We all sometimes face issues while playing video games. This could be bugs, lags, and other issues with the network connection, or with your bullet’s trajectory, all of this making bad game experience. People start playing computer games to relax after some problems in real life and don’t want to face any in games, so Riot Games do everything they can to get rid (or at least minimize) bugs in Valorant.
On the meeting with journalists in Los Angeles, representatives of Riot told about their great work for fixing already existed bugs and prevent all possible ones. They told how they improved their servers and how the peeker’s advantage is reduced.
Making The Seams Invisible
Valorant software engineer says that the company`s aim is to make this game competitive. Developers want gamers to trust Valorant’s system, which will process all their actions correctly. Valiant is the latest craze among the players and there are sites like ValorBoosting that provide services where players can rank higher and faster.
The fair competitive game is that one, where you can control both process and result, regardless you won or not. Your destiny in the game shall not be decided by a slow Internet or bugs. That’s gonna be a real challenge to reach a great success in Valorant, but at the same time it is the guaranty of game’s fairness, – Straily’s said.
Game’s engineering team doing everything they can to make the game smooth and free from bugs. If players thinking too much about the technical side of it, like FPS, latency, etc, probably their previous experience in such games was awful.
Dave Heironymus (engineering manager) said a pretty right thing about his team’s work. The main idea of the speech – if people haven’t noticed the results of engineers’ work, then it’s done correctly, but if somebody did – the work isn’t finished yet.
Paul Chamberlain (senior network engineer) said that his team will fix the problem immediately if the one will appear.
Soon Riot will publish Valorant API that allows to fetch players’ statistics and analyze players’ data. This allows players to check leaderboards with the top and most skilled players, also find players with the most wins and kills. Easily find players with the highest rank and Many professional and amateur players use this info to improve their game and to better understand Valorant mechanics. One of the most popular services that provide that kind of data is valoranttracker.org.
128 Tick Servers
The game’s well-written code is only 50% of work. All multiplayer games require powerful servers because it is the place where you actually play. Ticks – communication between the server and your computer. The more often this communication happens, the better accuracy of all your actions. Usually, companies have 64 tick servers for their games. Valorant has 128 tick servers, so the game works better.
The more ticks servers have, the smoother and more accurate game is because the server gets twice more information about your actions (walking, shooting, etc). So, in that game aiming and shooting (bullet’s trajectory) are smoother and more accurate, and the walking looks more natural.
We think it’s obvious that these much better\faster servers have a higher price for their both purchase and maintain. Most other multiplayer games have 64 tick servers. Look at CS: GO has only 64 tick servers but players can make payments to private companies for playing on their own 128 tick servers. These servers make Valorant a unique shooter.
35ms ping
Players’ connection to servers as important as their power and Valorant developers know about that. Straily said, that their goal #1 was to make latency no higher than 35ms for gamers in the U.S, Canada, and Europe (70% of all players).
If somebody doesn’t know what latency is, here is the explanation – this is the time which takes for your device (in our case – computer) to send a message to a server. The second definition – it’s just a way to see how far are you located from servers and how strong your connection is. Riot Games are setting servers all around the world (already 4 in the U.S) to provide a convenient game for everyone.
That will provide small latency only for 70% of players. The rest 30% still, theoretically, can have it higher than 35ms, but the company going to use another new solution for these cases.
We think that each fan of multiplayer shooters has seen the moments when their enemies get bugged/stuck.
In that game, all bugged players won’t cause so many problems for others. The gamer with an awful connection will see himself teleporting around when others will see him moving smoothly because the server will do everything that possible to make his movements look natural. So, there won’t be any problems with killing the bugged agent.
An easier explanation: the other 9 players won’t even notice the 10th player’s network problems, so his issues won’t affect the match itself.
Peeker’s Advantage Is Reduced
Peeker’s advantage is a real problem. What does “peeker” mean? This is the situation when two players meeting by the corner, but one of them sees another earlier. This issue still cannot be solved in any game but Riot found out the way when nobody will get a real advantage in that situation.
Straily said that the team spent a lot of time studying that problem and calculate the time which is needed for minimizing the peeker’s advantage so that agents will appear on corners approximately at the same time, which is pretty fair.
They organized the meeting with experts to find out the solution, so they came to a compromise – peeking less than 80ms isn’t perfect but fair.
The perfect conditions that will be available for 70% of gamers the peeking will be decreased from 80 to 60ms.
Valorant’s team responsible for the network connection said that the solution of the peeker’s advantage was their main aim. If this problem will be resolved then or at least reduced, then this is would be a great success for all developers team and Valorant players.
