Valorant is Broken (and Riot Can't Fix it)
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- čas přidán 12. 05. 2024
- / thekinglive
#Valorant #King #Gameplay
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Twitch: / bigolbktofwtr
Twitter: / bigolbktofwtr - Hry
I think another problem is the types of players that gravitate towards the selfish feast or famine characters. So most of the time, not only are you left with way less utility, but also youre left with (most of the time) a no com/very little teamwork type player so you cant even do something as basic as split through mid
Thats a great point! Its rare but i have had great reyna/jett players on my team before (i actually cant think of any chambers LOL) who communicate, and try their hardest to work together. At least with those players i feel relieved a bit, but for the majority of them they just say nothing and ignore calls.
High ascendant / low immortal is bad for it as well. I tried to pick up yoru last act but playing duelist in this elo means ~50/50 chance you're just going to have 5 duelists.
As a Jett main my main issues is initiators not using util or using for themselves instead of the team. I end up basically dry dashing onto site. When I play initiator duelists usually don't push in with it. Jett and reyna players usually play for the team but don't get the support they need. Then get yelled at for baiting when they got tired of dying for free.
lot of gays nowadays
@@nibras69 ??
I think big problem is how RR allocation works. If you have higher ACS you get more RR. So of course you are incentivised to play for high ACS on selfish agents instead of playing to win the game. The Jett with 20 kills who gets team MVP by just exit fragging every round and aceing twice, then dying first the rest of the game with no impact, has no positive impact on winning the game, yet will most likely lose the least amount of RR/get the most amount of RR depending on how the game turns out afterwards. While a sentinel/controller player may try to play to win, get left hanging by his team and go negative trying to anchor/retake a site that he was never going to get help by his team for. That guy then loses a lot/gains very little RR, for actually trying to play to win. So yeah I honestly understand why people just lock duelist and run it down, because hitting your head against a wall repeatedly on a duelist gets rewarded more by the system than learning complex agents/maps and actually playing to win.
Yeah this is totally true and FUCK VALORANT
This is hella real. Most duelists are selfish and play for kills while sentinals and controllers play for win. As far i have known this game, initiators works best for me! They can be played agressive like duelists and can also help push in site or retake site better than many agents(thats why they are initiators😂). Currently im a sova main and I usually mvp or team mvp almost every game
As someone who enjoys playing controller much more than duelist, THIS IS SO REAL. I can't climb if I play with my brain, might as well just do aim labs
this is so right. As the Jett player I try my best to actually play off my teamates' abilities so that it's not only easier for me to get a kill but also safer. Sometimes I'll get flamed for exit fragging a lot, which is fair sometimes, but it's mostly bc the other duelist and/or the initiator won't help me enter site. Or my teamates' aren't able to enter site when I enter. Idk, I suck cause I'm only gold 3, I try my best to play off my teamates though, no matter how annoying they are being
This. The reyna that has zero kills and then gets a few 3k's once the round is already lost gets to still hold on to RR. It's dumb.
As a controller main, soloq lately has felt like an absolute nightmare, basically for all the reasons you have listed here. Can't avoid having at least one guy filling Reyna-Jett and then just watch round after round how they die with no impact. Idk what Riot can do, hopefully with a different map pool we magically get better, but we need some incentives to get people out of agents that do nothing the whole game.
I was flamed on Reddit for saying ranking/match making should prioritize using different agents.. one trick pony is not my style but apparently THAT is the ONLY way to get good. At least I was told.
So true bro
@@SamMaciel its not the only way
but in general if you play mostly 1-2 agents you're going to be better than the guy that plays 10.
@linkplays2952 "better" at what? Pure aim? Baiting? Overall, game sense? Teamwork? Solo confidence? Rank pro?
My point is not to say that 1 agent doesn't have benefits. I'm saying that there are aspects of the game you lose or are blind to by only using a single agent.. incentives don't mean you have to take them... I'm just saying someone who is well rounded is an overall positive for all games where a highly specialized adds frustrating team comps ( 4 dualists) and an aspect of greedy playstyle. Not saying flip the scales just balance them a bit more to bias team-play not k/d-play..
Just my opinion.
@@SamMaciel Better in the sense you don't have to think about your utility as much and you can know more about said characters utility. If you main sova you can learn way more sova lineups for example than if you played 10 characters sova being one.
No one who plays neon as a side characters will be near as good as a neon main is since her movement is complicated. Same with raze satchels.
TL:DR If someone only plays 1-3 agents they can learn their utility and more complicated utility for certain maps than someone who plays 10. Even pro players only main 1 role which is 4-6 agents.
I honestly wish there wasn't a map pool. The game would be more exciting to me if every map was always in the game.
i know right? i think riot's biggest head scratcher by far when making the map pool was having the map pool apply to unrated and even swiftplay. like why??? those are two casual modes in valorant, why are we making players go through the same map pool as competitive???
@@ruta_VAi think they think that new map pools every season will make people more hype for new seasons but it really just hurts the game
@@ssspottyyy trying to artificially create hype by putting back a map that we used to have will never work out well. I can see having a pool for competitive, or have a map vote system, but in the casual gamemodes??? Trippin
@@-cactus.raven-i could be wrong but on update 8.11 they are removing map pool in casual play, so every map will be back in every game mode except comp
@@ilybrisenwho cares about other modes though. We need it for ranked.
The biggest problem is the map pool, just remove it from comp and leave it for pros, for comp just put all available maps out
a map pick plsss
This 100% or two sets of pools you can choose from. It would give them data on number of players and agent picks and their preferred pool.
@@user-mu8rf5no1ri think a map ban is better
@@TheReal_FishFins the thing is they don't want this on ranked, they copied a game that has map picking, and they have lots of testers, feedback searchers, analyzers etc, and they still didn't want to do this cuz it's negative in a thing that we didn't take into consideration and they did.
They should copy CS' map rotation. Put an Active pool that is only used for pro tournaments then keep a Reserve pool so people can play those maps for Casual play
I agree. I'm a passionate Reyna hater and the solution I found to this is to pretend it's not a Reyna. I will just treat them as a player rather than somebody I can ask util from and I will try to call a play involving them.
