Valorant Dev Tracker

I can! The very short answer is we use data analytics and surveys to identify groups of players we're interested in testing with, and then send out email invites to ask them to come playtest with us.

Obviously things are a bit different now with quarantine in the US, but we're still running tests, discussion groups, etc. with players in the same way, just remotely. If you're interested in this sort of thing, check the email you have associated with Valorant periodically - you may find a survey or email there that asks about your availability to playtest on a given date!

A single game with only reports from a stack of players won't generally restrict players. Most restrictions are over a course of games unless the person hit the hate speech/racist word auto restrictions.

Thank you! This is so nice of you to say. League has set an incredibly high bar for us. Their cosmetics team is incredibly talented!

I don't think we've stated the time yet, but the countdown timer should be accurate.

yeah we did scrap those. they were made before our alpha/beta period and before we had a few things nailed down. at one point you only had the option to choose the buddy as a full package, so if you wanted that Sova owl buddy charm hanging from your Viper Shorty, itd be a weird mismatch because it pulled the mount from Sova's too.

we wanted to redesign the system to be a bit more modular and allow us to keep mounts on guns that it made sense for, but change the charms based off your choice. the old designs also were this weird fishing pole shape to pull the buddy as far away from the gun as possible, because we have a lot of clipping issues.

some of those issues are still present today. we cant actually run a physics sim to make sure the buddies never intersect with the gun because that'd be an unnecessary performance toll, so we set limitations on them to make sure that they cant go too far back past the mount. thats also why they dont have nice jiggly physics - ...

The number of times I have died picking up that yellow Prime Vandal...

I can't say anything else til the patch drops. :(

Oh hi! Thank you! :) The knife and the Op are my favorite!

I don't actually know how we find people for these labs. I can ask how we do it. :)

Totally understandable - its certainly a disconnect from the typical mechanical functioning weapon to now being a creature, but you're right its something that is just for a specific set of people. we want to make sure everyone can get something to express themselves and their likes. over time as we have more and more guns, buddies, sprays and cards, we'll reach that point where we've released enough that we at least have something for everyone. we'll get there :)

I understand the pain. you feel it, i feel it, everyone does. the unfortunate circumstance is that for the engineers and folks working on those types of issues, they dont have the luxury I do of changing a color to make someone happy. that sort of fix takes a lot of time, effort, and debugging but rest assured it is a priority.

I can because my boy Joe Lee tweeted it out yesterday: https://twitter.com/SWAGGERNAU7/status/1280891089486921728

Always! Whenever the high elo folks had concerns, we made sure to listen. Some of them were hesitant at first, but we made changes to ensure we satisfied them. Even if it's not their personal style (maybe they like scifi or more clean skins), they at least told us the skins didn't ruin the game for them.

We also ran research labs with real players to test the skins out. We care so much about this kind of stuff, so we wanted to be really thoughtful and deliberate about how far we pushed the skins from a gameplay standpoint. Labs also helps us see cool behaviors, like melee spamming. We all do the same thing when we play, but it was cool to see players do it too, so we amped up the effects on the melee a little more to make it even more satisfying. ;)

As far as I know there is no way to get a permanent game ban from weight of reports alone. My guess is that this is a cheating ban.

If you message me your brother's account ID I can take a look but it is unlikely that me investigating will lead to the account being unbanned.

this is easily doable - we actually brought this up last week as a note that we put the effort to change buddy mounts for higher tier skins, but things like grid, avalanche, etc tend to get ignored because we arent making custom mounts for them to begin with. we can absolutely adjust this in the future

We'll make it an option eventually, yea, so requests can go either way. Unfortunately, there are higher priorities so it may be a bit before we get to it.

Oh I’m jealous! Congrats! I’m still on level 7.

Damn. +1 to everything this guy said!

that totally makes sense. and no worries - its fine to compare to CS when it comes to skin quality or preferences, the main differentiation there that we have to learn and understand from is what do players like because of taste, and what do they like because of rarity or exclusivity.

we currently have buckets of skin categories that we use to figure out what to make next, and ill give you a little example of what sorts of things go through our minds when coming up with a skin idea.

Generally when thinking about skins we always think about what "genre" or "bucket" can we put something into. A lot of "CS Style" skins where you get a pretty wrapper or painting on your gun, we'd typically consider fitting into an Artistic bucket. There could be some potential spillover into other categories though.

Say we look at doing a techy looking skin thats got like scifi paneling and such and its purely just a texture wrapper on the base gun - something looked like distri...

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

no love for the phantom? :P