Valorant Dev Tracker

Rank is always an illusion until you put in enough games, even in the old system. You weren't Radiant, in any season, right off the bat. It took some games to get there. No matter what ranked system you play, you have to put in some games, to prove you belong at a rank and climb there.

While you may have been playing other Immortal/Radiant players, while being plat/diamond. You were getting +35-50 per win and only -10 for a loss. Do you think it's fair if we, after 1 game, just gave TenZ the #1 spot on the leaderboard just because we think he belongs there? Unfortunately every Elo/Rank system needs you to play games, to figure out where you belong. We can guess all we want, but until you actually give us enough matches to have a big enough sample size, we won't know your rank until you put in some games.

Also we are pretty generous in letting you move upward, and even increased how fast you can increase within a patch of the initial new ranked system launch.

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!pin

I read this before you changed it and I wanted to give my opinion, just because I'm the designer of it.

So I understand that you feel like it's not about personal skill, but we actually have two MMR's that make your singular MMR. A performance based MMR and a Win/Loss MMR.

In lower ranks performance has a bigger impact on your MMR. This is because it's very easy to see who is probably not Iron based on how well they are aiming, how often they win duals, how they use their skills, etc. Players are usually at low ranks because they aren't consistent, and part of that reason is because they don't know every map, every call out, how to play multiple agents etc. As you climb in ranks the difference in aim ability, reaction time, agent usage, etc. starts to shrink. At the highest levels, team play and game sense become the main factor in winning a match, and that's when you are solely being rated based on your wins/losses.

Just to be clear, your performance MMR ex...

I think I understand where you are coming from, wanting RR to drive MMR, but the whole point of Ranked Rating was to smooth your Rank swings and give you an easy to understand point system.

You aren't matched based on Ranked Rating, and I sometimes see the argument where you should be.

"I want to beat silvers, then golds, then plats, etc. to get to my actual rank."

In concept, and not diving deep, that seems like an okay idea. But there is a reason this isn't used in most games. Things like Microsoft developing their True Skill Elo System(which most big games use and license), as well as the Elo system in chess. The reason being is that by beating a Silver player, it does not mean you are actually Plat or wherever you think you belong. It only means you can beat a silver player. Could you imagine us throwing the whole player based into Iron/Bronze and giving them the same RR per win/loss and matching them based on their RR to climb? You would have teams of ...

2 teams would end up creating a lot of work across our entire stack, we have a lot of assumptions that there are maximum two teams. The work we did for deathmatch makes this a bit easier but it's still a ways off. We do want multi team modes at some point, but the cost to get multi team working means the mode will need to really call for it, and escalation didn't.

we saw a few instances of this today. this is a new feature, pardon our dust

ayyy we spellbreak now poison + fire gauntlet combo is nasty

As someone not on characters team who also loves viper, I think we make her ulti continuously expand until it envelopes the entire map and last multiple rounds and it can only be cleared if jett uses her wind dashy abilities to clear the air, would be a double buff to jett and viper at the same time, good way to funnel some of jett's power to help the team too. And then later on maybe we make an agent who has big fan and can fan away the smoke

So the intention is that it's roughly strong (very lethal) to weak (not very lethal), with some randomization. The randomization does allow for some relative deviation from that lethality - sometimes you'll see light weapons & pistols ordered with a weaker one before a stronger one - that's intentional currently, but something we'd be open to iterating on if people don't like it. The alternative would be to basically have a hard-set strength rating of each weapon and never let a weaker weapon show up before a stronger weapon - but I'd worry that would become stale quicker.

What are your thoughts on how it works now? Would you want it to be more true to the strong -> weak curve, or more random? Would you like to see it sometimes go weak to strong, sometimes full random, sometimes strong to weak? These are all options we considered and things we could do in the future, we just felt like strong->weak with some randomization felt best for this team-based version of the...

oh man some of the internal playtests on redacted have been so hype, can't wait to see players get a redacted and transition it into a double redacted so the redacted gets redacted.

Sorta answered here

A golden gun focused mode would be fun... 🤔

Great question! Yeah so we all know in VALORANT "you don't kill with abilities". But for Escalation we specifically were looking for only the abilities that could do just that :D And furthermore we upped the damage on almost all of them - this was necessary because the ability levels felt almost impossible, especially if you got stuck on them - getting a kill with a shock dart that does like 90 max damage if everyone else has guns is basically impossible. So I ended up roughly doubling damage on all the abilities other than raze ult.

ANYWAYS - we started by looking at all abilities that could realistically secure kills. There actually aren't that many - it's basically Raze's kit, shock dart, mollies, a set of ultis, and then some weird ones that TECHNICALLY could kill you but never should like a cypher trap or killjoy turret. We picked out the ones that felt diverse and like they'd be the most fun, and then I did some frankenstein work to allow all agents to use them. I ran...

This isn't something we have explored, but I am personally a huge fan of this. I am a fan of randomized engagement and would absolutely use this