Valorant, the sought after free-to-play online tactical FPS that was released earlier this month by Riot Games, is getting an ‘early yield or surrender’ option with Patch 1.02.
The news came directly from Senior Producer Ian Fielding as seen on the official site of the first ‘Ask Valorant’ article. The goal would be to reduce wasted time when there’s no hope of a comeback anymore.
Riot Games also answered the community’s question about unrated games feeling unbalanced.
Patch Notes 1.02 are here with a fresh Menu UI, surrender option, and balance for Viper, Jett, and Reyna. Competitive won't be on with the patch ship and will be coming later. Read all about it: https://t.co/VZxSAktY7t pic.twitter.com/TD7Kd0bm8t
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) June 23, 2020
Here’s a snippet of the answer posted by Ian Fielding, Senior Producer and Yilin He, Senior Data Scientist of the Riot Games:
Our goal with Unrated Mode is to allow players to play the core VALORANT game mode with any of their friends. Given this, it means there will be a wider range of skills in games, which can lead to matches feeling less fair. We still have strategies to make sure we keep stomps low and matches competitive, but Unrated will generally have a slightly higher range of skills. We have taken some steps at the cost of a moderate increase to queue times to reduce the average disparity in matches. We hope this leads to matches feeling more balanced.
Comparing Competitive and Unrated, we have a pretty similar matchmaking configuration, with the biggest difference being that in Unrated, there’s no limitation on who you can party up with skill-wise. As it turns out, lots of folks have friends of varying degrees of skill they’d like to play with!
The majority of our Unrated matches are still within the skill disparity constraints that Ranked games would allow. For the high skill disparity matches, the skill gaps come directly from the premade, while the matchmaker adds zero or very limited skill disparity to the match. We are launching our Competitive mode in patch 1.02, which will hopefully help players in both queues, and Competitive will continue to have hard limits on skill disparity.
As a final note, we do track matchmaking ‘quality’ in many ways, including match balance (the final round score) and skill disparity (the difference in skill between the best and worst player in a match), and so far haven’t found huge balance issues, but we’ll continue to monitor this data at scale.
With that said, here’s the thing about Valorant. Like other Riot Games, Valorant is not too far from the typical hero-centered gameplay. Also, with the combination of high-level gunplay and hero mechanics, Valorant is both highly competitive and skill-focused that causal players may find it difficult to enjoy.
Valorant was fully released on June 2, 2020.
