TakeFourSeconds

Any word on Vanguard stuttering issues?

Vanguard patches on a separate cadence to the game, a performance improvement was included in an update a few days ago.

If you're still having issues let me know and maybe we can figure it out.

Edit: For anyone who wants to help track this down here's the information that I'm looking for:

1. Your Vanguard logs from C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard\Logs

2. A Windows Performance Trace while another game is open and is lagging.

To generate the performance trace these are the steps:

Install Windows APK (only the performance parts are necessary)

1. Open an admin command prompt

2. Demonstrate the perf problem (run an impacted game)

3. Run: xperf -on DiagEasy

4. Wait a few seconds (hopefully to catch a stutter or frame drop)

5. Run xperf -d %TEMP%\trace.etl

6. Send me trace.etl (maybe zip it first and upload it to Google Drive or somewhere)

tacticalAlmonds

melee only though. The big change imo is that you can walk without making noise. huge.

It's worth calling out that walking in the slow field is even slower than normal walking - it'll still take you quite some time to get through, but should reduce some of the free information and certainty of safety that Sage gets when throwing her slow orbs currently. We felt giving players a slow, silent option adds more texture to the entire ability instead of the previous iteration, "make noise or don't interact with it"

Bluxen

I like that they reduced Raze's grenades to 1, but I feel like they weren't even the problem with her. Her ulti is the problem. You can react to her grenades, but you just can't react to her ulti. Once she sees you, you're just dead. Or, well, she doesn't even need to see you most of the times.

On that point - we want to continue gathering data from this change to see how effective these nerfs will be, but there is a change we're shipping on audio clarity for the ult. When she uses her ult, you'll not only hear her voice line, but also an equip sound for her rocket launcher that can be attenuated in 3D - similar to how you can hear Phoenix's fire coming from a specific location when he starts ulting. Basically, if Raze ults nearby you, you should be able to audiolocate her based off of the rocket equip sound and play accordingly.

This may still not be enough information, especially with Razes who are good at Satcheling themselves forwards to augment their speed with their ult out, but it hopefully will provide better texture to the information you're getting and we can work from there. Rest assured we will continue to make changes if she's not meeting our goals here!

SeulBear

i got a general question..how can i provide feedback?
do i just post here on reddit on random posts? is there an official "submit feedback" button somewhere?

We definitely watch Reddit, Twitter, etc. but also send out periodic surveys to gather player opinions on a variety of topics; just spinning things up right now.

multigrain_cheerios

so just want some clarification, does the silent option only affect walking in the slow or does it affect all movement through the slow area (running, jumping, etc)?

Only walking in the slow! Running and jumping will still make noise.

PM_UR_NSFW_ALT

I think her ult plays ok. It seems like it is too easy to get points for given her 'free' lethality. We'll see how the one grenade changes the feel of it overall.

Yeah, hopefully with grenade change will also lower the amount of kills and ult points she's generating as well. We're definitely keeping an eye on things.

SHAWNANOMALY

Glad to hear that the Devs don't see Raze as OP despite the loud crying. The slight nerf with the nades is a nice concession. Those that found her annoying because they didn't counter/respect her are still going to cry about her though they will be without the excuse about being doubled naded.

Raze is a good agent, but isn't grossly strong by the numbers by any means - we're looking at fractions of a percentage difference in terms of her performance compared to other agents, and we've been watching her performance decline over time as players get more experience in the game and playing against her.

That being said, some of her abilities aren't meeting our clarity goals for how severe their punishment is, so we're hoping these changes will help (there's actually a lot involved in those audio changes there). On top of that, reducing it down to 1 grenade will encourage Razes to be more thoughtful about their utility, and rewards good Razes by giving them access to more grenades than the baseline with kill resets.

She's strong enough that she can take a thwack on the head right now and stay perfectly viable, while also giving everyone a bit more breathing room and information to get comfortable. If she ends up being too weak after these changes as time goes on, we can always buff her back up, but our clarity goals remain the same regardless of an agent's power. We'll see!

dydx4j

please stop watching reddit

Let me clarify - we use Reddit and Twitter to stay in touch with the community and communicate about the game. One of my roles on the team is to provide data for us to make decisions off of though, which is why we utilize things like surveys and data analytics to gather objective measurements of sentiment and content performance. Valorant's a global game and we can't keep in touch with player sentiment just by checking out some English-speaking social media channels from time to time, which is why we have these other sentiment gathering tools to lean on.

