Player Behavior, Balance, and Anti-Cheat // Dev Updates - VALORANT

Summary

The video celebrates EDG's victory at the Champions Grand Finals in Seoul, highlighting the competitive spirit and community engagement. It discusses upcoming changes in VALORANT, including balance adjustments for agents like Phoenix and Sage, and map rotations with Icebox and Lotus out, Split and Pearl back in. The Anti-Cheat team shares updates on Vanguard's effectiveness and introduces ranked rollbacks to counter cheating. Player behavior improvements and rank distribution adjustments are also addressed, with a look ahead to the Game Changers Championship and the new VCT Season.

Takeaways

• 🏆 Congratulations to EDG for winning the World Championship in Seoul, showcasing a highly competitive final-four bracket.
• 🌐 The esports community gathered in Seoul, the birthplace of esports, celebrating the game and meeting players.
• 🎮 VALORANT launched on console last month, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive with millions of new players.
• 🔄 The year-end patches are an opportunity for significant balance adjustments without disrupting professional play.
• 🎖️ Recent updates to Iso, Neon, Reyna, and Raze have contributed to a healthier Duelist ecosystem.
• 🔥 Phoenix is still under development, and the team is considering changes to other agents, especially weaker Sentinels and Controllers.
• 🌟 Vyse will be joining the roster soon, and her performance will be closely monitored post-release.
• 🔧 Patch 9.05 introduced changes to Astra, Chamber, and the Ares, aiming to improve their utility and viability.
• 🗺️ The map rotation for 9.08 will see Icebox and Lotus removed, with Split and Pearl returning, and adjustments to Sunset's B Site.
• 🛡️ Vanguard, VALORANT's anti-cheat system, is effective with only 1% of games affected by cheaters, and improvements continue for console platforms.

Q & A

What team won the Champions Grand Finals in Seoul?

EDG won the Champions Grand Finals in Seoul.

What was the reaction from the crowd during the finals?

The energy from the Korean crowd was incredible, and it was special to see the community come together in the birthplace of esports.

What updates can be expected with VALORANT's year-end patches?

Year-end patches will include larger scope changes to improve game balance, particularly adjustments to Duelist agents, Sentinels, and Controllers.

What balance adjustments were made in Patch 9.05?

Patch 9.05 introduced changes to Astra and Chamber. Astra's utility output was improved, and Chamber's ability to defend territory and retreat was enhanced. Additionally, the Ares weapon received a buff to improve viability.

What new agent will join the VALORANT roster soon?

Vyse will be joining the VALORANT roster shortly after the release of this video.

What map changes were introduced in Patch 9.08?

Icebox and Lotus were removed from the map rotation, while Split and Pearl returned. Sunset received changes to B Site and Mid, with adjustments to improve defender options and post-plant gameplay.

What steps is VALORANT taking to combat cheating, especially with the game’s recent console release?

VALORANT uses the Vanguard anti-cheat system, which has been adapted for console to combat new types of cheats, such as input spoofing. VALORANT also plans to introduce ranked rollbacks to refund RR lost due to cheaters.

What changes were made regarding player behavior penalties?

Penalties for communication abuse have been increased, and hardware bans are now issued for severe behavior violations. The game is also expanding its automated voice evaluation globally.

What rank reset adjustments have been made for console players?

After observing that players were climbing ranks too quickly, VALORANT reset the rank distribution for console players. Going forward, console and PC ranks will reset on the same cadence.

What major events and updates can VALORANT players expect in the coming months?

Players can look forward to the Game Changers Championship in November, the new VCT season in January, and updates in 2025 to celebrate VALORANT’s 5th anniversary.

Outlines

00:00

🏆 Champions Grand Finals Recap

The script begins with a recap of the Champions Grand Finals held in Seoul, highlighting the intense competition and congratulating the new World Champions, EDG. The commentator expresses their exhaustion after a thrilling week filled with exciting matches and community engagement. They also mention the upcoming Game Changers Championship and Off-Season tournaments, as well as the warm welcome of millions of new console players to VALORANT, which has surpassed expectations. The introduction of the Product Manager and Balance Design Lead sets the stage for a discussion on game balance and upcoming changes.