You ever notice how you'll be watching a Reyna in a 1v3, and they don't even activate their ultimate? That's how bad this agent is, that even in the optimal time to ult with her, the people playing her don't use it LOL.
Like I'd love to have an agent who's ultimate I can call a play around, but at the very least please just use your ultimate in the situations where it makes sense like for the love of god.
right? its the cheapest ult in the f-ing game, USE IT
@@Bigolbktofwtr honestly tho I’m not sure if that reyna would be good at using another agent because that seems to be an issue with not knowing how to use utilities which is even worse on a controller or initiator. Now I understand rey as being bad comms or self centric players but as long as they are not toxic I would rather them play that agent since they have cracked aim and can possibly make high impact kills we can work with rather than them being forced to play omen and have bad smokes or blinds. Some people with adapt but as a whole the population will just get more toxic and miserable
The main issue is Valorant rewards high KDA players even with a Combat score system. No one is going to care about a Controller having good map control and almost perfect smokes or a Sentinel being able to anchor a site or an Initiator being able to setup the team for a push.
It just rewards players who have good aim and gets more kills than the rest, that's why you'll see players insta-lock Duelists.
seriously the KDA thing is really crap for controllers. I spent most of my time closing angles, covering lines of sight and decoy plays - allowing my fraggers to get high KDAs and every match i dont play that role, there is 70% chance of losing coz every just picks wants to frag frag frag xD
This is the problem with literally ANY hero shooter game. R6, Apex, OW, etc. if there is a hero that helps an individual player win more, that hero/character will always be picked
but it doesnt help the player "win more". playing selfish agents give a more fun playstyle and are more likely to frag out but winning the game is practically irrelevant to their impact most of the time.
not with apex even selfish characters has team utility there.
i used to love comp in low ranks because people commed at least half the time and at least tried to play together no matter how bad they were at the game, but once i hit diamond i was getting at least a jett and reyna most of my games, no comms at all 90% of the games, and most of the time if i did make calls people didnt listen and the team was now disjointed making my calls counterintuitive. so now when i enter comp i just immediately expect all these things and my expectations are usually met, my mental is chalked from the getgo and i cant even perform well myself because of that. but when i play teamplay im fine, which is how i know its just the state of comp. riot needs to do something and soon
It does feel like things get worse sometimes as you climb. People start to care about the game more and for some reason they start to be less enjoyable to play with.
Once you make it to about Asc2-Asc3 people start comming again. It's really weird in D2-A1 everyone stops comming. Idk why. I've noticed a big difference in the quality of my teammates since spending more time in Asc3 and Immo1 especially. There is a light at the end of the tunnel if ur willing to get there.
@@Cojitar my peak is low ascendant 3 a few months ago and if thats true now then it wasnt a few months ago, was still the same shit sitting in silence 90% of the time in asc 2 and few games in asc 3 for me
@@pigletisme2434 my peak is low immortal1, and when I was in immortal I can say more than 50% of games have people comming consistently. Maybe my hidden MMR keeps me in those slightly better lobbies, even when I fall back down to low Asc3.
unfortunately this is unfixable. Reyna, Jett and Chamber are already in the game. They can't remove them, reworking them would receive so much backlash, and would ruin some comps that only run 1 of them. And adding a role queue would kill the game. I think we just have to suck it up and play whatever we want as well. I realised this after a few thousand hours maining smokes, so now i just pick Deadlock every game 😇
If we can ban agents that would be a good solution to not have reyna on the team
@@bumerang6525or just have a role que for ranked like league and ow have. so we can have some basic structure of 1 of each agent and 1 flex que that can select anything thats way better than having basically 5 flex picks and getting a full team of duelists or a team with 3 controllers etc
@@bumerang6525When you ban Reyna but the guy on your team is a Reyna one trick he most likely will perform worse than if he had Reyna, thus making you more likely to lose. Doesn't matter if you have Jett, Kay/O, Omen, Killjoy and Sova on Ascent if only the Omen and Jett actually know how to play their character. It would actually be better if you had a Jett, Omen, Reyna, Chamber, and Viper as long as they are all comfortable with their character.
@@CantHandleThis6this ain’t league he can still shoot his gun no matter the agent
@@Krimo Mistimed smokes, Getting over aggressive because their used to having a get out jail free card, Bad TP's, Mistiming Paranoias, Blinding the team, and blocking off points of the map that teammates want to hold (especially if there's an OP involved). These are all the things that come from an Omen not knowing how to Omen which hurts you more than if they played Reyna and used their Utility correctly
As someone who used to be a controller main, I always had duelists who would be scared to entry. When I switched to duelist and entried, suddenly my winrate went up by 10%. I can control the utility from my initiators and pace of the game, while on smokes all I could do was tell my duelist, "I'm blinding, go go go" "entry please" "jett please dash on site" "why are you dashing wine at the start of every round" and then subsequently getting made fun of for telling my duelist to fucking entry. Good thing I am not in silver anymore. Too bad that still happens in plat.
Good luck shits like this happens in ascendant-immortal lobbies too where they rely more on their godlike aim than actually playing and most of the time their aim isnt much different from silvers
i don't play duelist (my aim is mediocre at best lol) but i completely agree with your take. why am i, as sage or gecko, the one taking space lol
100%, I usually play sentinels (Cypher, Deadlock) and it's insane that I have to use my util in awkward ways to go past a choke point, with 2 or 3 duelists on the team. Like, bro. Why are you even playing a duelist?
Currently dabbling in initiators (Fade, Kayo and a bit of Gecko) and I plan on learning Omen too... But I know for a fact the issues will remain.
gets worse when you get to diamond lmao. Just a heads up less people use their mics but have egos about how the game is supposed to be played, Which ends in you tryna comm the whole game only to get flammed half-way through by someone who has a good understanding of the game but just never uses their goddam mic to articulate it (until you fuck up of course xD)*
@@paradox9369 As a cypher main, i relate SO HARD to this
One time I had a Yoru on my team, why would not use util to get on site, always waited for me
and when I did come in after him, and traded a kill, he would say "Cypher, why are you baiting me?"
