I was experiencing these issues at around 8pm PDT on the day ranked dropped (6/24). When was the latest fix implemented? Will do!
Latest fix was in the ranked patch, so it sounds like it's not fixed yet. Please send over your shootergame logs :-)
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\VALORANT\Saved\Logs
Okay, but I still don't really understand how you would use that cycle to design a new agent for example
I'll preface by saying I'm not a designer, so my work doesn't really get checked against the tac cycle. But the short answer is - we wouldn't. Going through designing a new agent has a ton of different processes and frameworks to think through - the way the tac cycle would come in is when we're playtesting the agent or looking to sign off on the kit or not. If the agent's gameplay fundamentally breaks the tac cycle, something is wrong.
The Tac Cycle is super high level; it's not something we look at to inform or generate ideas for design, it's something that serves as a boundary around the content we make and a reminder of the kind of game we're making.
I’m with you - global audience research is part of my remit on the game I work on, so I feel your pain. I do think there are ways to account for the social media limitations you said as there are very few countries without a strong social media presence (even if they are different networks), but I realize it becomes unwieldy at a certain point and limits your agility. Anyway, thanks for explaining. Appreciate the time and very impressed to hear from two of the team directly.
Yup, for sure. Social media can helpful to source opinions and understand the broad strokes of sentiment; it's less precise than crafted survey work, though. We like to be able to view player sentiment trend over time and adjust in response to the changes we make, which is generally a lot harder to do and less reliable to do with social listening than a solid survey framework. Social media definitely has its place in helping us source issues and understand some of the nuance behind them, though!
Damn, this is such an incredibly thorough write-up. I'm a software engineer, so I write a lot of documentation, and this post is like a guidebook on how to design an important repeatable process, whether that process is in video game development or craft beer brewing.
Great job to the Valorant devs for what is clearly a huge amount of work and thought put into the balance process, and particular props to Milkcow for some really excellent technical writing!
Thanks! Appreciate the compliments. Balance and game health need to be structured to have a strong foundation and processes that are repeatable for years... maybe even over a decade.
Can anybody tell me what the "Tac-Cycle" has to do with balancing? They say that they use it for balancing or that they designed Raze according to it but the explanation they give in the article doesn't fit that.
From how they explain it with examples like "What territory of the map do we own? Do the opponents own?" it sounds more like a mental exercise you should use while playing to help improve your ingame decision making.
Tac Cycle is our north star in terms of design philosophy. Whereas we have our "bands" for the data we take in to look at the game state, the Tac Cycle helps us understand if something is healthy for the game or not, regardless of where it sits in the bands. It's basically our core thesis for what the game is about, and all of our content should layer into that philosophy cleanly. If it doesn't, then something is up and we need to investigate.
Really interesting and very good of Riot to share this.
Only thing that surprised me is the lack of mentioning of community management as an input for balance. They mentioned player surveys, but Riot seems to place a big priority on actively listening and contributing to communities like reddit. I think they have demonstrated it’s important to them in their behaviors, which is great, but surprised it’s not part of their framework.
Anyway, good read, thanks for sharing.
We care a ton about player feedback and we love interacting with you all on social platforms like this. I worked with DCole to build the framework above, and the reason we don't have social media as an input for "players" is because it's inherently biased - if we only took in English-speaking social media, we'd be inherently biasing towards one population of our playerbase. We want to understand player perception and needs across the globe, so it's important for our sentiment gathering to be unbiased and global.
For example, I've got a survey on balance-related topics I'm looking to field today. It's in the following languages:
English, Russian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish (Spain), Turkish, Spanish (Mexico), Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean.
I've still got more languages to add for future surveys as we build out our infrastructure further, but it's a solid start. Gathering player sentiment in an unbiased way is very much a scientific process and...
Read moreNo disagreement on the hot takes - I actually work on a tactical shooter PC game, so I appreciate that the balance doesn’t always net out positive ha.
And I’m def not saying you guys should be sorting the subreddit by new, but I do think there’s always a ton of great community led analysis in games like this, and you get to leverage the wisdom of larger volumes of people than you wouldn’t with structured research.
As you pointed out though, it’s important to know what to ignore. All research methods have their strengths and weaknesses.
Anyway, no real disagreement in anything, just interested to hear your guys’ perspective on it. Thanks for sharing.
EDIT - To clarify, when I say collective wisdom I don’t mean the collective as a whole is smart, but I’m saying iterative development of research from large groups can be powerful. Look at something like Wikipedia as an example, or communities for ARGs.
oh yeah I totally agree with you. In reality the team reads and shares internally every insightful post we find, whether here, on social media, or stream clips (we watch a lot).