One of our core tenants on the balance team is to not "kneejerk" and be methodical, thoughtful, and data-informed with our changes, so if you're worried about us freaking out over Reddit threads we've all been through it before on League and other game dev jobs in the past.

mloofburrow

It felt bad having a Sage orb fall at your feet and literally not being able to move because it would give away your position. Even if it is slower it's still a really good change.

P.S. - I didn't see it in the patch notes, but the tooltip for Armor is broken. It says it reduces damage by 50%, when in reality it absorbs damage. Same amount of damage goes out, it is not reduced. And it absorbs 66% of damage taken, not 50% as displayed in the tooltip. Sorry, I'm an MMO nerd, so precision of language is important. :)

No apologies needed, this bothers me too (also an MMO nerd). I'll look into this

biggians

Unfortunate to see Sage got more nerfs than Raze. Nobody's ult should result in a guaranteed trade at worst when you're near an enemy, period. Compare Raze's damage ult to Jett's ult and tell me with a straight face you'd ever rather have Jett's.

Paint shells didn't receive a damage nerf, so they still deal 275 damage in an area and 1 well placed nade is still a free kill even on buy rounds. There's no reason an ability dishing out that much damage with that much area control should be able to refresh at all.

This character is still a mandatory pick for people playing competitively, and that's a damn shame, because she is unquestionably the least fun character to play against in the game by a huge margin.

This is where we definitely disagree, both with the outputs and the focus.

Lethal damage is a strong, potent flushing tool - and our goal is that you can dodge the Paint Shells and you lose ground. We think both reduced frequency should reduce how often this thing is actually flushing or scoring kills (a pretty big nerf), and improved audio should allow more time to dodge, and more clarity of where you're going to.

We're also super willing to keep tuning over time, both as players learn, get better and we see the impact of these changes. While we're really firm on "Paint Shells need to be lethal to flush effectively", we are open to tuning a lot of other levers such as timing, area controlled, and other things.

One of the bigger things I see is a level of gun...maybe "purity" is the right word...that I think is an expectations gap between VALORANT and CS. We're going to have lethal abilities in the game to cause threat, but we also are committed to working on making sure that they have good tactical play loops in them.

b00xx

I think as time goes on you'll see that the nerf to Raze wasn't right.

Guns; Basic, Signature, and Ultimates abilities; all can do damage. But how do you determine the cost? In this game, everything is loosely balanced around cash. Have y'all taken a look at the cost per kill/damage? Coming from places like Magic: The Gathering, the community and the developers have a system for analyzing cards. There are several things that affect the "cost" of a card; rarity, mana cost, colors, and complexity/interactions. I believe this method can translate to Valorant with a little work.

Now going back to my original statement, I don't think the Raze nerf was correct because I think the cost per kill across her kit is much lower than other agents.

edit: Maybe that's the answer though. Raze's role is deal damage at a lower cost per kill. Right, we have initiators, intel, support, and dps roles in this game. They're just a little different looking than what we're used to. All agents can "carry" when looking at the scoreboard. I guess, in relation to that, Raze just doesn't feel quite right to me as there are no other agent options for damage like her.

Cost is a tuning lever we're happy to pull here if it needs more - agreed on the impact of cost on power like this being a good place to tune.

givemebrownies45

no complaints from me, good work devs

<3

Poliveris

is this per round or carried over? The people I see who have good gun play on raze do not use her utility. If this carries over to the next round I could see that being okay. Still will probably be an uninstall for me. Finally found a character I resignated with in gaming; Hated every OW char, same with apex etc. And it gets nerfed into the ground.

I wont be able to play her in comp as she adds no value to her team, people will hate you picking her because she was basically destroyed. Just remove her at this point... Or redue the entire character because shes pretty much obsolete

Let's...relax. ._. If a balance change is enough to make you uninstall, bruh, this is gonna be a bumpy-ass road.

Second, the kill reset is "kills from any source give you another Paint Shell." So you usually get one, and if you perform well, you get two.

Raze's value in competitive play should be clearing and flushing tight corners and angles - either forcing them into your gun and angle, or letting you ignore that area to take other fights.