Solo queueing is a nightmare in the low ranks.
You want to entry as a duelist? Too bad because your initiator already wasted all of their utility before you even took main.
Want to setup your duelist as an initiator? Too bad because as you flashed and stunned everyone on site your entry either died taking first contact or they’re too scared to push even though they’ll get an easy kill or just get traded (which is literally their job)
Want to smoke for your team so they can get in to the site? Too bad you wasted both your smokes because either the duelist is too scared to entry, the initiator is useless, or both.
Wanna play as a sentinel? Have fun being useful only if they go to your site on defense or if you can trade your teammates and you have lineups. You’ll be useless if your teammates are unless you have godly aim. It’s also just incredibly boring to play.
its just a nightmare. Doesnt matter how well you know the game or how well you play, its all up to the enemy team and your own. If you get enemies that hit only headshots, you're screwed, or if you're teammates are useless and braindead, you're screwed. The chances of a solo carry are infinitesimally small.
you’re not wrong lmfao
Copium
I think Dota had a great system called the honour system, where you’d get more RR if you were nice to your team and they could choose to reward your kindness or punish toxicity. This basically solved toxicity because players were forced to be nice or rank up extremely slowly. Also, I’m fairly sure you couldn’t honour someone in your party so it was quite a good system until they sadly removed it
I hate how when you pick a certain agent is not "meta" you get toxic teammates hating you even if you contribute to the team. I just wanna play the agent I feel like picking with other aspects like design and personality wise and not just power wise, people these days only pick agents depending on how "meta" they are in both ranked and pro play. I've had toxic people "reporting" me for botting when clearly I was helping and enemy cyphers getting mad that I killed them as a sentinel that isn't "meta". I get for pro play cuz they're making money by playing in riot's tournaments and they wanna be able to win, I wanna see a variety of agents being played and ever agent having the same amount of value and not just the "meta" agents like cypher, gekko, jett, raze, viper, omen constantly getting picked due to their power
I think people who main agents in the Holy Trinity should just main clove. You can play double controller on all maps (pretty much), smoke even after you die entrying, and still frag out like crazy (if you're feeling it). Plus her meddle has great teamplay functionality, so I personally would much rather have a Clove on my team than any of those three.
But at the same time, this only applies to high level games, people are allowed to play the game how they want and if they just want to have fun, let thtem.
Agreed, even if you’re the first to die every time, at least you still have util thats useful for the team even after your death, which is still more util than Reyna provides 💀
if ur playing a team game just to play it like a solo game, go for it, just dont play the mode where winning and losing has stakes so ur ruining other people’s experience, just play unrated or swiftplay
@@pigletisme2434 Even better, i'll suggest most of them to try out These
Solo :
Ultrakill/DOOM
Multi:
Apex , Quake , i'll even add For Honor or guilty gear for Non-fps highly skilled game
I genuienly believe that most of us (people who plays fraggers , including me) would like better those games since they reach more what we want in the game
Plus idk if its on Val' as well , but alot of Riot games player complain about "low skill champ" meanwhile there is alot of more """skill """ based games
if u think this only applies to high level u have never hit immortal, it's in all stages of the games, the difference is that at high level the util help and the coordination is 10 times better then anything below ascendant
Perfectly said. The trinity agents + iso are just selfish, you can't expect them to work with your team. If I play Harbor on breeze and we're losing, I get the blame for not getting frags or get told to "just smoke then" which I was already doing all game, but they are tunnel-visioned. I've been playing since launch and there is still nothing as satisfying as coordinated team play, especially when the comp is right for the map. I wish these players could realise that and start experimenting with other agents...
I've been thinking of learning Raze for exactly what you said in the video, and there was a time where I wanted to switch. Then I saw the horrible smokes my controllers were doing, was disgusted, and went back to Omen. I may not learn Raze, but that's a cost I'm willing to pay to get proper smokes. Baffles me how controllers in plat lobbies don't know how to do it.
People keep asking for a replay system but what we truly need is agent and map bans. This is probably a hot take but I believe this can work, Riot just has to make it balanced and fair so players don't have 100% control over agent bans, otherwise Reyna's pick rate will be nuked and Riot doesn't want that.
Very happy to see you post again, your valorant videos never fail to validate my feelings about the state of the game and this is no different. Impossible to find like-minded players in ranked. It almost feels like they also got tired of this game and either quit or are playing on auto-pilot without feelings, as if the occasional frags they get is their life support. Riot has to stop neglecting its community and do something with it.
Edit: One last thing to add is that I believe the agent picks are the reason why the map pool feels horrible. If you were to have comps that match the map, then we wouldn't complain. But we don't live in that world so we just want to have the other maps back where bad agent comps are not that punishing compared to breeze or icebox. What makes the hate even more amplified is that this is the longest time we've had an unchanged map pool, so that's a valid reason to complain. And as much as we hate icebox or breeze (I personally don't) I don't think they are going to go, because they just came back previous patch. Ascent was never banned, so expect to say your goodbyes to that. If that doesn't happen then Riot is 100% biased towards Ascent.
www.reddit.com/r/ValorantCompetitive/comments/18tc8y6/history_of_valorant_maps_in_rotation_which_ones/?rdt=42384
Agreed, Icebox and Breeze basically *requiring* a Viper is one of the problems with the current map rotation for sure, especially the further down you get in the ranks the less likely you are to see a Viper on your team, and don’t even bother hoping for a good Viper 💀
as an iso main i can disagree with this tbh
There are people who can play multiple characters and it is a good skill to have. But there are also players who simply become grandmasters at one agent but absolutely can’t play anything else. For me it’s chamber. I tried everything. I can’t smoke that well, don’t have a duelists mindset or speed, and I am horrible at setting up as cypher and killjoy. Not for lack of trying. At the same time I synergised with chamber in a way that I have never before with any other character in an fps shooter. Post nerf mind you. His guns were built for me and it brought out my natural instincts for knowing when agents rotate how to cut them off and helped me most with my aim. And it’s fun fighting flashers and smokers and mollies with just guns like a tactical fps. There are also the sniper mains. I just think that it is a very selfish thing to do to ban an agent a player spent hours mastering and is good at and will be mediocre at the rest. I mean it sucks the fun out of the game for them. I’d rather have a rey a grandmaster( no excuse for toxicity a penalty for that is absolutely welcome) than a toxic filler player who can’t play or doesn’t like playing omen. And people don’t like learning lineups and have trouble remembering them, so they develop their mechanical skills because they have different strengths. Sure they could learn something else but why would I study a game like a textbook when I just want to have fun? The focus should be on stopping toxicity and faster penalties for that rather than instalocking.
