Riot Games' Valorant

[KaNesDeath]

The wave of cheating and chinese users overflowing eastern servers has begun.

 

[aunshi189]

Valorants hitboxes:

Well that explains why all my precision finger tip shots keep missing.

I'm pretty trash at FPS but I've been enjoying Valorant after getting a key. Sage seems strong but is annoying to play as every one wants a rez always.

 

[Execute]

Well that explains why all my precision finger tip shots keep missing.

I'm pretty trash at FPS but I've been enjoying Valorant after getting a key. Sage seems strong but is annoying to play as every one wants a rez always.

I picked up Sage early on and I can't tell you how many times people scream for heals/revives when they're across the entire map. I still think Sage is the most versatile/powerful agent in the game.

I really want competitive/ranked to be released. Think it comes out next week? The matchmaking seems to default to 1 carry, 2-3 average joes, and then 1-2 completely dogshit players. Looking forward to more balanced matchmaking, even if it means longer queue times.

 

[KaNesDeath]

Peekers advantage is apparently worse in Valorant than a certain other 128tick server 5v5 game:



It'll be interesting if or how Riot tackle this. For one of the issues is a more casual friendly game mechanic that doesnt punish accuracy while walking. Other is its prediction software and possibly the fog of war anti-wallhack feature.

 

[Bamboozled]

I picked up Sage early on and I can't tell you how many times people scream for heals/revives when they're across the entire map. I still think Sage is the most versatile/powerful agent in the game.

I really want competitive/ranked to be released. Think it comes out next week? The matchmaking seems to default to 1 carry, 2-3 average joes, and then 1-2 completely dogshit players. Looking forward to more balanced matchmaking, even if it means longer queue times.

She's one of the weakest IMO

She's strong post plant and CT side, but T side her abilities are a disadvantage. Ultimate is strong though.

 

[KaNesDeath]

End of OWL has been put into hyper drive:
https://www.espn.com/esports/story/...-sinatraa-retire-join-sentinels-valorant-team

 

[Execute]

She's one of the weakest IMO

She's strong post plant and CT side, but T side her abilities are a disadvantage. Ultimate is strong though.

Sage??? No way, bitch is OP.

 

[Bamboozled]

Sage??? No way, bitch is OP.

add me TiKD #NA1

 

[Execute]

add me TiKD #NA1

Will add tomorrow. Usually on after 5 PM CT

 

[Mondo Freaks]

Sinatraa quit OW and joined Valorant.

 

[Madmick]

Best servers, server management, netcode, and anti-cheat technology in the world with this game. No other game can compete.
https://www.dailyesports.gg/what-do-128-tick-servers-mean-for-valorant-competitive-play/

Riot Games’ debut first-person-shooter game, Valorant, is set to feature some of the best default competitive settings upon release. Valorant devs boast the game will host 128-tick servers, <35 ms for players near most major cities, and highly developed netcode. When it comes to first-person shooters like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) and Valorant, server tick rates are of utmost importance. Riot Games’ proactive measures in ensuring high tick rates highlight how the company prioritizes competitive play.

What are tick rates?
Tick rate (measured in Hz) is the frequency with which a server “updates” what the player is seeing. For instance, a server tick rate of 64 means the server sends packets of information, such as player position and object location, upward of 64 times in a single second. Therefore, the higher a server’s tick rate, the better it is.

128-tick vs. 64-tick
High-frequency servers (128-tick) are a luxury in most competitive games. Valve servers default to 64-tick, while 128 servers are accessible, for the most part, only through FACEIT, ESEA, and LANs. Implementing 128-tick servers means that players will receive basically twice as much information as someone would on a 64-tick server.

Higher tick rate servers “see” more information than lesser ones, and this is the underlying cause of “no reg.” No reg is when a player shoots his weapon aiming at an enemy, and for whatever reason, his bullet does no damage. What’s happened is that the player shot at a time when a tick refreshed and wasn’t registered by the server. Increasing the tick rate decreases the chance that movement by objects in the game will “pass through” the server unseen.

Tick rate affects the movement of projectiles and utility as well. The difference is so obvious in the fact that there are entirely different line-ups for utility usage in CSGO depending on whether the player is on a 64- or 128-tick server.

Valorant raising the bar
For years, competitive players have urged Valve to transition its in-game servers from 64-tick to 128. Implementing high tick rate servers puts Valorant‘s competitive integrity a step or two above Valve’s from the get-go. There’s no need for players to look to third-party sites to access quality competitive servers. Furthermore, the accessibility of 128 servers for all users means Riot developers are taking careful consideration to optimize the game for computers all across the spectrum. Their high-frequency servers, low latency, and netcode are sure to bring smooth gameplay and increase competitive integrity for all players.