If it needs to be UNTOUCHED for you to enjoy the character, then that's on you homie. I'm not worried this is gonna slam Raze into the dumpster

Thecookierealm

What kind of shit Raze nerf is that? They don't realize that it's the amount of damage her abilities do and not how much charges she has right?

We do, which is why we removed a whole charge from her best basic ability.

KbLswag

Pretty poor to first say Raze would be exactly like she should and will not get nerfed and then giving up on people crying about her being op just cause they keep sitting in the same corners and cant react to abilitys flying ontop of them.

So now if you wanna break a Sage Wall fast without shooting you have to sacrifice ur ONLY nade. Dipshit nerf for the crybabys. SAD RIOT PRETTY SAD

Bruh when did we say we ain't nerfing?

SemiAutomattik

Rip bhopping being useful, not a fan of that change. Bhopping thru the orb was a risky and high skill cap way of countering the orb. Not a fan of any change that lowers the skill cap.

High skill floor way (IE once you can do this, it's trivial to do - it's not "tested" - so it's hard to access but easy to do after you access that).

Your point on tradeoffs isn't lost on me here. It's something I could see returning as the game shakes out depending on where the chips lie (not soon, let's see how this goes)

KevinDL

No mention of the ranked system we were suppose to be getting after 2 weeks? Been 2 weeks...

Not sure on the ETA, but we won't turn it on while shit like Cypher cam gun and boost exploits exist. Need a clean game to make the competition seem meaningful, otherwise I think the rank won't feel real and earned.

IkeKap

Can you consider in game surveys as well. It would make providing feedback in a directed manner a lot easier

We're looking into this now, just not feasible with the current state of the client in beta. Hoping we can add it down the line!

neace

How much "flush" does she need? She already has roomba which is a pistol round death sentence, you can't even sit in a location when it's on map. You automatically have to reveal your position and waste ammo or die. Her ult forces you to just leave and it even goes through walls a good chunk of the time. Then there is nades and satchel.

Brimstone ult forces him to stand still and cast it, why is this Raze character one shotting a whole team instantly while flying around like Jetpacks in halo? I just don't get it. It's a bad argument imo and one that only takes a few moments before you see the error in it.

That character single-handidly breaks the game right now, I don't see how these nerfs will ever suffice. The maps aren't massive playgrounds either, the mark was missed here.

Because she does not have:

• Angle blocking utility (IE smokes)
• High-density angle debuffing (IE flashes)
• Escapes
• Stalling capability
• Flank watch capability
• Restoration or recovery
• Wide-area recon
• Flexibility

Raze can do two things: flush and boost. She's very focused on doing one job and doing it a lot, at the expense of all the other types of value other characters have. It's why Raze shines in situations like Split vent, Haven Sewer or Garage, or Bind Hookah - the other areas of the map leave her with an unreliable footprint unless the enemy is being predictable or you have them cornered in.

We do agree the frequency is a bit much so we reduced the spammiest (Paint Shells) a lot.

I think the jetpack movement with two satchels is also something we wanna watch. It's pretty non-tactical and does some weird combat maneuver stuff that is out of line.

Thecookierealm

And gave it a kill reset? A KILL RESET, AND THE DAMAGE REMAINS THE SAME

If you earn them! This works just like Jett's dash

EROTIC_RAID_BOSS

How come you opted to have her earn back paint shells with kills instead of putting a normal cooldown on the ability, or keeping 2 charges but with a cooldown between them?

Is it to make her less potent in noob elo games especially, where people are worse at dodging her shit?

Mostly because kill reset is less consistent than cooldown, and because cooldown promotes a behavior like "use one really early to get more." We have that on Sova's Recon Dart for that reason, but didn't necessarily want to encourage that more on Raze.

EliselD

The fact that you're active here on Reddit answering our questions and clarifying things is awesome. Please don't stop doing this. We appreciate it a lot more than you guys think. Thank you!

Of course! I was a player far before I was a game dev, and there's no worse feeling than being invested in a game and feeling like the devs just don't care or listen. That's one of the reasons I joined Riot in the first place.

coolylame

Don't forget the RGB

The difference between a gamer and a casual is that when gamers facepalm into their keyboards their face is colorful, it's also more clicky.

chawzda

Has there been any discussion regarding clarity of the grenade's area of effect? Right now it's difficult to tell how far away from the main grenade and especially the secondary clusters I need to be to avoid damage. I can't count how many times it appeared I was far enough away and still took damage. Not a huge deal but it can be frustrating as the range is deceptively larger than the visuals make it appear.

