Riot Games doesn’t want to skimp on technology, and ideally it’s never an issue: “We’re doing our job right if no one notices what we’re doing,” says Engineering Manager Dave Heironymus. And Senior Network Engineer Paul Chamberlain underscores that by contributing, “We certainly don’t want to get in the way of the experience.”

128 tick servers were always set

For Valorant (buy now ) has been chosen for 128 tick servers – roughly double what most shooters have to offer when they are in the mainstream. The tick rate indicates how often the client communicates with the server. This alone is not everything, of course, but it is the basis on which the network code is sent. And ideally, this is optimized so that no ticks are wasted – for example, with packets that do not fit completely into a tick.

How well Valorant’s technology is set up will have to be looked at. For that, the game will have to run for a few days. In general, Riot Games seems to have done a lot right, but that’s what the player expects here, because the team has a lot of experience with online games and also the necessary budget to not have to make compromises.

Maximum 35 ms ping is the goal

And so it is also said that there was never any debate about whether 64 ticks was not enough as in Counter Strike. 128 was set for Valorant. In addition, everything will be done to ensure that players have a ping of no more than 35 ms in the core markets of North America and Europe – at least as far as this can be influenced from the developer’s side. The data centers should be as close to the players as possible and not just somehow in the favorable Midwest of the USA.

But even for players with not so good connections, they are looking for answers. Players with bad connections will be shown the same lags they have on the server and have for fellow players to make the situation clear to all involved. At the same time, on the server side, you will try to interpolate the values and intercept lags. How well this works in the end will have to be seen.

Peeking advantage also remains in Valorant

Even Riot Games can’t completely turn off the peeker advantage in the end, since the server and client communicate in this way, but they have invested a lot of time to minimize the time window of the advantage. That’s how they got below 80 milliseconds and consider that acceptable in the game. Most of the time, the peek advantage is around 60 ms in Valorant, according to Riot Games.