This has been over five years in the making, and has required cooperation with other companies at the ISP-level to optimize. Here's the intro and conclusion excerpts from Part 1 of a 3-part series on what gaming's problem is, what Riot's plan was, and what they did to prepare this game:
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-i

NOV 6, 2015
FIXING THE INTERNET FOR REAL TIME APPLICATIONS: PART I
League of Legends is not a game of seconds, but of milliseconds. In day-to-day life, two seconds fly by unnoticed—you took two seconds reading that! In-game, however, a two-second stun can feel like an absolute eternity. In any single match of LoL, thousands of decisions made in milliseconds dictate which team scores bragging rights and which settles for “honorable opponent” points.

I'm a network engineer at Riot, and part of the Riot Direct team that’s obsessing over those milliseconds. If the communication between a player's computer and our servers slows, a player can’t make in-game decisions as well—and it’s rough to potentially let your team down because of a connection issue. My team’s mission is to provide the fastest possible connection for players to our game.

This is the first in a three-part series discussing what problems online games face using the commodity internet as their delivery mechanism to players, what Riot’s doing about it, and what the future holds for real-time applications.

In this first post, I’ll dive into how the internet, while an absolutely amazing piece of technology, wasn’t constructed for applications that run in real time. If your web browser issues a GET request to rottentomatoes.com looking for reviews of the latest Bond film, you probably don’t mind waiting a few seconds if afterwards all the relevant information appears. The situation doesn’t exist where a user of rottentomatoes.com absolutely needs a movie review in the next tenth of a second. Yet, when I play League, I’m constantly devouring information I need that quickly.

I’ll also discuss some components of the internet’s construction and what implications those components present. Plus, I’ll dive deeper into the issue illustrated by the rottentomatoes.com example: how online game communications fundamentally differ from those of other applications. Finally, I’ll talk about how the routing hardware of the internet exacerbates this problem of real-time communication....

WRAPPING UP
All of this together adds up to an internet that's far from ideal for League of Legends: the resulting latency and packet loss make for frustrating experiences in our game of milliseconds. Real-time gaming traffic requires a new approach—one that eliminates the inefficiencies of indirect fiber routes, BGP, and router configurations. In my next post, I’ll discuss the technical details of the approach that the Riot Direct team is using to tackle this problem and share what’s working and what we want to improve.

Here's where they talk about smoothing netcode and ping in the most exceptionally difficult geozones like Russia where there is such a massive sprawl of real estate; resulting in players dispersed among many different countries playing on the same servers (complicating ISP coverage) across 11 different time zones with a highly uneven distribution of the population:
https://beta.playvalorant.com/ru-ru/news/announcements/ping-in-valorant-during-beta/

AVERAGE PRELIMINARY TEST RESULTS
IMPORTANT: These are average results of preliminary testing. In reality, ping may differ due to various factors, including the quality of the connection of your Internet service provider.

Which means "averaged." The average ping for Moscow is 60. In reality, this means that in some areas of cities, under certain conditions, the ping may well be 45. And with a poor Internet channel and other adverse factors, it is above 90, which is comparable to Yekaterinburg.


As you can see, now the smallest delay is observed in more western cities, as they are closer to European servers. With high demand for VALORANT, we will consider various options for reducing latency in other regions of Russia and the CIS, including connecting Far Eastern cities to the VALORANT server in Japan and installing servers in the Russian Federation and other CIS countries.

FACTORS AFFECTING CONNECTION QUALITY
The server location, game optimization, modern network code and auxiliary functionality for smoothing the delays create a serious foundation for the VALORANT gameplay, but other factors can significantly affect the quality of the game in your home. We list the main ones and share practical tips.

1. Your internet feed is busy. Make sure that at the same time as the game you are not using your channel to download or transfer a large amount of data (including over the local network).
2. Connection type. A wired connection (Ethernet) is much preferable to a wireless (Wi-Fi). This is one of the easiest ways to minimize possible friezes during the game, as Ethernet has less chance of losing data packets.
3. Computer Specifications. VALORANT is optimized even for very weak computers, but, of course, the more powerful your computer is, the easier it will be to not only give a stable frame rate, but also to cope with the receipt and transmission of data packets over the network.
4. Routing in the network of the Internet provider. Depending on the provider, the quality of the connection may vary significantly even within the same city. The minimum that you can do with a poor connection is to write in support of the provider and talk about the situation. Perhaps the problem is solvable and can be fixed.

