Valorant Dev Tracker

No apologies needed, this bothers me too (also an MMO nerd). I'll look into this

u/PhilosopherDave - i saved this thread so i could come back and update you. This type of flavor piece of work is something we absolutely wanted to do at some point but was generally lower priority and marked as a polish item. I can confirm for you now that this has been addressed and will be updated in game in the future. additionally when you're at 0/0 when you inspect you'll no longer see a shell inside the weapon. :)

Let me clarify - we use Reddit and Twitter to stay in touch with the community and communicate about the game. One of my roles on the team is to provide data for us to make decisions off of though, which is why we utilize things like surveys and data analytics to gather objective measurements of sentiment and content performance. Valorant's a global game and we can't keep in touch with player sentiment just by checking out some English-speaking social media channels from time to time, which is why we have these other sentiment gathering tools to lean on.

One of our core tenants on the balance team is to not "kneejerk" and be methodical, thoughtful, and data-informed with our changes, so if you're worried about us freaking out over Reddit threads we've all been through it before on League and other game dev jobs in the past.

Raze is a good agent, but isn't grossly strong by the numbers by any means - we're looking at fractions of a percentage difference in terms of her performance compared to other agents, and we've been watching her performance decline over time as players get more experience in the game and playing against her.

That being said, some of her abilities aren't meeting our clarity goals for how severe their punishment is, so we're hoping these changes will help (there's actually a lot involved in those audio changes there). On top of that, reducing it down to 1 grenade will encourage Razes to be more thoughtful about their utility, and rewards good Razes by giving them access to more grenades than the baseline with kill resets.

She's strong enough that she can take a thwack on the head right now and stay perfectly viable, while also giving everyone a bit more breathing room and information to get comfortable. If she ends up being too weak after these changes as time goes o...

We are doing a pass on all the buddy locations! Not intended that it doesn't show up as clearly. Sorry about that! :(

We are doing a pass on all the buddy locations! Not intended that it doesn't show up as clearly. Sorry about that! :(

Yeah, hopefully with grenade change will also lower the amount of kills and ult points she's generating as well. We're definitely keeping an eye on things.

Only walking in the slow! Running and jumping will still make noise.

I certainly get the pain - we're also working on compatibility fixes. Thank you so much for your patience and I understand how frustrating it is to have this, then it's taken away.

We definitely watch Reddit, Twitter, etc. but also send out periodic surveys to gather player opinions on a variety of topics; just spinning things up right now.

I can't officially endorse removal of Software that I'm not a subject matter expert on. I'd like to make it clear that the things I've recommended are bandaid fixes, and we're working on greater compatibility layers that should be coming relatively shortly.

I have had players who have removed it without any issue, but I cannot speak for every device regarding this. If you remove this, please do so at your own discretion.

On that point - we want to continue gathering data from this change to see how effective these nerfs will be, but there is a change we're shipping on audio clarity for the ult. When she uses her ult, you'll not only hear her voice line, but also an equip sound for her rocket launcher that can be attenuated in 3D - similar to how you can hear Phoenix's fire coming from a specific location when he starts ulting. Basically, if Raze ults nearby you, you should be able to audiolocate her based off of the rocket equip sound and play accordingly.

This may still not be enough information, especially with Razes who are good at Satcheling themselves forwards to augment their speed with their ult out, but it hopefully will provide better texture to the information you're getting and we can work from there. Rest assured we will continue to make changes if she's not meeting our goals here!

Working on getting these things published and localized

It's worth calling out that walking in the slow field is even slower than normal walking - it'll still take you quite some time to get through, but should reduce some of the free information and certainty of safety that Sage gets when throwing her slow orbs currently. We felt giving players a slow, silent option adds more texture to the entire ability instead of the previous iteration, "make noise or don't interact with it"

Vanguard patches on a separate cadence to the game, a performance improvement was included in an update a few days ago.

If you're still having issues let me know and maybe we can figure it out.

Edit: For anyone who wants to help track this down here's the information that I'm looking for:

1. Your Vanguard logs from C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard\Logs

2. A Windows Performance Trace while another game is open and is lagging.

To generate the performance trace these are the steps:

Install Windows APK (only the performance parts are necessary)

1. Open an admin command prompt

2. Demonstrate the perf problem (run an impacted game)

3. Run: xperf -on DiagEasy

4. Wait a few seconds (hopefully to catch a stutter or frame drop)

5. Run xperf -d %TEMP%\trace.etl

6. ...

We have a change in internal playtesting for this. Removes the portrait for your own icon. Should help quite a bit.

Not intentional. We're unifying all of them.