Ask VALORANT - Feb. 24

Q

Can you explain the reason for the planned Rank Rating penalty for queue dodge? Sometimes I have real good reasons to dodge and I don't think I should lose RR.

A

We understand a Ranked Rating deduction—no matter how small—can feel like a painful penalty, so we want to be extremely clear with how this system works and why. First thing’s first: these changes target players who repeatedly queue dodge, and will have minimal impact on players who only queue dodge occasionally. We hope having a small (3-point) rank rating deduction provides additional deterrence for players who frequently dodge—without being too punishing for the person who rarely dodges. We've also kept it quick to earn back your rank rating, while not impacting your MMR with these penalties. However, repeated queue dodges will add up, and repeat queue dodgers will feel the intended pains of this.

For reference, our data says that more than 50% of dodges are caused by less than 2% of players, and the vast majority of players very rarely queue dodge, if at all. Targeting those repeat offenders should have a massive impact on how frequently you encounter queue dodges in your own games.

All that said, we recognize that queue dodging is an important tool to avoid really painful situations (like toxic teammates). And even if most queue dodges are caused by a small group of people trying to manipulate their competitive experience, we don’t want to take that safety net away from you. That’s why our systems have high forgiveness for infrequent offenders.

A final note: we will be watching the impact of these changes closely when we ship them (targeted for patch 2.05). If we missed the mark—whether we don’t reduce queue dodging enough, or we punish our more well-intentioned players too harshly—we’ll make adjustments to the system. Simple as that. And we’ll keep you updated with any changes.

—Jon Walker, Competitive Designer, -Ian Fielding, Producer, and Lea Hughes, Strategic Advisor

Q

When are devs going to make knife hit detection system more accurate? Escalation revealed some of its shortcomings.

A

Our knife is a bit of a meme right now. It’s serving the purpose of either psychological-driven kills on unaware opponents or a last resort when out of ammo—but it's rarely a decent (or reliable) choice to use in any other situation.

The hitbox is static, unintuitive, and only active for a very brief period of time. This leads to frustration and confusion when combined with visuals that imply the knife does damage during the entire slash motion. These are things we'd like to improve, but other weapon balance issues generally take priority over this work because the knife isn't intended to be a critical part of our combat model. We don’t think it should ever be the best choice in a fight, but we would like to make it feel better to use by improving its reliability and hit satisfaction, as well as allowing it to be a viable (but not necessary) weapon choice in some situations.

For Escalation, we were hoping to take a pass on the knife to give the knife level an extra "oomph,” but we ran out of time and to do so would have significantly delayed the mode. So, we shipped "BIG KNIFE" instead, hoping that a speed/jump boost, a longer range, and more damage would make that level at least bearable if not good. We hope to come back in the future and give the knife a closer look and the love it deserves—we just need to figure out when it makes the most sense.

—Nicholas Smith, Weapons Designer and Kyle Leach, Modes Designer & Engineer