Riot Games explain importance of 128-tick VALORANT servers

Riot Games have been very clear since they announced VALORANT on their commitment to achieve their own strict server performance requirements and provide 128-tick servers for players to enjoy the game. Although it was highlighted in several blog posts and videos previously published by the studio, they decided to go in-depth into just how important it is for the tactical shooter.

Brent “Brentmeister” Randall, member of VALORANT’s Gameplay Integrity team, discussed in incredible detail the work going behind the scenes on the servers, code optimization, netcode, and testing the real world stress of millions of players on it at the same time. One of the most important aspects of server tick-rates to give defenders a chance to react and maintain a fair fight between aggressive attackers.

“In VALORANT, a key part of the gameplay is taking strategic positions and holding them. Holding positions can become impossible if other players can run around a corner and kill the defender before the defender can react due to latency. That latency is partly based on the network and partly based on the server tick rate. To give defenders the time they need to react to aggressors, we determined that VALORANT would require 128-tick servers. If you’re interested in how we came to that conclusion, our tech blog post on peeker’s advantage covers it in detail,” explained Brent “Brentmeister” Randall.

Riot Games have a systematic approach to breaking down the problems they face regarding server issues, “breaking a big intimidating problem down into smaller solvable problems.” Some of the areas they decided to focus on and solve performance and ping hindering issues included network, animation, gameplay, movement, equipment, physics, and the replication process.

The most interesting aspect is how the server and VALORANT communicate to register player movements, hitboxes, and with millions of games running at the same time, the servers had to stay strong. The team decided to cut off any character animations during the buy phase, which at any given moment will be third of the matches running. This decision helped the studio in cutting the animation cost every VALORANT round by another 33%.

“Another important realization was that amortized server performance is the most important type of performance at scale. Imagine a VALORANT server running about 150 games. At any given time, ~50 of those games are going to be in the buy phase. Players will be purchasing equipment safely behind their spawn barriers and no shots can hurt them.”

“We realized we don’t even need to do any server-side animation during the buy phase, we could just turn it off. So that’s exactly what we did - if you look at the server view, players are just in the idle pose during the buy phase. This helped reduce costs of the animation system over the course of a round by another 33%!,” said Brentmeister.

What do you think of VALORANT’s servers and connectivity in its current state? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!