05:02

🎮 VALORANT Game Balance and Updates

This paragraph delves into the game balance adjustments made to characters like Iso, Neon, Reyna, and Raze, and acknowledges the initial overswing with Iso but notes the subsequent improvements. The discussion emphasizes the importance of year-end patches for making impactful changes without disrupting professional play. The team is also working on Phoenix and considering changes to other Duelists, Sentinels, and Controllers. Notably, Harbor's changes are delayed for more extensive work. The paragraph also covers the addition of Vyse to the roster and the monitoring of her performance. Upcoming changes to Astra, Chamber, and the Ares weapon are detailed, along with improvements to recoil control and hints at future adjustments to other agents. The paragraph concludes with a teaser for Patch 9.10 and a discussion on map rotations, including the removal of Icebox and Lotus and the reintroduction of Split and Pearl, with adjustments to Sunset aimed at enhancing defensibility and post-plant gameplay.

🛡️ Anti-Cheat Measures and Community Health

The script introduces Brittany from the Anti-Cheat team, who discusses the effectiveness of VALORANT's Vanguard anti-cheat system, which maintains a fair gaming environment with only 1% of games affected by cheaters. The team's proactive approach to catching cheaters, especially on the new console platform, is highlighted. The paragraph addresses the challenges of detecting cheats without revealing anti-cheat techniques and announces the upcoming implementation of ranked rollbacks to refund lost Rank Points for games affected by cheaters. The commitment to improving player behavior is underscored by the acceleration of penalties for communication abuse and the expansion of restrictions to all team-based modes. The introduction of hardware bans for severe behavior cases is also mentioned, along with the ongoing efforts to improve manual review processes and staff support for repeat offenders. The paragraph concludes with a commitment to rolling out automated voice evaluation globally to combat communication abuse.

🎉 Welcoming New Players and Rank Adjustments

The final paragraph welcomes new console players to VALORANT and acknowledges the need for rank adjustments following the beta period. It explains the decision to reset ranks to better align with the player base's skill distribution and assures that future rank resets for both console and PC will be synchronized. The paragraph also addresses the mixed feelings about rank resets, balancing the need for consistency with the desire to maintain player satisfaction. The script concludes with a look forward to the Game Changers Championship, the new VCT Season, and VALORANT's 5-year anniversary, promising exciting updates and a commitment to fostering a positive gaming community.

Keywords

💡Champions Grand Finals

The Champions Grand Finals is a major esports event where the top teams compete for the championship title. In the context of the video, it refers to the culmination of a competitive bracket in Seoul, where EDG emerged as the new World Champions. This event is a significant part of the video's theme as it sets the stage for the discussion of esports achievements and future plans.

💡EDG

EDG is a professional esports team that won the Champions Grand Finals, as mentioned in the script. They are celebrated for their hard-fought victory, which is a testament to their skill and dedication. EDG's success is central to the video's narrative, highlighting the competitive spirit and the pinnacle of esports excellence.

💡Esports

Esports refers to competitive video gaming, where players participate in organized, multiplayer video game competitions. The video script discusses the birthplace of esports and the community's gathering, indicating the cultural and competitive significance of esports within the gaming world.

💡Game Changers Championship

The Game Changers Championship is an upcoming esports tournament mentioned in the script. It signifies the continuation of competitive gaming events and the ongoing engagement of the gaming community. The script's mention of this event points to the anticipation and excitement surrounding the esports calendar.

💡VALORANT

VALORANT is a tactical first-person shooter game developed by Riot Games, which is the focus of the video. The script discusses various aspects of the game, including balance adjustments, new agent releases, and anti-cheat measures, emphasizing the game's ongoing development and commitment to fair play.