There's definitely been discussion on this, it's just a bit of a more involved problem to try and solve for since visual clutter is so scary in our game and all of of our artists are working hard on other content that we need to finish to ship the game.

So the short answer is - no changes on that in this patch, we're aware of this though and will continue to keep it in mind if we can swing in for some lightweight QoL changes at some point.

ArchJay

u/RiotArkem sorry for ping, but does the corrupted packet bug fix fix and issue that cause the game to brick our internet?

This patch should reduce the number of packets that are sent which should reduce ping spikes and any "router bricking".

We've also fixed a crash that could happen if a packet got corrupted just right but that's a different issue.

Mightysam2010

Hi Mr. Riot man,

I have a question:

I’m deaf in one ear, can we make sound being sent to one output channel like iPhone accessibility features available?

I'll bring it up with the team, we can probably do something like this but I don't know when we'll get to it!

drewst18

Did they also fix the people who spam pinginging guns/spike dropping to single digit fps. Doesn't happen much but usually one in every 5 or 6 games there is a troll doing this.

A fix is part of the patch, yes. It got left out of the patch notes but will be added in a bit.

JackDarkZero

Was hoping they have the fix of limiting ping spam on guns/spike that can cause game client fps to tank by griefers.

We did. It was excluded from the patch notes in error but is in the update. Patch notes for the patch notes being updated tomorrow:

• Patching patch notes to include all notes in the patch

BrokenAshes

Disable ping spam

Post-patch, pinging items on the ground will be rate limited the same as other pings.

T3nt4c135

Glad to see the Raze nerfs. But I'm surprised to see that Omens paranoia didn't get a small buff. Also no spam spike removal :(

We did include a fix for the ping spam. It was excluded from the patch notes in error but is in the update. Patch notes for the patch notes being updated tomorrow:

• Patching patch notes to include all notes in the patch

xXdimmitsarasXx

Re-commenting for ping, vanguard stops vmware vms from working

The initialization of the VMware Workstation device driver has failed. Execution of this virtual machine cannot continue.

It was fixed for like a day, but broke again today with the new patch. It always works if i rename vgk.sys to something else and restarting (to prevent the kernel driver from running) and always crashes when vgk is running.

I should be able to use VMs on my host system!

I'll ask the team about it to see what can be done.

Neklin

Any option that vanguard will allow for virtualization in the future? I still don't want it on my main machine.

It's unlikely that we'll support virtualization but I wouldn't say never.

Mightysam2010

Holy fuck a fast as hell response from rito itself, I’m blessed.

In all srs tho awesome thank you a ton, the game is awesome so far and Its absurdly good for beta. Any suggestions in the meantime you might have to work around this kinda issue?

If there's a performance issue it'll be on our side and we'll need to fix it.

The best work around would be to uninstall Riot Vanguard (from Add/Remove programs). You won't be able to play Valorant until it's reinstalled (the game launcher will do it) but it will mean that there's no chance of a Vanguard bug impacting anything on your system.

RiotArkem

I'll ask the team about it to see what can be done.

/u/xXdimmitsarasXx we expect VMWare to be working on the host machines that have Vanguard installed.

If it's not working for you can you let me know your VMWare version?

It's possible that there's a version specific thing we can look at.

xXdimmitsarasXx

thanks for reaching out fast! https://i.imgur.com/uFYu2D0.png here's the info

As i mentioned, it was working yesterday, but after today's patch it broke again.

I can try and update for the latest version, if you give me the go.

I tried the same version and I saw an error the first time I started a VM but then the second time I tried it worked. I'll keep looking into it though.

DerWici

I'm using VMware Workstation 15 Player (15.5.2 build-15785246)
still not working

Not to use a cliche, but it works on my machine :(

I've tested the latest 15.5.2 and 15.1.0 releases with no issues.

I'll take another look though

er3zy

It seems lot of people reporting the issue here are using Ryzen CPU. What do you have on your test machine ?

Mostly Intel chips, a lot of Xeons and some i5 / i7 / i9s. Normally we have a compatibility lab with machines of all different configurations (across vendors and performance levels) but we've got limited access to it right now.