This year, Riot Games has made some of their biggest Agent updates since Patch 3.0 for Valorant. So today they wanted to dedicate more words than usual to share insight on some of the different lenses they use to drive balance changes, with a special focus on player perceptions of our Agents, and how they factor perception with the information they get from quantitative sources like win and pick rates.
Yes, they will also tease the next Agent.
STATE OF THE (AGENT) GAME — Ryan Cousart
With the Agent changes they have made this past year, they have seen a bit of movement in role diversity, specifically, the Initiator role. With the addition of Fade, they have seen competition among picks when compared to previous months where Sova dominated the recon space. While they are happy to see players have another choice in the role, they also think there are areas—like clearing spaces—where she’s potentially overperforming, so they will explore potential tunings to her utility.
Breach’s strength on Fracture has upped his pick rate, and KAY/O is starting to rise in Competitive play. A few key Agents are also starting to sprout in power—some in healthy ways, and other in ways the team wants to address.
You’ve likely noticed Chamber overtaking the Sentinel role, pushing his peers further behind in their presence. Although they have shipped some incremental Chamber updates to address this, the results in competitive and watching Champions show there is still work to be done here and will continue to be a focus for us moving forward.
This brings up the topic they want to focus on with this post: How do they decide when an Agent needs a change and monitor if they hit the mark with these updates?
When Riot approaches Agent balance, they employ multiple lenses to help drive what changes should be made and their goals. That is to say, there is no single metric that tells us to act.
Here’s a quick overview of some of these lenses that they commonly leverage:
- Winrate and Pickrate Data in Solo Queue
- There’s a lot of in-game data Riot collects, but for starters, Riot looks at an Agent’s non-mirror win rate across multiple MMR tiers across different maps to get a high-level gauge of power.
- Non-mirror winrates are the winrate of an Agent where the opposing team did not also pick that Agent, otherwise, popular Agents will naturally end up at the 50% winrate mark (for every match with two of the same Agent, one team must win and one team must lose).
- In addition, it’s often helpful for us to also use Agent pick rate split up in the same way. This establishes some understanding on what the differences and similarities are when it comes to numerically strong Agents and which Agents players are choosing to play.
- Player Perception
- While Riot does check and value social media for Agent sentiment, a bulk of the Player Perception data Riot use for balance comes from what you all think! Riot send out countless surveys to players all across the world to understand how you are feeling about the game/Agents, and understand those they feel are too strong, weak, frustrating, etc. in the current meta.
- Pro Play
- Riot look closely at Pro Play pick rates and trends to understand what pro teams and players perceive as the most valuable Agents, comps and utility in the game in different contexts.
- Our Design Principles
- On top of everything, they assessing how the Agents are fitting into the design principles the team holds. One example here that Riot has talked about often is an Agent’s sharpness, meaning do they have clearly defined strengths and weaknesses compared to their peers. When an Agent isn’t hitting our Design Principles it can drive change even if they aren’t an immediate issue when evaluated through our other perspectives.
When Riot look through all these lenses simultaneously, they often tell us conflicting stories. A large part of our job is analyzing what each one is actually telling us. Riot then uses the right combination of lenses and questions to build confidence in the direction of any proposed changes before testing them and sending them out to the live game. After they go live, they keep a close eye on the impact the update had on all our balance lenses and how players change their behaviour while learning and mastering a new patch. With this retro, seeing things in the live game and how players interact with changes helps us grow our own understanding of the game to guide our future updates.
DESIGNING GAME BALANCE VS BALANCE PERCEPTION —Alexander Mistakidis
Hey folks, Alexander here to speak a bit more about balance perception. As Riot shared in their How We Balance VALORANT article: our job with VALORANT balance is to provide an experience that is fair for every player.
In pursuit of that, one key area Riot thinks about a lot is how players are perceiving and experiencing the current balance of the game. When us designers want to improve game health and solve balance issues, Riot needs to understand that meta through player sentiment, data analysis, and design discussions about the current power and intended power.
For the VALORANT team, how players perceive the balance of the game is as important as the true numerical balance of the game. This doesn’t mean Riot will balance things based on shallow outrage or bad faith takes, but they do make balance changes based on how players are actually playing the game. The balance is informed by the meta, the collective choices of our players. The meta of how players play VALORANT varies by region, by skill, and more. The meta is like a living culture that shifts patch to patch, and effective improvements to VALORANT are ones that make an impact on it for the better.
After a patch, it takes many weeks for players to adapt to new changes, which means Riot has to be patient to understand how player behaviour changes over time. It’s not only about spreadsheets and math equations that make a perfectly balanced game. Some games that are balanced are not fun, and some balance changes ruin what players love about the game. Riot will try to avoid those.