💡Balance Design

Balance Design in gaming refers to the process of adjusting game elements to ensure fairness and competitive integrity. The video script discusses balance adjustments for characters like Iso, Neon, Reyna, and Raze, highlighting the developers' efforts to maintain a healthy and varied gameplay experience.

💡Anti-Cheat System

An Anti-Cheat System is a software tool designed to prevent cheating in video games. The script mentions Vanguard, VALORANT's anti-cheat system, which is crucial for maintaining a fair gaming environment. The discussion of Vanguard's effectiveness and upcoming improvements underscores the video's theme of promoting integrity in esports.

💡Ranked Rollbacks

Ranked Rollbacks are a feature that refunds players' lost ranking points if they played against a cheater who was later banned. The script announces this feature as a way to compensate honest players, reflecting the video's focus on fairness and rewarding legitimate gameplay.

💡Console Players

Console Players are individuals who play video games on consoles rather than PCs. The script welcomes millions of new console players to VALORANT, indicating the game's expansion to a broader audience and the inclusive nature of the gaming community.

💡Map Rotation

Map Rotation refers to the regular changing of maps in a game to keep the gameplay fresh and challenging. The video script discusses changes to the map rotation, including the introduction of new maps and adjustments to existing ones, which is part of the ongoing effort to enhance the gaming experience.

💡Competitive Integrity

Competitive Integrity is the principle of maintaining fairness and sportsmanship in competitive gaming. The video script's discussion of anti-cheat measures, ranked rollbacks, and player behavior penalties all relate to upholding competitive integrity, which is a central theme of the video.

Highlights

EDG is crowned the new World Champions at the Champions Grand Finals in Seoul.

The energy from the Korean crowd and the esports community is celebrated.

The community is thanked for their support on the Road to Champs.

Introduction of the Game Changers Championship and Off-Season tournaments.

Announcement of millions of new console players joining VALORANT.

VALORANT's console launch has surpassed expectations.

Existing players are welcoming new console players with open arms.

Year-end patches are an opportunity for substantial game balance changes.

Updates to Iso, Neon, Reyna, and Raze have been successful.

Plans to ship more patches throughout the year without disrupting pro play.

Phoenix and other Duelists are being worked on for balance adjustments.

Some Sentinels and Controllers are identified for tuning.

Harbor changes are delayed for more extensive work.

Vyse is joining the roster and will be monitored closely.

Patch 9.05 includes changes to Astra, Chamber, and the Ares weapon.

Recoil control will be improved with increased fire rate.

Upcoming changes to Phoenix, Sage, Cypher, and Gekko are teased.

A new map rotation is announced for Patch 9.08, with Icebox and Lotus out, and Split and Pearl back in.

Adjustments to Sunset map's B Site and Mid are detailed.

Feedback on map rotations is acknowledged, with plans to update the schedule.

Vanguard anti-cheat system's effectiveness is discussed, with only 1% of games affected by cheaters.

Introduction of ranked rollbacks to refund lost RR if a cheater is later banned.

Player behavior penalties have been accelerated, and hardware bans are now in place for severe cases.

Automated voice evaluation is being rolled out globally, starting with English.

Rank distribution on console has been reset for a more effective distribution.

Console and PC will now reset ranks at the same time.

Plans for VALORANT's 5-year anniversary and the new VCT Season are hinted at.

Transcripts

Hey, everybody!

We just wrapped up Champions Grand Finals here in Seoul,

and one of the most competitive final-four brackets ever.

Congratulations to our new World Champions

EDG, for their hard fought and well-earned trophy.

It was such a great series.

The energy from the Korean crowd,

seeing our community come together in the literal birthplace of esports.

Meeting so many players.

Crazy matches, broken pick-em’s.

Though I did end up in the top 1%.

What a week!

I am exhausted.

I need a nap and some fried chicken.

Before we fly back home.

We wanted to thank you all for being with us on the Road to Champs this year,

and we also want to welcome the Game Changers Championship and Off-Season

tournaments that will be happening over the next few months.

I think we've also got some other people to welcome, right?

We do!

Millions and millions of new console players, in fact!

