In an extremely lengthy post, Riot has outlined how they approach balancing for Valorant.
They start with a do’s and don’ts list. For example, they realize they won’t make every player happy, and thus they won’t be completely data driven in their decision making. However, they adapt a cycle of intel gathering, planning, execute the plan, and repeat.
This loop is key to iteration and to constantly monitor and implement feedback from the community. They also take into account sentiment data and implement “bounds,”
“Think of them as borders—when our metrics live inside the borders, we feel the game is fairly healthy. If something dips outside of these borders, it raises a flag and we investigate. We’re not ready to share the numbers of these bounds yet, but the graph below has an example of how we think about bounds on different types of content.”
The post provides an example of a case study on Raze to understand exactly how to balance her regarding her grenades. They tested having two grenades, gathered sentiment, tested, and repeated. You can read the whole post here.
