Valorant

[Worthy]

It's perfectly fine to play it casually - I play casually every match. Play to have fun, and enjoy it. The learning curve will be pretty steep if you aren't good at clicking heads and who cares what people think of how you play?

Ranked mode isn't enabled yet since the full launch so it's technically all causal. There's also a new mode that came with release called spike rush. First to 4 wins, everyone gets assigned the same gun at the start of the round, you have all your utility, and everyone on the attacking team has the bomb. There are upgrade orbs around the map that give you boosts too, but you're at risk of being shot whilst collecting them. Each game lasts about 10 minutes max, it's super fun.

 

[Screeeech]

Christ I'm tired, last week was one of the most insane work weeks I've ever had.. exciting, terrifying, stressful, felt like we've all been running a 3 year marathon which a 100 meter sprint at the end

Super interesting to launch a game like that though, things have calmed down and stabilised a lot and it's all looking very good indeed, got a lot of tweaks we'll be making to improve latency for players, but right now on the whole things are looking great.

Need to catch on sleep! I haven't even played the game for about 3 weeks Might have a dabble at spike rush later,

 

[RobHu]

Can this be played for fun as a casual or is it strictly aimed at the competitive crowd? What's the tolerance for newcomers like?

I was a total newcomer to this style of game and hadn't played any online FPS for many years. No problems really - a couple of ragers here and there but if anything most of those cases were after I had improved a lot and was doing fairly well in most matches.

 

[[FnG]magnolia]

Good to know and I have, on occasion, been okay at clicking heads in various FPS games It was the comms that was behind the question; not a huge fan of it for a variety of reasons, so if that is a necessity and things are salty I can probably not waste too much time learning the ropes.

Thanks @Worthy and @RobHu , appreciated.

 

[Worthy]

Just mute them

 

[Wilko_Dog]

Christ I'm tired, last week was one of the most insane work weeks I've ever had.. exciting, terrifying, stressful, felt like we've all been running a 3 year marathon which a 100 meter sprint at the end

Super interesting to launch a game like that though, things have calmed down and stabilised a lot and it's all looking very good indeed, got a lot of tweaks we'll be making to improve latency for players, but right now on the whole things are looking great.

Need to catch on sleep! I haven't even played the game for about 3 weeks Might have a dabble at spike rush later,

What have you been working on mostly?

Riot have done a great job of releasing this, first day was a bit hit and miss with server issues and a couple of bugs but by the 2nd day it was mostly all sorted, it’s like a breath of fresh air having a game that actually gets fixed rather then worse (was playing siege mainly before this)

 

[Screeeech]

What have you been working on mostly?

Riot have done a great job of releasing this, first day was a bit hit and miss with server issues and a couple of bugs but by the 2nd day it was mostly all sorted, it’s like a breath of fresh air having a game that actually gets fixed rather then worse (was playing siege mainly before this)

I work on something called "Riot Direct' which is basically our own global backbone network, we're in around 50 internet POPs (point of presence) worldwide, basically my entire job description is 'ping'

Essentially, we simply put our equipment (network, game servers, everything) as close to the players as possible, so we can get traffic directly to the game servers as close as possible, rather than have it flowing all over the place, which is a lot more challenging that it sounds! We can also manage things like DDOS attacks much easier, because we see everything hitting our own network ourselves.

Because we run our own network, we're not constrained by anybody else - we can buy the lowest latency paths available (which cost a fortune) but we cut out all the middle-men, so we can go to wherever the players are, on our terms - rather than be constrained by things like 'the cloud' or whatever.

For Valorant I basically worked on the edge connectivity for how player traffic gets to the game servers and back, with the lowest latency - network stuff basically.. I spent most of my life working for ISPs, so it's kinda cool to be taking that tech into the games industry, as I've always been a gamer - just never thought I'd end up working in the games industry (been there 4 years now)

Launch day was pretty awesome, we had some initial stuff that broke, but on the whole once the initial teething problems got fixed - everything smoothed out and kinda worked as expected really. We had such a lot of data from the beta that confidence was pretty high that things would work ok, I think the stress levels got pretty high as we got closer, but that comes with the territory, so it's all good!

 

[Shimmy]

I work on something called "Riot Direct' which is basically our own global backbone network, we're in around 50 internet POPs (point of presence) worldwide, basically my entire job description is 'ping'

Essentially, we simply put our equipment (network, game servers, everything) as close to the players as possible, so we can get traffic directly to the game servers as close as possible, rather than have it flowing all over the place, which is a lot more challenging that it sounds! We can also manage things like DDOS attacks much easier, because we see everything hitting our own network ourselves.

Because we run our own network, we're not constrained by anybody else - we can buy the lowest latency paths available (which cost a fortune) but we cut out all the middle-men, so we can go to wherever the players are, on our terms - rather than be constrained by things like 'the cloud' or whatever.

For Valorant I basically worked on the edge connectivity for how player traffic gets to the game servers and back, with the lowest latency - network stuff basically.. I spent most of my life working for ISPs, so it's kinda cool to be taking that tech into the games industry, as I've always been a gamer - just never thought I'd end up working in the games industry (been there 4 years now)

Launch day was pretty awesome, we had some initial stuff that broke, but on the whole once the initial teething problems got fixed - everything smoothed out and kinda worked as expected really. We had such a lot of data from the beta that confidence was pretty high that things would work ok, I think the stress levels got pretty high as we got closer, but that comes with the territory, so it's all good!

Wow those are impressive lengths to go to and could well differentiate the game to many others in online FPS. Was this commitment towards lowest possible latency already there with LoL? Or was it deemed more necessary for Valorant?

Always good to work in an industry where your personal interests are.