At least with iso he has the wall. The only team benefit i can think of is chamber and Jett have essentially a free gun for eco rounds but its rarely used to benifit the team. Ive never really seen a chamber or jet sacrifice and buy for a player and use their ultimate
@@Wetto.-.11Calling Iso selfish feels disingenuous. Everything in his kit minus his double tap is best used to help the team. Especially his Wall and ultimate. Need to push and take space use a wall and or undercut that you and or your team can push behind. Use the undercut to combo with abilities such as a shock dart, Raze nade or Brim ult. Pesky sentinel making your life hell with utility. Time your ultimate with your execute and take their utility out of the equation if you win great if you die, they're a free kill or have to play retake. Plus you can even fuck up a chamber using their ult or a Jett on knives, especially if their on eco cause a vandal vs Classic sounds super fair.
I started playing comtroler because in my rank no one wants to play smoke and i dont want to suffer with bad smoke but because of that now i try to stay back and support my team than just die which means i would get less kills which should be normal but i am not rewarded with enough rr for supporting my teammates
All i want is for valorant to give some ACS boost for the support agent with good assist which will encourage and give us something worth in return otherwise all will just try to play duelist and try to frag out to get the most rr out of the match
All i want is that assist on agent like initiator and controller should be more rewarding
i feel like the main tip valorant content creators give for ranking up being "instalock duelist" dosent help either, so you often end up with pretty mediocre reyna's and jett's who end being mid/bottom fraggers and don't contribute much to the team.
The King is fucking back baby
Hey its Teets!!
I remember playing sunset with deadlock once instead of cypher to try something new and that game felt infinitely harder cause cypher is absolutely broken on sunset
Raze & KJ is extremely valuable against Cypher. The molly’s and nades literally knock out Cyphers tripwire within one easy swoop. I’ve noticed though- a lot of the players don’t know that in low elo? 🤔
I'm no radiant balance genius but I'd say the simple yet probably hard to execute answer to selfish characters is to force/rework them to be more team-friendly, similar for characters that are "inferior" versions of others. I'm not talking big changes like complete ability changes but how they function is a good start. Say a Reyna gets a kill and self heals, how about have any excess over health redirect to a nearby ally in need? Reward your team for having a good Reyna. Maybe make Chamber's pistol drop a short duration slow field on kill but reduce the bullets it has. If Harbor feels like a worse Viper, buff what he's supposed to be good at. Make his slow a little better or make cove not a glorified 6 second smoke; make it block projectiles or stay down as a smoke even once broken. These ideas are probably ludicrously broken but you get the point.
This was a problem that I had with Valorant very early on and was ultimately the reason I dropped it. While it does play and feel like CS in a lot of ways, the really inflexible nature of roles and team play was a big turn off for me. It’s not that I don’t like playing with and as a team but in Valorant, there’s just straight some things that YOU cannot do alone. Your character / role dictates so much and doesn’t leave a lot of room for flexibility. I feel like my issue with it is that team play is a requirement to succeed and have a good time in Valorant where as in CS, you still have a lot of personal agency but your chances of winning CAN be positively augmented by good teamwork.
The worst part of it to me is that Riot did this totally by design and then they double down hard on it by their approach to making maps. If the maps were more general purpose designed then I don’t think it’d be that bad. But when they design a specific way parts of a map are meant to be played, then I can’t help but see why so many people hate a lot of the maps in the game.
This, but in CS, it's the polar opposite issue for me. I end up doing all the utility lineups because my teammates have no idea how to do it themselves because they hope that someone else did the work for them. At least in Val, everyone has a set role and you can identify what's wrong and even teach them how to play. You can't really do that in CS. You either know it or don't.
The more you rank up the more common it is to see people know their lineups, your issue is only really an issue at low elo. @CR0WYT
@@NOMORTARS this happened while I was MG1 in CSGO. It was soul draining knowing that ranking up didn’t mean much. At least in all levels of Valorant you can help. You pretty much have to queue with people in CS or you’re setting yourself up for failure.
I was just talking with my friends about this when I picked Harbor on Icebox. For some reason, the slow effect from harbor's wave and wall is nowhere near as effective as sage's slow, which basically makes him useless. Unless you're buying Cove every round for 350 creds and using it well, Harbor has no use case in the game right now. There's hardly any room for adaptation anymore.
Yeah Icebox is like all he's picked in pro play right now too. The slow is nice if you're able to just hold the wall, but one flash and they're through it.
harbor's slow honestly just needs to be buffed. take it away from teammates pushing through your wall, and slightly increase it to add an incentive not to push it for enemies. there's not enough threat for it to not be pop flashed through.
After masters shanghai, riot said that there is going to be a duelist rework, which to me sounds like they are trying to fix this problem somewhat. The biggest problem for duelists (+ chamber) is that only raze and jett are solid picks while the rest are just worse. Neon, phoenix, iso are not good at the duelist role at all, phoenix and iso have no movement or space taking ability, neon is quite difficult to play and her entry ability is very bad compared to raze and jetts. Iso is by far the worst, having no movement ability, no flash, a wall which is pretty bad, the undercut which is okay ig but requires some kind of teamplay to get good value, his shield is not that effective imo, and ult is quite literally a 50/50. Chamber after the nerfs really cant have the impact that he used to have, the tp is extremely limited and doesn't let you escape that easily, and the rest of his kit pretty much relies on his ability to get a kill (and tp away). The only way they can fix this problem is to rework other duelists to have some kind of entry value, because currently only raze and jett can do this consistently (and raze is much better than jett for taking space). Yoru can also do this but he has a very high skill ceiling and if you don't know how to play him then you quite literally throw the game by tping and dying for free in an entry. I think he also requires a lot of team play which you cant always get in soloq
I completely see what you're saying but I think it's a doomed mindset. It's not like Reyna, Chamber, and Jett are pointless agents. They're harder to play around as a teammate, but also as an enemy. They take duels rather safely. Selfish play is only bad if the player is bad, like a cracked selfish player can carry a game. I think having this available tradeoff of less team utility for more selfish tools creates more interesting dynamics than not.
