NETROMANCERS
When it comes to the technology of Valorant, Riot has a
deck’s worth of aces up its sleeve. First one: 128 tickrate
servers. The faster the tickrate, the more frequently the
server updates the game state – sending the locations of
players and bullets and so on to each client computer. It
makes everything more accurate and responsive, because
all that data is being updated every 7.8125 milliseconds.
By comparison, CS:GO’s matchmaking runs on 64 tick
servers; Rainbow Six: Siege runs at 60. Many games
operate with even lower tickrates: Fortnite is 30, while
Apex Legends seems to be only 20. Why? Double the
tickrate and you double the server load, which means you
need twice as many servers to run the same game.
“Running a 128 tick server is unrelenting,” says Riot’s
engineering manager David Straily. “Anyone can do it on a
micro scale, but to do it for everyone, globally, is where it’s
really expensive. We have to actually run multiple 128 tick
servers per game core on our CPUs. What that means is
theoretically, if you ran our server uncapped, it has to be
at about a 500 FPS server tickrate... if we could only run
one game server per one server CPU on an actual physical
computer, that’d be prohibitively expensive.”
Second ace: Riot Direct, an ambitious internet
infrastructure initiative the company launched for League
of Legends five years ago. Even if you have a fast home
internet connection and a 128 tick server, it’s irrelevant if
yourpackettakesaslow,circuitouspathtogetwhereit’s
goingasISPsprioritiseothertraffic.Riotbasicallybuiltits
own internet backbone, installing
routers all over the world and signing
deals with major ISPs to route Riot’s
game traffic directly across their
network, rather than the open
internet. Valorant can make use of
the same network, meaning at least
70 per cent of its players, at launch,
will have a ping of less than 35 ms.
“No other game has something like
this,” Straily says.
Third ace: anti-cheat factored into
the very design of the game. Riot
integrated an anti-cheat team into
Valorant’s development before it evenTOP: The magnum is
a pricey sidearm, but
seriously rips.ABOVE: Minimalist
gun designs pave the
way for skins.
LEFT: Can you tell
Viper is all about
the poison?“WE WANT IT TO BE
MORE OF A THINKING
MAN’S GAME”