Valorant Details Major Change to Map Rotations

By Marc Deschamps

In the past, Valorant fans have expressed a lot of frustration when encountering the same map multiple times in a row. While developer Riot Games has made a bunch of changes to the random map selection since launch, 67% of surveyed players told the team in March that they were encountering the same maps back to back "often" or "very often." In a new blog post from Riot Competitive team member Brian Chang, Chang revealed that the system's randomized maps weren't accounting for "bad luck" scenarios where players would end up encountering the same map multiple times. However in a newly revealed detail, it seems that patch 4.04 changed that. 

"So instead of making map selection a random process, we instead opted to create a deterministic choice that always selects the map that minimizes streaks," Chang writes. "If a certain map showed up too often in your recent history, we would remove that map from the selection pool altogether. From there, we would always choose the map that the 10 players in the lobby had seen the least."

It's not hard to imagine how frustrating it must be for Valorant players to end up playing the same map three times in a row or more; that's an easy way for the game to get tedious, and make players not want to come back! Fortunately, Riot Games is already seeing a lot of success with the change. According to Chang, no player saw the same map five times in a row in the month of April. Also, the "percentage of players experiencing the same map 3 times in a row has now dropped to 0.06% (1 in every 1700 or so players)." 

From those numbers, it certainly looks like Riot Games has turned things around! With May coming to an end, hopefully the developer will reveal the numbers for this month, so fans can see if this new method is still working as effectively!

Valorant is now available on PC. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the game right here.

What do you think of this map rotation change in Valorant? Have you noticed a difference? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!

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