Valorant removes randomness from map selection, killing back-to-back Icebox at last
Unless you're very, very unlucky.
Have you ever logged into a game of Valorant and tore your eyes out after three back-to-back matches of Icebox? Well, thankfully for you, it seems as though the team at Riot Games has all but removed these sorts of unfortunate experiences from the popular FPS. This all comes via an official blog post where member of the competitive team Brian Chang explains the changes in the past and the effect they had on the game.
This article in short explains that the previous full random map selection present in Valorant in the past occasionally leads to frustrating situations where you can run into the same map over and over again, and that there was a shared feeling of frustration revealed in player surveys.
Back during Valorant’s launch, 26% of players stated they had run into the same map at least three times over the course of five games. Fast forward to patch 4.04 this March, almost two years since Valorant first launched and these numbers had apparently not changed significantly despite the addition of “pseudo-random” map selection.
As such, randomness was removed entirely from map selection in Valorant. According to this official blog post, a system has been slowly rolled out that picks maps in such a way to minimise consecutive games on the same map. By doing so, data gathered shows that “the percentages of players experiencing the same map 3 times in a row has now dropped to 0.06% (1 in every 1700 or so players)”.
It’s an interesting concept for sure, that true randomness isn’t actually what you want to have in games. You’d expect that to exist in certain aspects of Valorant, such as the spread of your bullets, but the maps you run into during longer gaming sessions becoming a lesser source of frustration as soon as randomness was removed may come as a welcome surprise for some of you out there.
On the other hand, it does mean that sooner rather than later, you will find yourself in Icebox. You can’t win them all I suppose. Let us know below if you have any other similar tales of randomness being stripped from games, or if you’ve beaten the odds and landed four consecutive games on the same map in a row as of late!
if you've not jumped into Valorant for a while, check out our recap of the last Valorant patch for an idea on the current state of the game.