Hello out there.

VALORANT launched on console just last month

and your response has already surpassed our wildest dreams.

It's amazing to see how many new players are playing our game on console,

bringing their friends into the fun,

and honestly learning a ton from our PC players.

Seeing our existing players

welcome a whole new group of people in with mostly open arms

and only a minimum of controller shade, has given us all the warm and fuzzies.

So much gratitude.

Let's jump into our main topics for today.

Hey everyone!

I'm Coleman.

I'm a Product Manager on VAL gameplay.

Hey, and I'm Dan VAL’s Balance Design Lead.

We're happy to be back to take a minute to discuss where the game’s at,

heading into the end of the year.

These year end patches are typically the best opportunity

for us to make necessary balance adjustments and try new things

without disrupting pro play.

You can expect the year end to be a time where you see larger scope changes

that are meant to have a substantial impact on the game.

The updates

we made to Iso, Neon, Reyna, and Raze have helped us hit our goals overall.

While we did overswing and Iso initially, after the follow up patch, the Duelist

ecosystem is in a pretty healthy and varied state for the most part.

And we think this push and pull

is a totally normal part of live balance with competitive games.

We want to ship more patches throughout the year,

but we also want to ship them in a way so that they're not overly disruptive.

We are still working on Phoenix and we're planning

some other opportunistic changes within the Duelist roster,

but we also see

some other spots on the roster that are in need of some tuning, particularly

among some of our weaker Sentinels and our Controllers.

We know a lot of you will be expecting Harbor changes with this patch,

but unfortunately they're taking a little bit longer

since we think he needs larger scope work

and we're still exploring our options here.

Additionally, shortly after filming this video, Vyse will be joining

the roster,

so we'll be following her performance closely

as we do with all of our agent releases.

So now as we near the end of the year and VCT is over,

you'll start to see some of these changes roll out.

Patch 9.05, we made some changes to Astra and Chamber.

For Astra.

We wanted to improve her total utility output compared to other Controllers.

And for Chamber, we improved his capability

to defend territory aggressively and still make it out alive.

We're also buffing the Ares to improve its viability

compared to the rest of the mid-range price point weapons in Patch 9.05.

Additionally, we're making it easier to control recoil

when your fire rate is increased by things like Reyna Ults or Brim Stim.

You can also expect changes to Phoenix, Sage, Cypher, and Gekko.

There might be some other fun things in store for Patch 9.10,

but will update you on that more later.

But before we go, we mentioned on our socials

that you'd all see a new map rotation in 9.08.

Icebox and Lotus are out and Split and Pearl are back in.

In that video we mentioned that we're making some adjustments to Sunset.

More specifically, we're adjusting B Site to make it more defensible at a baseline,

removing the unbreakable

Cypher trapwire spot and changing B Main to do some of that post-plant gameplay.

We'll also be making some light changes

to Mid to add some defender options when defenders opt to contest it.

And we've heard your feedback on map rotations.

Trust us, we haven't forgotten that Fracture exists.

We're looking at updating our schedule and cadence of map rotations going forward,

and we'll share more details with you when the next pool goes live with 9.08.

But for now, we want to hand things over to Brittany Perez on the Anti-Cheat team

to talk about Vanguard and share some pretty exciting news about Ranked.

Git gud. Don't cheat.

Hey everyone!

I'm Brittany, an analyst with the Anti-Cheat team on VALORANT.

You probably already know that VALORANT uses an anti-cheat system

called Vanguard to keep the playing field fair and keep cheaters out of our game.

In fact, only 1% of VALORANT games have cheaters,

and the average cheater is caught and banned within their first six games.

VALORANT’s debut on console marks a significant milestone for us,

with Anti-Cheat both dealing with a new platform

and new classes of cheats like input spoofing aka ximming.

We've done a pretty good job of proactively

catching and banning users of these tools.

Our anti-cheat for console will continue to evolve as cheaters do,

and we're looking to stay ahead of the curve.

