Cover-Credits:
Valorant’s gameplay team released an update on several investigations that are taking place within Riot Games. The developers noticed a large number of reports about the game feeling “inconsistent” and there being a peeker’s advantage. Riot has addressed the issue in the past but the community’s feedback on several performance and networking issues. While there is no word on when the issues will be fixed, Riot Games has already planned out new features to help players have a much more consistent experience.
Addressing networking buffering and network jitter
Riot revealed the server stability looking good at the developer end, reports come in where players complain about “inconsistency.” A lot of players have talked about how hit registration is great in one match and it is a completely different experience in a different match. Riot has narrowed down the causes behind the problem to network buffering and network jitter.
Currently, when network buffering jumps in size due to a network or performance hiccup, the system takes longer than usual to recover and it is something that Riot wants to fix. Considering the complex nature of the issue, Riot Games revealed that it will update players a year later from now with regards to the progress the developers make towards addressing the issue.
The problem of peeker’s advantage in Valorant
Riot has been hearing more feedback about how trying to hold angles against high ping peekers is useless as they always have the advantage. Riot is currently investigating its network and gameplay systems but it will address peeker’s advantage in the future.
Riot revealed in a blog post, “Once we wrap up the core systems audits, we’re going to be doing some work to help us investigate why players are feeling this way about high ping players. We’ll upgrade our internal tooling tailored specifically to measure the exact peeker’s advantage. Using that tooling, we will test various networking scenarios to exactly measure whether an aggressor’s high ping can have a noticeable effect on these values.”
In addition to the above steps, Riot will also monitor live matches to evaluate how high ping offers an advantage to peekers. Any changes that will be implemented will be available in the public beta environment for players to test out before patches are available for the live version of the game.