That said, the reason we don't typically say public pitches shape our decision-making is because typically community diatribes on "how to fix X" are great at fixing a specific problem for a specific person, but fail to take into account broader audiences, technical limitations, or other factors. That's totally fine!
Being a game designer means learning to take in and solve for many audience perspectives rather than hyper-serving your own individual perspective/pains. But that's also why the most valuable thing a player community can give us is a meaningful, well-intentioned breakdown of their pains, along with some ideas as to what may help alleviate said pains. The best way to encourage that is to say we're always listening, but we can't really push people to crowd-source...
Read moreI think that counts under "sentiment data," even if not directly mentioned. They also talk about devs watching streams later to gather this data on Raze, which definitely falls out of the scope of a survey
This is correct. We read many message boards, watch a lot of streams and directly talk with players to gather sentiment data on top of the surveys we send out.
Really interesting and very good of Riot to share this.
Only thing that surprised me is the lack of mentioning of community management as an input for balance. They mentioned player surveys, but Riot seems to place a big priority on actively listening and contributing to communities like reddit. I think they have demonstrated it’s important to them in their behaviors, which is great, but surprised it’s not part of their framework.
Anyway, good read, thanks for sharing.
The community is great at identifying broad problem sets paired with blazing hot pitches to solve very personal, specific needs
I would say we invest a lot of effort (as demonstrated by the article) in educating y'all so you can have a meaningful dialogue with us. What impacts our decision making most is when y'all hold us accountable to shared values that we've discussed and help us understand how our actions/impact don't ladder up.
Thanks for a detailed /u/ImThour! This is exactly the kind of report we can review/fix/speak to effectively. This is a known issue that we've been working on for a little while now. We have a fix we're just about ready to begin testing internally. However, it may be several patches before we're able to get this live based on testing and managing it against some of the other performance work we have in flight. We think our fix should help a lot but may not completely resolve the issue. There are a couple different technical factors contributing.
/u/So_Obvious gives a good breakdown here of why high framerates will see this swing much ...
Read moreI love that this is a thing. Safe spaces like this are necessary and a force for positive change in the FPS space. GLHF!
I'm kinda disappointed that the Ares is missing, it doesn't have a battlepass skin and it didn't have a skin in any of the previous bundles. Going forward you should probably consider overlap as well. The Spectre has been in the Prime collection, Prism collection and has the Kingdom skin in the battlepass. Sheriff, Shorty and Ares do not have battlepass skins or bundle skins yet.
it's definitely something we are looking at
I will spend any amount for a butterfly knife, which is sad.
i'm listening
For some reason, when I try to recreate it now, it doesn't happen.. I'll have to send that to you some other time I suppose haha. I only had time for 3 games today and it didn't happen in either.
Oh? Maybe our latest fix attempt worked?
Well, keep me updated!
hmm? that's the link to this thread though :O
Haha oops. Mobile. This is what a comment in the other thread said:
So yeagh, Nvidia overrides it. So you need to set it to application controlled, then change the game to 8x or 16x, but in order for it to take in effect, you need to restart the game. Minimizing, or refreshing game / resolution doesn't work. That is where I was having a big problem.
Hey, it’s David ‘Milkcow’ Cole, VALORANT game designer. We shipped a game! We have a live game! And with going live to you, we now have a responsibility to maintain the live experience— most importantly—game balance.
From as far back as our Alpha, there has been a group of Content Designers, QA, and Insights setting up the foundations of game balance and health, so that when we hit the live phase of VALORANT (that’s now), we would have a rough understanding of what is healthy, overpowered, underpowered, etc. Hopefully this article will shed some light into how we’ve been approaching balance and where we want to end up.
Game balance is something that every player feels and may have some opinions about. The experiences all of you have and feel shape your perceptions of the game—your perception is your truth. It’s our job to provide an experience that is fair for every player. With that be...
Read moreAppreciate the feedback! You're right on about the color. It was my intention to tone down the sign out button but I ran out of time before the patch locked. I'm planning on having it ready for the next one.
That said, I disagree that "the right button is the main button" is a universal standard. As you know, button layout depends a lot on context and platform. Many confirmation dialogs place the primary/likely action on the left because of reading direction and a few other factors.
Taking a quick glance, these all feature [PRIMARY] [SECONDARY] button layouts for their dialogs:
Now, most of these have a cancel action on the right, which is a lot less destructive than the sign out we have in Valorant. Nonetheless, my expectation is that most players will want to exit without signing out, which is why it's in that left "p...
Read more
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