Valorant public servers definitely feel so much better than CS or PUBG, although unrated is a bit of a pub stomp

 

[Screeeech]

Wow those are impressive lengths to go to and could well differentiate the game to many others in online FPS. Was this commitment towards lowest possible latency already there with LoL? Or was it deemed more necessary for Valorant?

Riot Direct was originally built for League - and yes, it was always built for the lowest possible latency, we've essentially expanded it for Valorant and future stuff, so we have most of our stuff running on it, having your own network gives you so many other options, as we can do what we like with it. We're actually not the only ones who do this - Blizzard have their own network and Valve do too - Blizzard's is pretty much the same as ours in terms of size and scope, AFAIK.

 

[Vince]

Riot Direct was originally built for League - and yes, it was always built for the lowest possible latency, we've essentially expanded it for Valorant and future stuff, so we have most of our stuff running on it, having your own network gives you so many other options, as we can do what we like with it. We're actually not the only ones who do this - Blizzard have their own network and Valve do too - Blizzard's is pretty much the same as ours in terms of size and scope, AFAIK.

I really have to ask because it will bug me forever if I don't. Not sure you will even know the answer but any idea if riot plan on support ultrawide resolutions as it has to be said from my point of view it was really disappointing that I could make it work in the beta but not at all now.

 

[Rroff]

Valorant public servers definitely feel so much better than CS or PUBG

With CS you often get a load of server instances chucked on one box.

Reminds me of back when I worked for a GSP (a long time back now) we found an interesting difference in terms of in game perceived responsiveness between different CPUs when a server instance was busy - say you had 5 servers running all within the capabilities of the slowest CPU when those server instances were busy we found for some reason the Intel Celeron host would feel more responsive in those games than both the AMD Opterons and various higher end Intel CPUs including enterprise and server models with the AMD ones sitting in the middle. Never really worked out why, it was impossible to actually measure with any tool we had but reliably blind tested, but I guess it was to do with pipeline lengths, etc. obviously the Celerons could only handle far fewer instances though.

 

[Screeeech]

I really have to ask because it will bug me forever if I don't. Not sure you will even know the answer but any idea if riot plan on support ultrawide resolutions as it has to be said from my point of view it was really disappointing that I could make it work in the beta but not at all now.

Unfortunately not, sorry restricting it to 16:9 and 16:10 I believe, sorry about that!

 

[Vince]

Unfortunately not, sorry restricting it to 16:9 and 16:10 I believe, sorry about that!

Aye that's what you get for buying one of these fancy monitors Might need to go back to 4k at this rate! Thanks for taking the time to answer regardless of if I would have preferred a different answer.

 

[Wilko_Dog]

I work on something called "Riot Direct' which is basically our own global backbone network, we're in around 50 internet POPs (point of presence) worldwide, basically my entire job description is 'ping'

Essentially, we simply put our equipment (network, game servers, everything) as close to the players as possible, so we can get traffic directly to the game servers as close as possible, rather than have it flowing all over the place, which is a lot more challenging that it sounds! We can also manage things like DDOS attacks much easier, because we see everything hitting our own network ourselves.

Because we run our own network, we're not constrained by anybody else - we can buy the lowest latency paths available (which cost a fortune) but we cut out all the middle-men, so we can go to wherever the players are, on our terms - rather than be constrained by things like 'the cloud' or whatever.

For Valorant I basically worked on the edge connectivity for how player traffic gets to the game servers and back, with the lowest latency - network stuff basically.. I spent most of my life working for ISPs, so it's kinda cool to be taking that tech into the games industry, as I've always been a gamer - just never thought I'd end up working in the games industry (been there 4 years now)

Launch day was pretty awesome, we had some initial stuff that broke, but on the whole once the initial teething problems got fixed - everything smoothed out and kinda worked as expected really. We had such a lot of data from the beta that confidence was pretty high that things would work ok, I think the stress levels got pretty high as we got closer, but that comes with the territory, so it's all good!

That’s class! Sounds like a lot of effort has gone into this game throughout, and it really shows..

Does the network help with hit reg quite a lot or is that just a myth? The hit reg in this is ridiculously good!

I’m not jealous at all that you’ve been able to work on this

 

[Rroff]

Does the network help with hit reg quite a lot or is that just a myth? The hit reg in this is ridiculously good!

Hit reg will always be a product of how well the server can reconcile events - network quality will be a factor in that and a significant one - though you could allow for a high degree of latency slackness and be trusting of the client and always have "perfect" hit reg from any one client's perspective but that comes with other side effects that have to be balanced - the closer all the clients are to the server the less you need to try and reconcile what just happened between all clients.

 

[Justo]

They broke toggle walk with yesterdays patch cant play like this having to hold shift, carpal tunnel coming lol

 

[CliffyG]

I thought that was something wrong with my setup. So annoying, i hate playing without toggle.

 

[RobHu]

I actually use the opposite, always walk with shift to run.

 

[Worthy]

I actually use the opposite, always walk with shift to run.

Yeah same here, it's where it's at

 

[chilipeppersc]

Wow those are impressive lengths to go to and could well differentiate the game to many others in online FPS. Was this commitment towards lowest possible latency already there with LoL? Or was it deemed more necessary for Valorant?

Always good to work in an industry where your personal interests are.

Valorant public servers definitely feel so much better than CS or PUBG, although unrated is a bit of a pub stomp

I have constant intermittent packet loss with DNA, here in Tampere Finland. It spikes between 8 to 30%, so I need to use ExitLag to avoid it. My ping is approx 30ms on my connection, using ExitLag puts it to around 50-60ms, this does not occur in other games. The packet loss issue is a real PITA, but thankfully there's a work around. Internet speed is around 500mbps:65 up, with about -5dB connection, it really shouldn't have such poor server connectivity but I'm guessing it has something to do with my ISP routing. Is there any future solutions for Finland? It seems rather common