Regardless I do sympathize and think these agents/player can create really bad feeling experiences. Good video 👍
The problem isn't with these agents alone, the problem is when you have all 3 of these agents, there is no utility to set them up to take duels. These agents aren't hard to play around as a team. They're hard to play around when they ARE the team. And you're practically guaranteed to have 2 of them every single game.
In lower elos this isn't going to matter, but in Imm+ it's just mind numbing. There's a reason that pro teams aren't running Reyna/Chamber. They just suck on most maps, and you're better off picking different agents that actually serve a purpose.
there is another massive problem, my game stutters every time someone shoots me, an ability is used etc. and it has been a problem for me and many others since almost 2 years now
I played this game season 1 and now i am back to the game. As a sentinel main i have mixed feeling about RR system.
I think one of the best example is playing Cypher on Sunset. I can basically defend all A site alone witch very help my team. Hovewer enemy never go on my site, so i don't really have posibillity to kill. As a result even if i win i get low RR and i can lost a lot if lose cuz no have kills.
i feel like the game is in an akward champ where it starts having quite a lot of agents but not enough to start allowing bans or actually encouraging people to choose different classes. There are so many champ that are just useless and never peaked it's sad
I think the biggest issue right now is the fact that somebody who is bronze or silver ranked, can play another silver or bronze player, but the skill difference between the two players is immense. I’m not sure if it’s simply people Smurf Ing or on alternate accounts but being in bronze and silver, and even gold, you’re either playing with or against straight garbage or somebody who is Miles better than you
I've noticed this too. I don't play much but the premise for the lowest ranks is that they have the lowest skill players in the game, but I'm going against people in iron who are very obviously at least platinum skill level but are either smurfing or something else
valorant, a game focused on teamplay above anything else
riot : "mmm Lets create characters with selfish kits"
but jokes asides, I get why they do it. These characters tend to be very popular because of their carry potential and potential for flashy plays. However, Most people that gravitate towards these characters tend to have main character syndrome, the whole team have to work around them and them only and when the game has so many of these agents, its just gonna create an environment where no one wants to work together because they all want to play the 1v9 carry character and end up sucking at them because now their comp has no utility whatsoever
I think the problem isn’t the maps it’s the fact that the agents are not balanced well at all. If you want to win you basically have to pick the same agents on almost every map and it makes the game stale so for a majority of players they are going to pick the more fun characters that aren’t as good.
acs is based on how many people are left on the enemy team so if the jett’s only getting the last few people that’s low acs, if he dies first he can’t get acs because he’s dead
personally for me its just the agents diversity, like this season alone my match carrier is just either viper or omen and viper almost 90% of it. which other maps like heaven i could get a way w astra,it has gotten soo stale to even grind. same thing over and over, if i dont use viper then i loose bc no one is powerful as her at stalling
Yo it's been so long since I've watched you! You used to be my guide back in bronze😭 then I kinda learnt by myself by the time I reached plat.. it's really nostalgic watching you again tho! Keep it up! I love your presentation style
I appreciate it man! Thanks for the long time support :)
100% Agree with all this. I have a few other thoughts as someone who used to (almost always) only soloq in this game.
The biggest flaw I found in Valorant was that there was no sense of "universal utility". This means that if your team comp isn't carefully made, you can go whole games without entry tools (flashes), concealment/cover (smokes), etc. Even though many agents have similar utility to sorta mitigate this problem, it doesn't make up for situations that feel lost as soon as the agents are picked.
CS never had this problem since anyone can have all the core utility needed. You can actively rotate between being an entry fragger with flashes to supporting with smokes to harassing with area denial molotovs anytime you feel it's needed. CS still has selfish players who only use flashes (or just dry peek everything lol) but you as a player always have the ability to contribute to filling the utility gaps your team doesn't have.
The only way I see this problem being addressed in Valorant is if they did a major rework of utility in general; that is, give ALL agents the ability to buy generic utility to meet basic needs like flashes and smokes, while still keeping the specialized utility of the unique agents. That way even if your team is Duelist stacked you as an individual still have a chance to provide stuff your team is missing.
I don’t really play valorant but since launch I was worried about this being the case. A tactical fps hero shooter with no role limit is naturally going to result in players taking the selfish flashy roles. It’s a tough balancing act.
The problem is that i used to main skye cuz its has one the best utility to support and overall a good agent but in my games my teammates don't want that support they go all in
And most of the times ill find im the one top fragging and our duelist just dying off at this point my team won't accept my support so why not enhanced my ability to get frags by locking in reyna
As a chamber that uses his util I can tell u that I'll still rely on myself more than anyone in the soloq and as a sentinel chamber is the best to hold with the ult, the trip is not really helpful for actually slowing down the enemy most of the time so I'll usually use it for info and put it in a very visible place where they can just shoot it letting me know they're coming. I think it's a gud sentinel to play on your own and u can even use the trip to get into site, like on ascent you're trying to get into a from a main but there's someone holding close on the left or right side but you don't know so you put your trip and it either detects them or gets shot so you know where they r.
With the words at the end I for some reason thought about comparison to League of Legends - maybe without the guidance of specific "positions" (support etc. in league), people will just not think about these things.
