Valorant Dev Tracker

Even if both Bahrain and Mumbai were in the same shard we'd already be splitting the player population because we prefer the server with lower latency. Yes, there might be some players like your friend in Dubai who have decent latency to both, but with a 10ms difference hopefully they always end up on Bahrain. The reason that Bahrain is on EU is that at launch, we didn't want to block Middle Eastern players from playing the game, and we thought that being on EU made the most sense while we waited for Bahrain to come online. Now that it has, we don't want Middle Eastern players to lose the ability to play with their friends in EU.

Ultimately, I believe we have the player population to make this layout work.

I don't have firm plans that I can talk about but it's on my priority list for next year. Real talk, the problem is that infrastructure is expensive in Latin America, without much coverage from public cloud providers (e.g. AWS is only in Sao Paulo, which is why most games are only hosted there in Latin America). We think we can do better, but I want to under-promise and over-deliver.

Yep, you've identified the primary case for why we'd put servers in Milan. It's on our radar, but we don't have any work planned yet.

The goal is to balance two tensions: more servers to lower latency, but fewer servers to concentrate the player base and improve matchmaking.

I felt it was better to "pull" players in from Florida to Atlanta, than to push more central players out to Miami. Purely a judgement call on my part, that a central location will better serve more players.

No plans right now. Your use case makes sense, but providing that support will only impact a very small part of the player base (e.g. those currently traveling outside their shard, or players with friends across the world who want to play together and have terrible latency).

I said this elsewhere:

The goal is to balance two tensions: more servers to lower latency, but fewer servers to concentrate the player base and improve matchmaking.

We don't have any plans to put servers in Milan right now, but we've got that option if we think that the player base fragmentation is worth the reduction in latency for some players.

Most of our servers are hosted in AWS. In some locations, generally the "2" locations as you've noted, we chose to expose some servers via AWS Edge in addition to Riot Direct, because AWS Edge has better routing for some players. Over time, we'll improve Riot Direct's routing and deprecate the AWS Edge servers.

Re: getting better latency to San Jose than Portland, the technical reason is usually ISPs peering in an unexpected way. Can you tell me what ISP you're on?

Re: expanding into Seattle, no plans, adding servers in Seattle would be a small incremental improvement to a relatively small player population that are mostly already being served well out of Portland. The goal is to balance two tensions: more servers to lower latency, but fewer servers to concentrate the player base and improve matchmaking.

I worked on the infra plan, AMA (within reason)

Thanks. Team is investigating. This helps!

awesome answers! I really like the idea of a safe spawn zone, and I think 1 way barriers are a really clever way to prevent spawn camping.

I think a boosted economy where you have to make decisions about what you buy makes sense. If the respawn timer is long-ish (15s I'd consider fairly long), players can plan their next loadout while waiting to spawn. Giving more money to the losing team is another nice lever to help make retakes easier / more possible.

Since there are multiple rounds it might also be cool to scale the economy each round (similarly to how we scale the weapon assignments in spike rush). So first round's mainly centered around pistols & some smgs, second round smgs & some rifles, third round rifles & some op/odins.

Overally, really well thought out mode and thanks for talking about it more. Keep the suggestions coming, I love seeing posts like this! We've got stuff we're working on internally but hearing what ya'll are thinking about and loo...

OP living up to your reddit name, this mode is creative! I really like it. I work on the modes team so I think about this kinda stuff a lot. I've got a few questions:

1. How would weapons work? Would you buy still, or would there be some other way to acquire weapons.
2. How are you picturing respawning looking? Is the timer static (always 15 seconds like you say) or dynamic, depending on objective state. Do you try to spawn players by their base? The tricky part here would be giving opportunities to get the plant down if your team wins a fight (so the losing team has disadvantageous spawns), but then making defusal not impossible (giving losing team advantageous spawns again). I think the 15s respawn could make the defusal feel impossible if the planting team established nice post plant site control.

I think key strengths here are that the mode has respawns so it's less stressful than standard mode, but it has clear, easy to understand objective play...

Video with the following graphs on would also be useful:

Total Frame Time

CPU (Game)

CPU (Render)

CPU (RHI)

Haven't ruled anything out yet, but this behavior is not consistent with what we would expect to see on a server performance issue.