Have you ever logged into a Valorant game and ripped your eye out after three back-to-back games on Icebox? Well, thank goodness the team at Riot Games seems to have eliminated these unfortunate experiences from the popular FPS. This all comes from an official blog post where competition team member Brian Chang explains past changes and how they affect the game.
This article briefly explains how the completely random map selection in Valorant in the past can occasionally lead to frustrating situations where you can encounter the same map over and over and show a shared frustration in player surveys.
Back during Valorant’s launch, 26% of players said they encountered the same map at least 3 times over the course of five matches. Fast-forward to this March’s 4.04 patch, nearly two years after Valorant’s initial release, and despite the addition of “pseudo-random” map selections, these numbers have apparently not changed significantly.
Therefore, randomness is completely removed from Valorant’s map selection. According to this official blog post, a system has been slowly rolled out that selects maps in such a way that it minimizes consecutive play on the same map. By doing so, the data collected shows that “the percentage of players who experience the same map 3 times in a row has now dropped to 0.06% (1 out of every 1700 or so players)”.
It’s definitely an interesting concept, and true randomness isn’t actually something you want to have in a game. You might expect this to exist in some aspects of Valorant, such as the spread of bullets, but once the randomness is removed, the maps you encounter during longer gameplay become a lesser source of frustration, which may Will be a welcome surprise for some of you there.
On the other hand, it does mean that sooner or later you will find yourself in Icebox. I don’t think you can win them all. If you have any other similar stories of randomness being taken out of the game, or if you’ve beaten the odds and played four games in a row on the same map recently, please let us know below!
If you haven’t been into Valorant in a while, check out our review of the last Valorant patch for thoughts on the current state of the game.