In fact, some changes could make the game more balanced but don’t actually change how the game is played. For example, if Riot makes an Agent more powerful, but players don’t perceive it to be strong and then don’t play it—they actually have a worse problem. Riot has a relatively strong character with a low pick rate, and they wouldn’t have much room to buff them more to convince players otherwise (*cough* Brimstone). To this end, they are aiming to make the Agents more balanced with updates, but they also are aiming to inspire players to change their perception of the game’s balance and evolve the meta themselves.
BALANCING WHEN PERCEPTION AND DATA DIVERGE —Dan Hardison
Penguin here! While Alexander mentioned in the above section that they balance our game for competing audiences, I thought it would be interesting to shed some light on some spicy data that shows how perception doesn’t always match reality as far as power is concerned for ranked, even amongst our best players.
The team isn’t sharing this just for Twitter trivia. Try to apply what Alexander talked about when reading these “fun facts.”
| Agent | Fun Fact |
| KAY/O | One of our weaker Agents in ranked games across all MMRs but a high priority pick in pro play. |
| Breach, Brimstone, Neon | Play these agents in a coordinated setting like a 5-stack and you’ll see them shine even more than solo queue, especially at the highest MMR. |
| Yoru, Neon | Put in the time, put in the hours. Most of our Agents have a learning curve, but these two especially stand out at the highest MMR as high mastery Agents. |
| Phoenix | The 3rd strongest Agent in solo queue in high MMRs |
| Brimstone | 3X as many players believe this character is too weak versus too strong, but he has one of the highest win rates in higher MMRs |
| Sage | Still one of the best agents in the game across all skill bands in ranked, despite player sentiment indicating that they’re the fourth weakest agent |
The philosophy in Alexander’s blurb above is why Riot hasn’t shipped large buffs to KAY/O despite him being one of the weakest by-the-numbers win rate Agents in the game for most players. Our data indicates his abilities are powerful, pro players are able to utilize him well, our players in surveys don’t think he’s weak, and additionally he just doesn’t feel weak to any of the VALORANT design team when they play the game ourselves. Any changes Riot makes to KAY/O would just aim to make him more intuitive and accessible without increasing the optimized potential they see in professional play.
On the opposite side of the problem, there’s Chamber.
While Chamber’s ranked stats are nothing to be alarmed about in terms of win-rate, the effect he has on the ecosystem is negative: his pick-rate goes dramatically up as players get better at the game, perception is clearly that he’s too powerful, and he’s a must-pick on many more maps than they like in Pro Play—so on the power front, Riot will nerf Chamber in ways that should make drawbacks of picking him sharper with the intention that our best players shouldn’t always gravitate towards Chamber.
CHAMBER, PHOENIX CHECK IN
As mentioned above, even though they had updates to Chamber in 5.03, he’s still a focus for the team moving forward. Riot will be further exploring some changes that they they are hesitant to make right before Champions and focusing on creating meaningful counterplay options for his Rendezvous.. At the same time, Riot is looking closely at Cypher to figure out what updates he might need to find his proper spot on the Sentinel roster.
Riot has also shipped some Phoenix changes in Patch 5.01, so I wanted to go over how those have landed.
So far, Phoenix is looking pretty powerful—at least as far as winning in ranked is concerned! His flash is one of the strongest in the game now by our metrics. It’s too early still to say if Phoenix will have a stronger place or impact on the pro ecosystem, or if his level of performance in ranked will sustain over time, but early signs are promising that picking Phoenix is no longer a gamble.
For the future, Riot is also looking over the flash landscape, in general, to sharpen what the correct strengths and weaknesses are for our flashing Initiators versus our flashing Duelists.
WHAT YOU’RE ALL HERE FOR
Hey all its John “RiotMEMEMEMEME” Goscicki back again, the designers let me swim in at the end here (ty design crew<3). It’s been a minute since they talked about new Agents, so Riot has got some tidbits here for you about Agent 21.
As the game has evolved with shifting metas, new maps, and an increase in general game knowledge, Riot is always identifying potential new opportunities for Agents 12–14 months ahead of time. Riot has seen that Controllers are in a bit of a drought, and it feels like they have to go all the way back to ancient times to our last new Controller release with Astra. Aside from Viper, introducing Controllers that can cover large open areas is a blue ocean of opportunity.
We’ve let this soak long enough, and Agent 21 is almost ready to go out. I don’t want to flood you with too much information in this blurb here, so I’ll hold off on saying much more.“Jald hi milte hain.”
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