Yesterday team Sentinels won the Valorant Champions Tour. Now, Valorant is making an update on buffing or nerfing some agents. Who does buff or nerf characters in a game and how do they do it? (This is a general question on all competitive online games)
In: Technology
Buffing and nerfing is done by the game’s developers.
They look at why characters are popular. Their goal is usually to try to make all the options — characters / factions / etc. — good enough to play. They want to avoid one particular option becoming so good that everybody plays it, or getting so bad that nobody plays it.
The decision making isn’t magic. The developers play their own game, look at gameplay footage, and listen to community feedback.
The developers do have some tools that might not be available to the general public — for example they probably have very detailed statistics on what characters everybody picks. So they can easily figure out which characters are too popular or unpopular, and then investigate. Likewise they probably have statistics on matches — like if teams that have character X win a lot, or if teams that have character Y lose a lot. If the game has a replay feature, the developers might have the game send them a copy of the replay of every game that’s played, so they can analyze it.
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