Valorant Devs Say They Fixed the Map Repeat Problem
Valorant players are glad to know that they are no longer seeing the same map as much as they used to nowadays. Developer Riot Games has finally fixed the map diversity issue, which turned out to be a much bigger challenge than everyone might have thought.
“We wanted to make sure that we could improve the diversity of maps played without compromising the health of matchmaking,” said Brian Chang from Riot Games. “By influencing things like queue times or match balance.”
Apparently, when Valorant first launched to the gaming public, map selection was purely on a random basis. The game only had four maps with each one having a 25% chance of selection. Unfortunately, this never changed no matter how many times the players had already seen it and played in it. Some fans even saw the same map three or more times during five game stretches.
“In a recent survey, over a third of Valorant players responded that it is “extremely frustrating” to encounter the same map multiple times in a row,” Chang continued. “Playing the same map gets stale quickly and limits the type of challenges that you face in the game.”
Now, several months after Valorant’s official release, Riot added a pseudo-random system. This new feature’s purpose is to put players on maps that they have not recently encountered. Supported by the addition of more maps, this new system was much better. However, 67% of the game’s player base still saw the same map “often.”
This pretty much alarmed Riot. It pushed them to completely get rid of randomization. They “opted to create a deterministic choice that always selects the map that minimizes streaks.” They added this change alongside the game’s 4.04 patch in March. According to Chang, it is the game’s “most significant improvement thus far.”
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