I think these issues boil down to Valorant being a hero shooter. There's always going to be an imbalance and a good map pool is subjective as the tolerance for each map depends on the person's playstyle. Like I was perfectly fine with Pearl and Fracture because I knew how to play as an Initiator, but everyone else I played with hated them with a passion like what everyone is doing with Breeze right now. Every hero-based game goes through this and it's pretty much impossible to fix unless you just take the TF2 route and stop the production of future characters permanently to focus on what already exists, but I'm afraid that'll receive tons of backlash as well. Riot can't win.
Honestly, I'm not sure how they can create new relevant characters that will slot themselves into the meta. It might keep the game 'fresh' in the short term, but I think in the long term it just sucks. The more 'weak' agents there are in the game, the more likely you are to get one of them on your team.
Like why bother releasing another Iso when we can just focus on other things. Rework some of the weak guys, fix up some of the maps. Literally anything else.
@@Bigolbktofwtr an Operation Health of sorts for Valorant would be great, but the kind of people Valorant is attracting would not be happy about it. A similar period of time happened in Overwatch during the 2020-21 season where only one hero was released. It was arguably the most balayage game ever was, but it’s only because Blizzard put all their production towards OW2 and only did balancing tweaks for 2 years and everyone was more upset at that. People want a constant flow of heroes while maintaining balance, which is impossible.
Casey, what do you think about Role Queue for Valorant? (E.g. 1 Duelist spot, 2 controllers, 2 sentinels, or 2 duelists, 1 controller, 2 sentinels etc.)
I’m sure many will say the argument of queue times but, imho I don’t think it will affect it as much as you may think. It works very well in overwatch, in terms of matchmaking for the larger part of the player base, and they have FAR LESS of players than Valorant.
Personally, I think it’d be interesting to see Riot try that out in maybe some kind of event mode or experimental mode. I feel like it could be a really healthy addition to Valorant and would change the overall quality and feel of everyone’s matches.
Plus, imagine not having to be forced anymore into a role you don’t like or didn’t want to play, how great would that be? Lmao. Just queue up for the role(s) you love to play. idk. Lemme know what y’all think. Ty for coming to my TedTalk essay.
The problem with role queue is that we'd then have to decide what the acceptable team comp on a map is, and thats not how the game is played.
On bind, are we running double controller, or double initiator, or double sentinel, or double duelist? Maybe we run no sentinel even? Role queue means riot is deciding what the best team comp for every map is which sounds like a really really bad idea
its a solution, but i think it takes off the creativity on team comps and plays that could be made,
Overwatch died because of role queue (kinda) it was more of a “support characters can do everything” issue as well as “yeah here’s a free way to not die”
@@tsukki5838 wasn't the problem with overwatch was 2 tanks 4 supports beat out any dps ever?
@@Bigolbktofwtr hmmm. That’s a good point, maybe then it could be a bit flexible? Allow the teams to choose the role slot that will be used for the match (like a map or agent ban), or maybe just allow each team to choose their own set of role locks.
Plus, as an added bonus it could potentially get more people to work together more frequently, as they HAVE to choose how their team comp is going to be laid out. As for the queueing part, you wouldn’t queue for a role, but just queue up like any other normal match I guess?
I use to go to blue moose all the time.. what if there was a ban agent at the start.. and there can only be 1 of each agent in the game
In North Dakota? lol
My take is that in ranked, you don't really NEED these complex setups and meta is not nearly as important as it is in pro play. And sure it may feel harder if you are lacking a key component in the meta composition for a map, however you have to realize that the enemies are also likely to be lacking this as well.
Another problem is the smurfing problem, when i win a match, the next match i play against plat or diamond smurfs or i get teammates that are shit or i am bottom fragging
Ahh i missed your videos mane. and i agree with your take. I say the same to my team but even on 5 stack I've had many matches with the trinity agents
I feel like chamber as different as he can anchor a site really well and pretty much defend it alone
Ascent , Haven , Icebox , Bind , Split have been the OG maps that I love and I just wish they are back together.
As a low rank player i have to mention the smurf problem the game faces, lately you cant play three games without having in one of them someone who claims he is smurfing and then having 30-40 kills
Reyna is objectively bad, but I feel like both chamber and Jett, on the right players, are extremely impactful agents. A good Jett can be an explosive entry fragger and open up thoroughly locked down sites whilst also taking a weight off the team with unexpected defensive OP picks. A bad chamber will make you question why the agent is even considered a sentinel, but a good one (with good trip placement, aggressive angles, etc) is nigh unpushable and a nightmare for the enemy team to deal with. Team comps do matter and you often will "feel" them in your games, but in low ranks it mostly comes down to how proficient the players are with the agents and less about which ones they are playing... except for Reyna.
This is exactly what I felt about this game for a long time but couldnt put it into words
I'm low elo, and was a former Neon/Kj main and am slowly switching to Jett and Skye. Especially with Jett, the reason I personally try to use her isn't even necessarily because she's fun (she is though) but also both because, A: I would rather trust myself with a selfish agent, because at least I comm and entry frag and try to support my team, and B: I'm honestly tired of trying to entry with no support as neon or call for non-existent rotates as Killjoy. I'd rather just get things done so I don't even have to bother with team play. And I think people go through the game with this mentality, and it just carries them to high ranks (which is the reason I'm trying to learn Skye because I don't wanna play Jett all my life). Also, I noticed that Iso and Clove fill this role but aren't necessarily on the same level as Chamber, Jett, and Reyna, and I think that's solely because of how broken the Operator as a weapon is, but maybe I'm just bad idk
I agree, since most of my toxic teammates are the holy 3. While I may play someone selfish like Iso, I atleast try to make space. If there are 2 Duelists, I pick a role that is needed the most.