All of the above is why it's simply inevitable that they will resolve other problems (like peeker's advantage) better than any other game as they game matures. They simply have the best foundation in existence, objectively.
Riot is on a crusade to eradicate 'peeker's advantage' in its new FPS Valorant

 

[KaNesDeath]

Best servers, server management, netcode, and anti-cheat technology in the world with this game. No other game can compete.

Premature statement. Server infrastructure isnt fully implemented. Something odd is going on with the netcode causing increased peekers and high latency player advantages. Anti-cheat method used results in a single point of failure.

When Blizzard released Overwatch it was the console version of netcode and hitboxes used on Pc. Took them two months after release with help from the Call of Duty network engineers to resolve it for Pc. Riot dont have that luxury of in-house talent to lean on to quickly resolve these issues.

All in all theyre adequate systems Riot have put in place with Valorant as a baseline.

 

[Swing]

They're super invested in the competitive side of things. The fighting game that's being developed by them is being made by the guys who founded EVO and developed GGPO (they threw the source code up earlier this year so other fighting game developers could use it for free). I hope their focus pays off. Good netcode/servers should be a must for every game that features online play.

 

[Canned Tuna]

Best servers, server management, netcode, and anti-cheat technology in the world with this game. No other game can compete.
https://www.dailyesports.gg/what-do-128-tick-servers-mean-for-valorant-competitive-play/



This has been over five years in the making, and has required cooperation with other companies at the ISP-level to optimize. Here's the intro and conclusion excerpts from Part 1 of a 3-part series on what gaming's problem is, what Riot's plan was, and what they did to prepare this game:
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-i


Here's where they talk about smoothing netcode and ping in the most exceptionally difficult geozones like Russia where there is such a massive sprawl of real estate, resulting in players dispersed among many different countries playing on the same servers (complicating ISP coverage) across 11 different time zones with a highly uneven distribution of the population:
https://beta.playvalorant.com/ru-ru/news/announcements/ping-in-valorant-during-beta/

All of the above is why it's simply inevitable that they will resolve other problems (like peeker's advantage) better than any other game as they game matures. They simply have the best foundation in existence, objectively.
Riot is on a crusade to eradicate 'peeker's advantage' in its new FPS Valorant

I'm probably going to download this game and try it out this week.

Do you know if the problem with their Anticheat software impacting performance in other games was fixed with the patch that allows you to toggle it off when you aren't playing Valorant?

 

[Madmick]

Premature statement. Server infrastructure isnt fully implemented. Something odd is going on with the netcode causing increased peekers and high latency player advantages. Anti-cheat method used results in a single point of failure.

When Blizzard released Overwatch it was the console version of netcode and hitboxes used on Pc. Took them two months after release with help from the Call of Duty network engineers to resolve it for Pc. Riot dont have that luxury of in-house talent to lean on to quickly resolve these issues.

All in all theyre adequate systems Riot have put in place with Valorant as a baseline.

Objectively superior framework for supremely competitive gameplay. I'm sure more casual players won't mind playing other games antiquated by its release.

 

[GSP4tw]

The finally fixed the massive fps drops in certain spots of the maps. Thank fuck.

 

[KaNesDeath]

Objectively superior framework for supremely competitive gameplay.

What are the benefits of Valorant using 128tick over 64tick gameplay wise?

 

[sportkillergreg]

I didn’t know they still made games for the n64

 

[Execute]

I'm probably going to download this game and try it out this week.

Do you know if the problem with their Anticheat software impacting performance in other games was fixed with the patch that allows you to toggle it off when you aren't playing Valorant?

Wouldn't know. Haven't touched any other game since downloading Valorant.

 

[Execute]

add me TiKD #NA1

Added.

Having played the game for a few weeks now, I have some minor criticisms that I think will be addressed by Riot over the next few months.

1. No "true" solo-queue. I want a ranked system with true solo/duo players, and a ranked 5 for team play. I see no reason to allow 3+ stacks to queue for ranked as it's almost always a shitty experience for those in the minority. I've run into a bunch of people getting carried by their friends simply to obtain rank and then stop playing anything but the minimum amount of games.

2. No decay for rank, instead they simply remove the rank from your profile after a two weeks. No MMR decay either. I really fucking hate running into people that clearly didn't earn their rank.

3. Riot prevents you from queuing with friends 2 ranks away, HOWEVER they allow you to get queued with strangers 2+ ranks away. This is happening a lot less since ranked came out, so I am guessing their matchmaking is improving with more data.

There's still a lot of bugs and the last patch definitely introduced some hitbox/reg issues. Nothing that can't/won't be fixed before the release.