valorant Dev Tracker

Definitely have thought about this.

The amount of players that four stack is very small, and so is your chance as an individual to get paired on their team. BUT it still happens, so that really shouldn't be an excuse to not do anything.

Encounter MMR would help you here. Yes you may have to take a loss, and it feels bad because 4 players are forcing you into it, but all the kills and duels you had in the match still can make you gain MMR. If you are winning duels, but still lose, your encounter MMR can actually go up. Depending on the rank, especially if you are lower rank, you can actually have your MMR overall go up because encounter means more than your win/loss.

I have other concerns about 4v1 toxicity etc. In the end, you should have very few 4+1 matches, and that should reduce how often you get into these situations. Also because you do have encounter MMR you still have something that is taking into account your skill in that match.

I'm sorry you didn't see increases in your ranked after placements! It's an interesting pain point, I'll add it to my list of feedback and think on it more. I try to maintain a document of player feedback each act and see if there are things we can act on.

Every episode we do "Squish" ranks. This just pushes all ranks downwards. It helps us fight boosted accounts, accounts that are inactive, and also prevents ranked inflation. This is just to make sure people don't get to a rank, and then sit at that rank and don't really play the game anymore(or if the community improves past that player, they don't get to sit in a rank they no longer they belong).

Remember the whole community is getting better at Valorant. You are definitely getting better, but so is the whole community. To climb you need to get better faster then those around you.

I believe!!! You can get out of Iron and hopefully you see some positive improvements :)

We removed a system that could potentially lead to your MMR feeling hardstuck in Episode 3. By removing this system we had to make changes to match making slightly. We used data to compare against the old system, and found out match making would get more accurate/fair by doing this.

You have two MMR's in Valorant, Encounter and Win/loss. Your one MMR is made up of those two. In low ranked Encounter is valued more, this helps us combat smurfing because high ranking players are more consistant in their performance. In higher ranks Win/Loss becomes a bigger factor.

Because of us pulling out that system that may have had players feeling like they were "hard stuck", on top of the weighting changes of the two MMR's that make up your real MMR, it's causing big movement for some players. There are players that may have been held down in the old system climbing easier, there also is a chance that players who were being held up above their actual MMR are going to drop down.

Riot actually made a music account on Youtube where there's creator-safe music! :) So you can use any of the music in it for your streams/videos without any copyright infringements! It's just one video for now, but it's over 1hr 30mins long and they posted the tracklist in the description if you like any of them.

https://youtu.be/G8a45UZJGh4

They only ask that you credit the artist/song if you use it :)

LOL!! I relate to this so much xD

Which one? The one in her contract (which is static)? Can you send me an image of it?

We believe we resolved the impact on EU. The experience for players was similar, but a different issue from the AP servers. EU looks like a client dependency being enforced dropped players. We're investigating why that happened to avoid in the future.

We are actively investigating the issues from the last few days on the Asia Pacific servers.

I didn’t! I’ll ask him again! Any guesses?

Just to be clear, her playrate hasn’t been a huge concern; people find her fun and approachable. Lots of people playing her isn’t a problem. Super high winrates are a concern regardless though, and we have an obligation to keep the game balanced for our playerbase.

I’m the gameplay insights lead for VALORANT and one of the leads of the balance team. Curating our data ecosystem on gameplay and developing our balance philosophy is a critical portion of my job.

It'd be fun to do another balance blog post around the current state of balance, it can just be hard to find the time between everything else that's going on. I'd like to do another round of that, though.

This is the last one that we did, but it was awhile ago now.

Not sure what metric you're using to measure power, but in terms of winrate and pickrate Sage has been the most powerful agent in the game by a decent margin from launch until now, even through any nerfs we shipped. She's dipped from the #1 spot in winrate once or twice, but never fallen below top 3 (and was usually #1). She's looking a lot healthier after Patch 3.0, though!

Our internal boards have both of them even higher than this, too. Some of that power may be hard to feel, though, since we get lots of requests to buff her even when she's historically been the strongest and most popular agent in the game