My take is that there should be an agent ban phase like r6 after so many characters. It'll be a better experience for players. Some maps have metas on which characters are good so beinf able to ban some agents will give maps a different look and play and people will be forced to actually play more than 1 character.
valorant would be more enjoyable if every player had an access to smoke (viper orb) flash (kayo flash) he grenade (paint shells without extra explosions) and a molly (brimstone molly) in stricter amounts...maybe only 2 or 3 nades max per round + a cooldown type signature ability thats very distinct and unique to every agent and would allow teams to come up with interesting ways to play the map, every agent would be viable (everyone has access to important 4 types of util that I listed prior) and they could only be compared to each other by their distinct signature abilites which would represent their identity and "their 2nd unique role"
I agree I’ve improved a lot and my game sense is there but the team being a coin flip is a very common feeling to me. It also feels like there’s too many just stomps like in the last 10 games 6 of them were around 5-13 a mix of wins and losses but the fact that it feels like having a close game feels much more rare. Is just idk
Since there’s so many agents in the game now I think having a rotating agent pool that would change every now and then would be pretty cool.
then alot of ppl would quit the game, bcs majority of ppl r still playing the game, just bcs that specific agent is fun to play.
For the map pool problem, wouldn’t be better just to have a ban selection? Have 5 maps randomly chosen from ALL the maps and both teams vote for the map to get banned. I think that would make it better ig 🤔
welcome back, king
I used to hop on to Tokyo server. People there are just different. They never instalock and see what the team needs. That probably is just an exception I guess.
Clove is good on every map she's like a controller/duelist hybrid - im pretty sure their gonna nerf her smokes - reduce the time or something like that.
i think what they need to do and ive heard rumors is introduce an honor system, so you can just downvote the people who ignore calls and peak and die immediately half the rounds so they can play with eachother, and then people who make consistent calls, work with their team, pick useful agents will be upvoted and get to play with eachother. obviously need safeguard against things like sexism but overall i think its a good and fair fix if they can make it work.
i think if they can buff the useless agents rather than nerfing the good ones that would solve the issue, i mean jett, chamber and viper were in a good spot, they could have just buffed cypher like this back in the day or buffing harbor and the other useless duelists.
Another huge problem is clove. Im ascensant and yet even here (before i get told ascendant is actually not that high elo, im not saying im the goat just that its a higher level of gameplay than most people have in their games) 99% of my breeze games have a clove on both teams with no viper. And thats BREEZE. it feels like the only 2 controllers i ever see consistently are clove and omen, because people only want to pick agents with heavy solo playmaking potential.
I always thought that Valorant should have agent rotation as card games, so you don't have 2 agents that are doing the same thing
Have Yatoro been playing valorant for so long that I have no idea of it?
so THE problem with team pvp games now is it's balanced for team competitive. Every agent or hero is created so that they cannot single handily output value greater than 2 people on the enemy team. Balance is relative and currently everything gets nerfed into line and in order to get massive value you have to look at all the microscopic details and not only is that not fun... it's not reasonable to expect of people. A character needs to have a set of abilities that reliably do it's job. The abilities are just not built flexible.
I've never liked Ascent, luck would have it that it's never rotated out if I remember right.
im trying to learn raze, omen, skye, and other more helpful characters so that i can help my teamates better and win more often
Tbh the worst thing than map pools is teammates throwing
Introducing RR penalty for poor agent selection and making it known to the player will fix this instantly. Just add a like/dislike button to the agent select screen, and you can gain +2 bonus RR for good agent selection (according to your team) when you win, and lose -5 RR for poor agent selection when you lose. Likes/dislikes should be private.
I agree with everything you say but I believe it only applies in competitive play. it's not random that my win rates are better with agents like chamber and reyna. This is solo queue and everyone does his own thing. In order to rank up and win games consistently you have to step up yourself and such agents allow you to have bigger impact if you are a good player. You can also play attack side they way you want to. If you pick something like sova or smoker and you barely have any comms you need to figure out what everyone is trying to do to play accordingly and most likely they will just die so your chances of winning attack rounds on these roles is terrible. That's my opinion.
I re installed the game to play a few matches. The new maps and overloaded operator kits made me uninstall. No hate if you like how val turned out but this is not what riot hyped me up for. I will never forget when they said "you won't kill with your abilities, they help you get kills."
Hot take - they should experiment with switching agents after halftime or something like a role-lock.
People that pick Iso are THE WORST. Like everyone from the big 3 is better but no you have to pick fucking aimlabs
Very interesting observation but kinda irrelevant when casual games have mixed skill level to enable creators to farm low skill players for social media clout.
Also irrelevant because most trades and duels come down to aim diff, and it's impossible to have an evenly matched game when there's boosters in every game and the demotes people which makes them play in lower skill lobbies just to waste your time climbing so extend it play time and patronship.
So basically aim diff is king and valo is too sloppy to make aim diff go away. Which would be super easy to do for anyone with any critical thinking skills.
i really enjoy the strategic aspect of valorant, despite being able to frag out when i need to its not the part of the game i like the most, but its just impossible for me to do that in 9/10 of my ranked games.
I think its a combination of map pool and character balancing.
Though i agree with everything you said about the maps, Riot seems to love nerfing characters' strenghs to the point where they become really underwhelming, because of that the team comps have to be very specific, with off-meta picks making the game a lot harder to win.
I do agree that Clove, Chamber, Jett and Reyna (specially) are selfish and they get picked more often than we would like, but maybe making characters have more tools to help control the map, would add more diversity. How ? Thats for Riot to figure out.
I just can't help but feel the moment you add purely selfish agents to the game, instantly you appeal to a demographic of player that makes the game quite a bit worse. If you deleted all these agents, of course players would just gravitate to the next best thing. Yoru, Omen, Raze, but I don't necessarily think that's the worst thing in the world. All of these agents do a bunch for their team, and have utility that is impactful. But these solo carry agents just don't feel like they belong in the game. I truly believe if you deleted Jett Reyna and Chamber specifically, the game would be better off. Obviously a large demographic of players would absolutely hate that, but that's just my perspective.
@@Bigolbktofwtr I do agree to some extend, but then we remember that sometimes that could not be the case. Chamber for example wasnt originally a Jett sentinel as he is rn, he had more depth to his game and provided team value, even though he was broken. But we also have weak characters alongside those selfish characters, like Iso, Neon, Harbor and Deadlock. And instead Riot chooses to nerf the stronger characters, making them underwhelming, instead of buffing the weaker, it just makes the game more frustrating imo.
Also, lets just face it. As much as we hate Reyna and it's mains, she is not getting deleted, it is just not like Riot to do such a thing.