But we know on occasion that some of you on PC or console

might run into a cheater and that cheater isn't banned

and the match isn't terminated.

You might be wondering if the Vanguard team is so good,

how are the cheaters able to play without getting red screened?

Vanguard is a delicate tango of prevention and detection.

We strive to block cheats outright, but when immediately blocking a cheat

would make our techniques too transparent,

we detect the intrusion and delay our response.

While we agree that the delay isn't ideal, it's

an integral ingredient for your anti-cheat chefs to cook up better detections.

But as a way to make it up to all of you honest gamers out there, we're

happy to announce that VALORANT is working on implementing ranked rollbacks.

Basically, if you played and lost a game with a cheater on the other team

and that cheater was later banned, you'll receive a refund of any RR lost.

The anti-cheat space is a never ending battle, and despite

our polite requests for cheaters to stop, some will always try to cheat.

Keep up the excellent work reporting suspicious behavior

and we'll continue keeping your games a safe and competitive environment.

Hey everyone Stephen here.

Our teams manage the player behavior experience in VAL.

When Anna made her statement about keeping our community healthy

a couple of months ago, we worked together to make a few commitments to you.

We have significantly accelerated the severity of penalties received

for comms abuse, and we've expanded the restrictions on gameplay to include

all team-based modes, not just Competitive and Premier.

And we also unlocked hardware bans for behavior.

We'll only issue these for cases where we manually review.

We took a look at those manual review processes and audited them.

We now have clearer steps for who needs to be involved

and when, so that we can have faster manual escalations.

And we're also staffing support to review a higher volume of repeat offenders.

If you've been repeatedly disruptive over the past episode,

you received a notification a couple of weeks ago.

Any subsequent behavior events will be weighed more heavily.

If you're disruptive, expect a ban.

We know that voice is still a major area for comms abuse,

and we started a beta for automated voice evaluation in North America last year.

We've seen good results so far and are committed to rolling out

voice evaluation globally.

And that's coming before the end of the year.

However, building confidence around other languages is taking longer

than we anticipated.

So we'll support English globally first

and rolling out additional languages over time.

We need to continue to invest heavily here and are committed to doing so.

If you did your placement matches and received a rank,

you probably placed a little bit lower than where you were last season.

We feel the pros and the cons to resets.

Regular resets help to shake out the inconsistencies

and maintain a consistent definition of skill at every level.

At the same time, not seeing that rank that you worked

so hard to achieve can be rough.

We're currently looking into ways to keep the benefits of resetting ranks while

providing more opportunities for upside to balance against the feelsbad.

Now to our new console friends, welcome!

Champs is such a perfect moment to join us.

You get to see VAL framed at the highest level of competition.

We're so excited for each of you to start on your own competitive journey.

in VAL.

To those players who have been with us since the beta, you noticed that we had to

adjust the way that we calculated rank from beta to launch.

When we turned on the competitive queue for console,

we estimated where folks would place with an all-new player base

and so many players joining us all at once.

And after a couple months of testing,

we saw that players were climbing the ranks faster than we had

anticipated, and the stats behind it didn't quite match up.

So we reset ranks and have a more effective rank distribution on console.

Now, going forward, both console and PC will reset rank at the same cadence,

though console players shouldn't expect a change as big as the beta adjustment.

We're just getting warmed up.

We'll be back soon on our socials with a refresher on Ranked 101,

and later to discuss some spicier topics before end of year.

Oh, hey we're back!

Oh, sorry, I mean, I told them about the chicken.

Why don't you take this one?

All right. Thanks for watching, everyone.

And thanks for all your hype and feedback throughout the year.

We'll see you all in November at the Game Changers Championship.

And we'll be back in January

with the new VCT Season and another dev update to kick off 2025.

VAL’s 5 year anniversary!

2025 is going to be such an amazing year and we can't wait to tell you

all about it.

In the meantime, be good to each other and enjoy your games.

Wait, where did that come from?

Here comes the party!

But everybody's gone.

I just really wanted to shoot this thing.

All right. Bye, everybody.