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Riot Games has returned with a brand-new patch for Valorant, just a week after the launch of Episode 2.
The main focus of Patch 2.01, which was largely a surprise to the community as Valorant updates are usually released fortnightly, is a massive rework of the game’s most unbalanced map, Split. According to statistics site Valorantics, Split has the lowest win rate for an attacking team among the game’s five maps, coming in at only 46.3 per cent.
In this major map update, Riot Games has widened several narrow hallways and chokepoints, removed a number of the map’s unusually deep corners and taken out a number of defensive-sided cubbies. The rework also added a number of material stacks so players can isolate certain angles more effectively.
“This Split update is focused around improving attacker options on the map,” Riot Games said of the changes, “as well as reducing 50/50 checks, the depth of certain corners and opening specific areas on the map by increasing chokepoint widths.”
In addition, the patch also introduced a minor nerf to the agent Jett. The duration of her Cloudburst smoke ability has been almost halved, from 7 to 4.5 seconds. The developer noted that the update is “a continuation of the Controller changes from Patch 2.0”.
“In Patch 1.0, we increased Jett’s smoke duration to 7 seconds, and we are partially undoing that now,” it said. “We’ve found that the result of that change was that Jett became a substitute for the Controller role, and reasonably aggressive teams could make use of her Cloudburst smokes to quickly take space without relying on a dedicated Controller.”
Other changes in the patch include minor updates to competitive mode, new queue restrictions for players who AFK, alongside a number of bug fixes. Check out the full patch notes here.
Last week, on January 13, Riot Games released Patch 2.0 to coincide with the launch of Valorant Episode 2. The updates introduced a brand-new online leaderboard as well as the game’s 14th agent, Yoru.
On the same day, professional Valorant player Tyson “TenZ” Ngo announced that he would be stepping down from the Cloud9 Blue team, as well as competitive play as a whole. He cited the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the move to home-based competitive play are major reasons in his decision to step back from competitive play.
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