The best idea would be to introduce agent rotation, without introducing new agents. They could sit Chamber the sentinel out, and bring Chamber the initiator on, for example. This would make it possible to retire old agents, without losing all the cosmetics and lore invested in that agent.
I agree with the pool of selfish agents. Glad you said it! Someone had to. Using utility in a way that benefits a team is nowhere better in CS as well. I guess its less about the agent abilities and more about the player. Even simple things like basic comms can transform the ranked experience.
Jett can take space for her teammates which is useful. Reyna is completely useless.
Such a good and relatable video. Diamond/Ascendant is CANCER when it comes to this kind of thing
5:09 Chamber is pretty effective at holding rubble the thing is he cant do it alone he needs an initiator to help him get posted up after that it's just free real estate for jett yea shes okay raze is just more effective at getting rubble control
i play really really high elo but i prefer reyna jett comps more on ascent, breeze and icebox. i play smokes btw
6:13 I’ve been calling them that since Episode 5 😂😂
The boy is back! Good to see an old favorite creator again!
I appreciate it man :)
@@Bigolbktofwtr now we wait on the twitch comeback🙏
Yeah, this sentiment is really agreed upon by most players, and i think it's because of how riot is balancing the game. They're trying to make every agent the same level when you can't do that. Chamber and jett SHOULD be broken so good players can get setup and get kills properly. If you make every selfish agent bad, people are gonna keep playing them and then lose the ability to hard carry their teams. This is why ranked is feeling more like a roulette and less of a skill based system. The maps reward these better agents because theyre so narrow and dont allow for a good individual to hold down a site, so a very simple execute can give it to you for free, and it leads to a predictable trajectory of each round.
casey is back havent watched you since covid jeeze just showed up in my recomended and was like hes back.
I die on the inside whenever I get breeze
ive honestly been having a lot of fun i dont really get these problems myself imo
i feel the opposite personally, the game feels extremely boring when the enemies are constantly playing like rats. the game felt extremely fun during the duelist meta, players are rewarded for their champs instead of gunplay (yes i know it an ability shooter, i just enjoy the fast playstyle)
ngl i like maps like breeze and icebox, just feels like valorant players dont like to take long range fights and cause of it they hate the maps with such attributes, like its a gun game if long ranged trades is a issue for you, just try to get better at it instead of avoiding it
Taking Long Ranged fights is generally bad in val because first shot accuracy is atrocious. Even if you're spot on, at 30+ meters you're likely to miss. ADS solves this slightly, but it's just really not optimal, which is why agents like Viper are essential, because the only other controller who can effectively smoke on these maps is Harbor. Their utility helps your team scale up, so you don't have to duel someone from 40 meters, while they take some sort of ridiculous off angle against you. People don't avoid long range duels because their aim sucks, they avoid them because long range duels are inconsistent.
Ontop of this, you're always out matched by an Operator, or even really a Marshall at range. And now with the Outlaw in the game it's even worse.
Map pools are not bad. Riot just needs to get their shit together and properly rework maps that are mostly disliked and stop making battle field sized maps where if you don’t have Viper or Harbor you are screwed. Like blocking one hallway on Breeze is not a map rework.
And they unblocked said hallway right after too!
I hope they add a pick and ban phase , let's say both teams can ban one agent
Just imagine no Cypher on Sunset , No Viper on Breeze or a reyna ban for all the annoying instalocks and smurfs
Would enable more agents like Neon, Deadlock and so on
I really hate the instalock era with Jett/Reyna
And same with the map rotation
Fracture is gone for almost 1 and a half year , same with Pearl
Meanwhile Haven left for one episode and is back , Split gone again
Just put in all maps and let both teams ban like 3 maps and then the lasting maps get picked RNG
I feel everything you said in this video in my soul!
I'm a big enjoyer of playing "correct" Valorant, which you can really only find with regularity by either playing in a team environment of some level, or in the PUGs that various content creators have set up in their discord servers.
I can't play double smokes with any regularity in comp unless I'm duo queuing smokes and even them, that chaos of ranked makes it very tough to play "correctly", either because of playstyle or the picks other have made.
I unfortunately though, just don't see a fix that has any kind or realism to it. If I'm being honest (dispute what I'd like to see), I've got no right to enforce how I think the game should be played on ranked teammates and more than they do to me, and people being able to play what they want is non negotiable from a game philosophy standpoint to me. Enforcing some kind of role queue doesn't make sense to me either, because unlike Overwatch or an MMO, the agents have way more crossover with what they're able to do and not having a certain role, while often difficult, doesn't doom a given game at all.
I don't know. It's really unfortunate how the state of comp is, but I'm not sure what the answer is. If they're ever able to discover a fix, I'll be thrilled, but I'll probably stick to mostly playing in more team based environments with the current way ranked is.
haven't played val in a while, forgot about you dawg. hope you're well!
Things have been going great! I have a much healthier relationship with Val as of recent haha. I love the game, but I don't take it nearly as seriously anymore.
The GOAT is back, as someone who for the last year or so have been focusing on igl-ing my uni team I find myself getting tilted alot when playing ranked. One thing is having people play Reyna or Chamber, but my main problem is them not responding well to any ideas on how to aproach the rounds. I find them often being the more egotistical players on the team (go figure) and this makes it hard to even come up with simple plans because they will just ignore it or debate you. I personally think the one thing riot could do is add an endorsement system or something which would promote people to be less egotistical and toxic // or at least get them into a different q.
Endorsements would be awesome if they worked! I know a lot of other games funnel the worst of the community into the same matches. Not sure the overall consensus from those communities but it sounds good on paper.
Ziptie pointed this out too, it does seem like the biggest issue is the players and less the agents.
I don’t like the public reason given for only having 7 maps at a time. I think all of the maps should be in the game EXCEPT Breeze. Delete breeze and never bring it back, it’s easily the least popular map in Val.
THIS CAN BE SOLVED WITH AN AGENT BAN SELECT
Good video, glad you are posting
Sunset and split feel like the same map to me.
Love this form of content, haven't seen your stuff in awhile glad it popped up again!