Valorant Dev Updates: Peeker's Advantage, Solo Queue, And Vanguard Conflicts

Riot has a trio of issues to address in this week's Valorant developer blog. Taking up most of the space is a long discussion about "peeker's advantage" and "strafe shooting," which boils down to a lot of technical bits about latency, packet loss, human reaction time, and so on. Bottom line: Riot is doing everything it can to ensure that matches are on an even playing field, but there are limits to what technology can accomplish -- "Until humanity learns to move faster than the speed of light," that is. We'll get right on that.

The second topic is competitive play and queues. Notably, solo queues are not a thing because Riot wants to encourage teamwork and not discourage groupers by making them think that solo is "the real test of skill." Winning matches, not individual performance, is still the primary factor in how your ranking will progress, and Valorant will try to match up equally sized groups whenever possible. Future plans for competitive play include easier grouping with friends during placements and greater rank progression.

Finally, it's everyone's favorite topic, Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat system. The software's "compatibility with vulnerable software packages has been expanded" which should lead to fewer conflicts with other programs on your computer, though there will always be "that one weird RGB driver" that causes problems. If there's a major conflist, Vanguard will prioritize crashing Valorant rather than your whole computer ... which I guess is the better solution?